Reading, especially fiction, is said to improve our ability to be empathetic to others. It allows us to slip on the shoes of others and walk a mile down a road we perhaps haven’t would never travel. This is one of the reasons I read, why I avoid white male writers, walking the same road as them for the most part. This book takes me off road, being the story of 4 mixed-heritage (Japanese/unknown black African), queer men in Japan and a fast-paced fiction centring around revenge porn in the gay community as well as issues of racism and consent.
I’m a believer in the concept of schema, that our minds organise information into neat groups and that things that are so far outside of our current world understanding are almost impossible for us to comprehend. I remember learning about Bartlett’s “The war of the ghosts” experiment thinking how common sensical it was. This was running through my mind while reading this book. I’m not Japanophile, and have probably the generic understanding of that country, its culture and people. My schéma exists somewhere between bullet trains running past Mount Fiji to a collectivist culture, the salaryman. I say all this because I really struggled to connect to this book and it’s characters. I could see the common humanity in Jackson, Ibuki, and the others, but the overall plot and their lives exist so far outside of my understanding I felt lost at times. Like those on Bartlett’s experiment, I found myself trying (and failing) to level this story in my own culturally clichéd schéma.
The crime elements, finding why revenge porn video existed and was being shared about one of the 4 leads, was a fairly straightforward through line in the novel, although the final dénouement felt a little rushed and undercooked, but that could be a feature of Japanese literature.
I think where this book lost me was the intersection of the gay community and people of mixed-heritage in Japan. As with all communities, LGBTQ communities in East Asia are different and are treated differently to those in the culturally hegemonic West and a lot of that nuance was lost on me I think. It’s a fast-paced, slim book which would normally work in its favour, but here didn’t give me the chance to link the cultural markers between what I understand and where I needed to get to. That’s not a criticism of the writer, that’s my cultural ignorance and gap to fill.
Overall, I think this is probably a better book than it landed on me. It was a bit of a random choice, coming from the Service 95 book club, which helpfully showed me I’ve still got some mapping to do.
