Cameron's Book Reviews: 2022, part 2.

It’s almost time for finals, so pardon me for being brusque or brief. Title links go to Bookshop.org.

There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job by Kikuko Tsumura, translated by Polly Barton

I’ve recently been trying to read more Japanese novels and consume more Japanese media because I’m developing a concept about the way that Japanese and Anlgo-American fantastic fiction (specifically contemporary fantastic fiction/urban fantasy) work. To that end, I’ve adopted a somewhat omnivorous approach to consume more Japanese novels than the Haruki Murakami I’ve read quite a bit of.

This one was a novel from a new author, a young woman who I believe won a literary prize (a fairly common way for new novelists to emerge in Japan, as far as I’m aware?) It concerns a woman who left her job as a social worker due to burnout, and who flits from one low-level job to another. In the course of the novel, she works as a surveillance technician, a writer of both advertisements and trivia printed on rice cracker packages, a surveyor and hanger of posters, and a low-level worker for a park.

At each of these jobs, she encounters one or another strange event, ranging from the conspiratorial to the magical realist, and while she might become embroiled in the plot for a time, the jobs she’s on are only temporary, and she drifts away from the strange events as her work in proximity to them ends. In many ways, Tsumura has managed to produce a very odd hybrid: a novel that is both Kafkaesque (dealing with the protagonist running headlong into surreal and occasionally threatening situations) and Picaresque (lacking a distinct overall plot, and focusing on one character’s journey through life – the narrator is, in many ways, capable of being a trickster like the standard Picaresque hero, but is generally too lazy to execute for an extended period.)

If you have the opportunity to read There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job, I would recommend trying to find it.

Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori

Continuing the project I was engaged in with the previous book, I picked up Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman. I found the experience enjoyable, generally: it follows Keiko, a 36-year-old autistic woman who works in a convenience store. While her family and peers tend to try to encourage her to act more “normal”, the only place that she feels comfortable behaving in a socially acceptable fashion is at the convenience store she works at, where her attention to detail and the scripts that she has internalized allow her to transform from a “foreign object” as she conceives of herself into a “convenience store worker” – a category she thinks of as different from an everyday human, but also different from the “foreign object” she is in her off hours.

I’m sure that reading that last bit was alienating to some people.

This novella was interesting: sure, I’ve touched upon Grady Hendrix’s Horrorstör, but is this one of the few works of fiction that touches upon the experience of working in retail or service. Quite often this topic is made invisible to people – it is, as mentioned, alienating. What Convenience Store Woman does, though, is flip that on its head. Keiko is always alienated. She always feels out of place and separate from the world around her. Work, paradoxically, makes her temporarily dis-alienated: able to identify herself fully with her job as a convenience store worker.

She is a person that it’s almost impossible to understand, despite the fact that she’s very simple. I almost want to ask “but...why?” after everything that Keiko says about herself, but Murata presents everything in clear, easy prose, complemented by excellent deadpan humor, and the translation is quite competent.

Perhaps the most significant – and least pleasant – relationship Keiko has in this book is not, however, with her work, but with her awful coworker, Shiraha, who is a sort of Japanese iteration on the inhabitants of the manosphere, blaming all of his misfortunes on the fact that society hasn’t exactly advanced all that far since the stone age, though completely unable to explain how or why that’s important. Watching everything fall apart for this man – caused principally by his inability to change himself or understand Keiko – is a fascinating journey, and one that the fundamentally likable Keiko comes out of basically unscathed.

Again, recommended.

No Speed Limit: Three Essays on Accelerationism by Steven Shaviro

A change of gears, temporarily. I was pointed to a University of Minnesota Press sale – from which the Japanese critical works mentioned below were also taken – and picked up No Speed Limit at the same time. This is the first Steven Shaviro I’ve ever read, and I found the experience largely an easy one.

No Speed Limit is, conveniently and fittingly, a fast read, taking the audience through a series of essays that include “Introduction to Accelerationism”, “Acceleration Aesthetics”, and “Parasites on the Body of Capital”. While I’ve written on Accelerationism before, Shaviro puts the fundamental problem very simply and easily right in the “Introduction”:

Accelerationism...demands a movement against and outside capitalism—but on the basis of tendencies and technologies that are intrinsic to capitalism. Audre Lord famously argued that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” But what if the master’s tools are the only ones available? Accelerationism grapples with this dilemma. (p. 7)

Does he actually lay out a satisfactory answer? No. Do I think it’s worth reading? Absolutely.

Otaku: Japan's Database Animals by Hiroki Azuma, translated by Jonathan E. Abel and Shion Kono.

(Previously referenced by me here and here.)

My prior essays that feature this – especially “We Have Always Been Postmodern” – are a reaction to the fact that I hadn’t read enough about this particular book and wanted to talk about it. Otaku is well worth reading, and quite fascinating, tracing the developments of the titular subculture through postmodern and hegelian lenses.

That most likely sounds dry, but Azuma is a fast read, and quite easily digestible. I will most likely be returning to this book a number of times in the coming months.

Much like I note with it’s “older sister”, Beautiful Fighting Girl, further down, Otaku is an excellent explainer for certain concepts, provided you have some knowledge of the media being critiqued: in this case, it summarizes the Deleuzian concept of the “Rhizome”, while modifying it into a potentially more useful one, as well as certain concepts taken from Hegel, a notoriously difficult thinker. If for nothing else, that makes Otaku a theory book worth picking up, I would say.

