Anon's Archive Slime Molds And Disability Discourse

5 2月 2024

[mood: sleepy] [current location: UnExist] [finished reading: ヒト夜の永い夢 and ハンチバック]

Welcome to Anon's Archive, a (hopefully) regular column about the books I've been reading. Unlike the actual Kansoulation posts, I want to write quick and "short" reviews about things I find interesting without feeling the need to write comprehensive articles.

ヒト夜の永い夢 (Hito Yoru no Nagai Yume)

Minakata Kumagusu is probably not a name that is familiar to people outside of Japan. However, he is a popular figure in Japanese historical fiction because he is sort of the biologist-ethnologist version of Leonardo da Vinci and his life is fucking wild.

For one thing, he became close friends with Chinese revolutionary leader Sun Yat-sen while they were studying in Britain. The guy worked in the British Museum. He wrote extensively about mushrooms and defended local forests from being co-opted by state Shintoism, making him one of the first modern ecologists and environmental activists. His ethnological work, especially on the "evil eye," is also seminal in the study of comparative folklore.

But his most important contribution to the history of biological science is his studies on slime molds. He was so passionate about these little things that he discovered a new species, Minakatella longifila, in his backyard. His studies caught the attention of Emperor Hirohito, who also seemed to share a fascination with slime molds, and Minakata is believed to have been the first commoner to present his findings to the Japanese emperor. The guy has lived it all and we will never compare to him.[^1]

Hito Yoru no Nagai Yume is about what would happen if Minakata's slime molds could create artificial intelligence and usher in a technological singularity led by maverick scientists like him. Also, incest rocks and clairvoyance.

Set in the early days of the Showa era, the book follows Minakata as he joins a secret society of scholars who study the most marginalized subjects. He's joined by other famous scholars like Fukurai Tomokichi (福来友吉), who is convinced that clairvoyance exists, and even meets writers like Miyazawa Kenji and Edogawa Ranpo along the way.

The book is very much an excuse to bring the most famous historical figures together in one setting. It's clearly inspired by the Teito Monogatari (帝都物語) books and both works enjoy vomiting about historical details that are very unnecessary but are unbelievably interesting. These could range from the incidental (the characters visit a Buddhist temple that has been affected by haibutsu kishaku) to elaborate biographies of thinkers and writers. We get a sense of how Edogawa Ranpo thinks because he says some strange things about how the world is all a stage and we are its actors:

「僕は、一つの妄想に取り憑かれているのですよ。つまり、自分が観測していない瞬間、この世界は舞台の書き割りのようなものでしかなく、街で見かける人達も本当は役者で、僕という客がいなくなれば楽屋に引っ込んでしまうのではないか、と」

This means that the book is most fun when I'm learning about historical figures and realizing that there's not that much fictionalized outside of the weird setting and pompous dialogue. People like Kita Ikki feel larger than life to me.

Incest rock spoilers

My favorite part of the book happens very early when Minakata is happy to see his name memorialized in Minakatella longifila. He meets a young man by the river who quickly befriends him over their passion for rocks.

This young man ran away from home to pursue his interest in man-made rocks. However, he felt conflicted because he loved his younger sister, Toshi, not as a sibling but as a woman. He didn't want to leave her alone, especially since she is sickly.

Minakata then tells his life story: he was in a similar situation with this young man because his own younger sister wanted to love him as a man. He had to flee to the United States to escape the pressure of his family and their love, but he regretted leaving them when he heard that they had died a short time later. He sometimes wondered what the world would be like for him if he hadn't left Japan.

The young man is moved and shows Minakata his most precious treasure, a stone from his pocket. Minakata holds it and feels that this stone is alive. The young man agrees: he believes that this rock has taken the spirit of his sister's soul. Specifically, he thinks the slime mold has absorbed her hair and nails into its essence. The narration around it reads like horny erotica over rocks by the way.

Both Minakata and the young man feel they are each other’s soulmate. The young man wants to make a business out of these spiritual stones, and Minakata encourages this business venture.

Before the chapter ends, the young man realizes he hasn't introduced himself to Minakata properly. The final line is

僕は宮沢賢治といいます

His name is Miyazawa Kenji, and this is a fictionalized biography of the man who was inspired by the loss of his sister to write Night of the Galactic Railroad (銀河鉄道の夜).

I hope that if any of you readers ever get a chance to read Night of the Galactic Railroad or any of Miyazawa Kenji's other works, you will remember that I introduced you to the concept of incest rocks.

The book is also full of bizarre Hollywood action sequences. You may be reading about nerdy scholars, but you'll also read about a train that jumps over a ramp to get onto other tracks, dream sequences akin to Kon Satoshi's Paprika, and other shenanigans.

The book is, for the most part, an exciting and intellectually stimulating read. It's hard to criticize the plot of the book because it's designed to be a rollercoaster ride that also works as a Modern Japanese History 101 class. I do think it suffers from being quite long (576 pages), and I guess I don't care too much for the conceit of dreams and realities as explored here. I've seen its ideas explored better in other places and there's nothing unique about it except that it's set in the recent past. The finale especially feels like a slog to me because it feels way too committed to its plot and goes on for too long. But I feel like this is nitpicking an otherwise enjoyable book.

If you find any of this historical fiction clusterfuck interesting, this is an easy recommendation. Just make sure you have a working internet connection because you're gonna look up everyone and everything mentioned in the book. I enjoy looking up Wikipedia articles while I'm reading stuff, so this might be a me thing...

ハンチバック (Hunchback)

The first 2023 winner of the coveted Akutagawa Prize, Hunchback is a 93 page literary book ostensibly about a disabled person with congenital myopathy. I say "ostensibly" because the book raises broader questions about how abled people read disability, especially in how they empathize with their disabled peers.

<head>
<title>『都会最大級のハプバに潜入したら港区女子と即ハメ３Pできた話（前編）』</title>
<div> 渋谷駅から徒歩１０分</div>

The book begins with an HTML text file detailing the life of a dude who visited a happening bar and had the best day of his life. It then pulls back to reveal the story's author, Izawa Shaka (井沢釈迦), a 40 year old disabled woman who lives in a nursing home and writes erotic short stories for a living.

While making instant coffee, she gets the urge to tweet about wanting to abort a baby. But since she knows that would be controversial, she decides to open up Evernote on her computer to type out her following fantasies:

（妊娠と中絶がしてみたい）（私の曲がった体の中で胎児は上手く育たないだろう）（出産にも耐えられないだろう）（もちろん育児も無理である）（でもたぶん妊娠と中絶までなら普通にできる、生殖堪能に問題はないから）（だから妊娠と中絶はしてみたい）（普通の人間の女のように子供を宿して中絶するのが私の夢です）

She wants to get pregnant and have an abortion. Of course, her body wouldn't be able to take it, and the fetus wouldn't develop properly. But that shouldn't be a problem because she's only doing it to abort. She wants to do it because she wants to have the same opportunity as other abled women.

Such thoughts will be foreign to most abled readers, including myself. I like to read about disability studies (Capitalism and Disability by Marta Russell is a very influential read for me), but it's something else to encounter the kind of fantasies Shaka tells about. I felt uncomfortable reading these thoughts, especially when Shaka admits that she can't relate to the poster children of disability studies movements at all. Shaka's parents left her a fortune and she knows she has a comfortable life, so she doesn't feel represented by these activists. If I met her in real life, I wouldn't want to be her friend.

Still, I'm drawn to her voice because she speaks from her own heart. She doesn't mind being aggressive and lash out some hard truths about being disabled in Japan. In a later section of the book, she goes into a long but important tangent about Japanese book culture:

アメリカの大学はADAに基づき、電子教科書が普及済みどころか、箱から出して視覚障害者がすく使える仕様の端末（リーダー）でなければ配布物として採用されない。日本では会社に障害者はいないことになっているのでそんなアグレッシブな配慮はない。本に苦しむせむし（ハンチバック）の怪物の姿など日本の健常者は想像もしたことがないのだろう。こちらは紙の本を1冊読むたび少しずつ猫骨が潰れていく気がするというのに、紙の匂いが好き、とかページをめくる感触が好き、などと宣い電子書籍を貶める健常者は呑気でいい。EテレのバリバラだったかハートネットTVだったか、よく出演されていたE原さんは読書バリアフリーを訴えてらしたけど、心臓を悪くして先日亡くなられてしまった。ヘルパーにページをめくってもらわないと読書できない紙の本の不便を彼女はせつせつと語っていた。紙の匂いが、ページをめくる感触が、左手の中で減っていく残ページの緊張感が、などと文化的な香りのする言い回しを燻らせていれば済む健常者は呑気でいい。出版界は健常者優位主義（マチズモ）ですよ、と私はフォーラムに書き込んだ。軟弱を気取る文化系の皆さんが蛇蝎の如く憎むスポーツ界のほうが、よっぽどその一隅に障害者の活躍の場を用意しているじゃないですか。出版界が障害者に今までしてきたことといえば、１９７５年に文芸作家の集まりが図書館の視覚障害者向けサービスに難癖を付けて潰した、「愛のテープは違法」事件ね、ああいうのばかりじゃいないですか、あれでどれだけ盲人の読書環境が停滞したかわかってるんでしょうか。フランスなどではとっくにテキストデータの提供が義務つけられているのに……。

To summarize for those who can't read Japanese, the Americans with Disability Act forces universities to go digital so that blind people can access textbook materials. This is not the case in Japan, a country that doesn't even notice it has disabled people. After all, the abled people of Japan can't imagine a hunchback walking the streets. While voracious abled readers will admit that reading can lead to slouching and back pain, the smell of paper and the feel of the page are just too superior to those damn e-readers. A frequent guest on TV shows, who recently passed away, used to advocate for better reading accessibility because she couldn't read without a helper. But many abled readers will shrug their shoulders because come on, you could feel the remaining pages in your own hands! Shaka writes in the forums that the publishing world follows an ideology of abled machismo. She brings up a very important case (Japanese article) where literary writers sued libraries for providing a service to blind people. While the court ruled in favor of libraries, it has stifled accessibility. Meanwhile, she notes, countries like France are required to send text data to those who need it...

Paragraphs like this show how important and challenging this book is to its abled readers. It educates ignorant people like me about important events in Japanese disability rights history -- a disabled mother vandalized the Mona Lisa when it was in Japan because disabled people were not prioritized for museum access -- while going through the details of what it is like to live with congenital myopathy. I found myself reading other books and news articles in English and Japanese to understand what I'm reading. I was also particularly amused when she brought up Aufbehen in the context of the shaky alliance between disability rights activists and feminists.[^2]

But the book is also aware that it will be read as didactic literature or worse, as tragedy porn for abled people. It's therefore concerned about how it will be read by others. Early on, the book introduces an incel named Tanaka. He envies Shaka's wealth and murmurs that he feels looked down upon everywhere. Shaka believes that he sees her as a kindred spirit, though she points out in narration that they are far from equal in suffering. While the book is usually full of digressions about disabled life in Japan, the plot follows the strange relationship between Tanaka and Shaka. Your mileage may vary -- especially since you have to read ... an interesting fellatio scene between the two -- but he ends up being a thematically important character.

You see, Tanaka's false sympathy for Shaka is the point of the book. The rants Shaka writes about abled people gatekeeping literature and so on may be easy for able readers to understand once they see her point. But no matter how good their allyship, they will never get disabled people. They cannot imagine what it is like to be in the shoes of disabled people, even if they read everything about disability.

Ending spoilers

To emphasize this point, the last pages of the book switch the narrator to Saka (沙花), a worker at the happening bar who was briefly introduced as a fictional character written by Shaka. Saka is a real person with a tragic story: her mother joined a cult and everything but her college savings disappeared into the cult's coffers; her brother worked in an office for half a year before he quit and became a nurse in an intensive care home for the elderly, only to be transferred to a nursery owned by the same company and strangled a patient there; and she is now entangled inside the world of sex work. She doesn't have a future besides finishing up her dissertation thesis on the films of David Lynch through the lens of disability studies. To cope with the reality of her broken family, she's been dreaming up a story she's been thinking about since middle school. She wonders about the patient her brother strangled and her last days and that patient had an unusual disease, which she remembered all this time. As her client begins to fuck her, she thinks about the child she might conceive, the one Shaka wanted to kill.

Yep, the story we've been reading all along is just a figment of Saka's wild imagination to make herself feel better about the world.

I had to read and reread this section many times to make sure I was interpreting it correctly. I even checked what other people said. We all came to the same conclusion: the story we read is based on what Saka thinks her brother (Tanaka) did in the patient's POV. The details are slightly different, but anyway the point is that we've been deceived Metal Gear Solid 2-style about what we're reading.

I can't believe I was no different than Tanaka in giving the book my false sympathies. My prejudices led me to believe that this was a "disability" book because it was written by a disabled author; therefore, I was the perfect victim for this wild plot twist. It's the kind of ending that makes people think about the book after they've read it, because everyone ends up wondering, "Was I just being an ableist asshole all along?" I feel like for someone like me, the answer has to be yes. I can't erase my ableism as much as I want to be an accomplice to disabled people.

This book was a humbling experience for me and I liked thinking about it, though I'm not so much a fan of reading it. While the book is short, I find it hard to read since it lacks furigana/ruby readings for kanji -- it gets very silly when medical conditions are brought up. The sentences are formally constructed in a way I find most modern Japanese literature intolerable to read. I also don't get the Buddhist imagery (Shaka is the Japanese word for the OG Buddha). The only thing I really like about its prose is how tangential the writing can be: it'll bring up the weird legal issues around doujinshi on Comiket and how cute minions are in the same breath as disability issues.

In truth, I only appreciated reading this book after the fact. I had to think about what I read and write about it. The reason Anon's Archives is a thing is because of this book: I knew I wanted to write about the book, but I don't have much interest in revisiting the book; a proper full-length post[^3] would kill my interest to write anymore. I'm glad I got to do this because it helped me consolidate my thoughts on what makes this book interesting and what I don't like about it.

Hunchback is good if you don't mind exercising your literary brain and are interested in how Japanese disabled people talk about disability. I can see this book working well in translation as long as the reader can be made aware of Japanese disability history through notes or a translator's introduction. It's not the book I'm going to immediately recommend to people who want to know what's new in modern Japanese literature, but it's something I'll bring up if I know they're receptive to the social issues the book raises.

Postscript

Well, this "short" post ended up being quite long because of Hunchback. I wanted to write about another book, but I felt like I need to use a quarter of my Kansoulations energy to talk about it.

I'd like to write shorter articles as time goes on though because I'm going to be reading a lot of books that are probably mediocre or just okay. While I want to dedicate my attention to writing full-length articles on cool books, I want to also talk about the books I like but don't think I can contribute an interesting article and the books I don't find good. I'm also interested in letting this column branch out into English-language stuff, manga, and doujinshi books that I happen to have.

So, let me know if you like this column and this format. I feel energized when I read comments praising my big brain genius. People should tell me I'm amazing, so I can feel motivated to write more...

[^1]: Minakata Kumagusu has not received the international acclaim he deserves. The most comprehensive English-language article I've found is a passionate Science Heroes article written by a PhD student and it doesn't use any Japanese-language sources. On the other hand, if you find Minakata's contributions to folklore anthropology about the evil eye interesting, the journal article "Orality and the Transforming Senses in Meiji Media: An Exploration of Kami-Shibai and Japanese Folklores" has a nice overview.

[^2]: If you are interested in this or how feminists are ambivalent about things like the pill, the chapter on Japan in Reproductive States: Global Perspectives on the Invention and Implementation of Population Policy was a very useful read.

[^3]: Yes, I don't consider this a full-length post. No, I'm not alright. But to be quite honest, I think Hunchback is a rather unusual text that deserves some attention.