Light from Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki

(Reviewed by Edgar here.)

Read as an audio book, and quite interesting. Despite the author’s name, this is not part of my reading series of Japanese fiction: it was recommended to me by Edgar based on my grumbling about having difficulty finding books that scratched a particular itch, and then took several months to come around in the rotation through our library: it is in fairly high demand, for good reason.

Edgar summarizes it quite well: it’s the story of Katrina Nguyen, a talented young violinist who runs away from home because of mistreatment she suffers on account of her transgender identity. She is taken in by Shizuka Satomi, a legendary violin teacher who is often called – with very good reason – the Queen of Hell. Meanwhile, Shizuka is trying to meet a particular deadline while distracted from the task by falling in love with Lan Tran, an alien starship captain hiding out as the manager of the local Starrgate donut (name spelled intentionally with two “r”s to avoid copyright infringement.)

There is a lot going on with this book – and it shouldn’t work as well as it does. Usually, when fantasy and science fictional elements collide, the result is fairly messy and hard to keep straight, but Aoki does so masterfully. It’s a finalist for this year’s Hugo Awards, and it’s a strong contender.

Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff

I haven’t watched the HBO series yet, but I need to after reading this book. Similar to There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job, Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country has a picaresque quality to it. The story passes through several viewpoint characters, and everything sort of slides easily into place at the end. There’s not a single wasted word as far as I can tell.

In many ways, it resembled Victor Lavalle’s The Ballad of Black Tom, Ring Shout by P. Djèlí Clark (reviewed here), and N.K. Jemisin’s The City We Became (reviewed here), and taking the two of them together have convinced me that Lovecraftian fiction, in the right hands, can be exceptionally good. When done right, this fiction is fundamentally about alienation (in a way very different form Convenience Store Woman,) and fiction of this type that doesn’t grapple with alienation just doesn’t really work as well, in my opinion. Lovecraft would probably hate the fact that the best writers in his mode are black Americans, but I don’t particularly care. I want more.

While I’m not normally worried about spoilers, Lovecraft Country is such an intricately patterned story that I worry about revealing too much. Just understand: if I immediately go out and try to find something that scratches the same itch, as I did with this, that generally means I very much enjoyed it, and think more people should read it.

The cover here is, I dare say, quite sick.

Revelator by Daryl Gregory

A competent enough novel, dealing with a family living in the Great Smokey Mountains who worship an entity living in the caves under the mountain. Not explicitly Lovecraftian, but borrowed from him. Deals with intergenerational trauma and the way that women’s voices are silenced in the historical record.

I felt that Gregory did well enough with the story – it didn’t exactly scratch the aforementioned itch, but soothed it for a bit. I would recommend it, but if you’re trying to decide between Lovecraft Country or Revelator, I’d go with the former, personally.

The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones

The second Stephen Graham Jones novel I read, and showing a genetic relationship to the prior one – Demon Theory – while being quite good and literary on its own. It centers on four Blackfeet men who were friends when they were younger but drifted apart as they aged: one of them left to marry a white woman and become a postal worker, one fled the reservation to try to find his own way and stalled out in the Dakota oilfields, and the other two remained on the reservation.

When they were younger, the four participated in something they refer to as the “Thanksgiving Classic” – a hunt that took them into a part of the wilderness they weren’t supposed to hunt in. They killed several elk, including a young elk pregnant out of season, and were caught and punished for it.

Graham Jones follows the conventions of horror films here: the four friends transgressed, and are subsequently hunted by an avenging entity that technically has the right to do so but goes further than it should, becoming a horrific monster in the process.

The end result is a fascinating refraction of the genre of cinematic horror, representing (as in re-presenting) its tropes in a new and interesting way. Highly recommended.

Beautiful Fighting Girl by Saitō Tamaki, translated by J. Keith Vincent and Dawn Lawson.

(Previously mentioned by me here and here.)

The older – and in my opinion, lesser – of the two Japanese critical works I read. Beautiful Fighting Girl concerns a particular character archetype that appears in Japanese media and Tamaki traces its genealogy and finds associated figures in Western media – largely in the work of outsider artist Henry Darger.

It’s very useful as a summary of Lacanian thought, provided you have some familiarity with the media that Tamaki is critiquing. There are gems here and there throughout it, but I think that Otaku by Hiroki Azuma is the better book. I’ll let my use of it in those prior essays stand for themselves.

Nothing but Blackened Teeth by Cassandra Khaw

(Reviewed by Edgar here.)

A book I enjoyed far less than Edgar did – while their description of the story and its plot is accurate, I found the story Khaw was telling less engaging. This is possibly idiosyncratic, because the story has a Japanese setting – and specifically a setting that references the Heian period, which I know only a small amount about – and I’ve been reading a number of Japanese books lately. While accusing Khaw, who is Malaysian, of orientalism makes about as much sense as accusing an Italian or Spanish writer of having a strange attitude towards the British, in my ignorance of the author’s background I must admit that it came across as such. I know, I know, death of the author, it shouldn’t matter.

Let me turn my attention elsewhere: it seems to me that the Nothing but Blackened Teeth is excellent on a line-by-line level and, much like Stephen Graham Jones, Khaw clearly has an affection for, and deep knowledge of, the tropes of the horror movie (which are, themselves, quite different from those of horror fiction.) That being said, the novella length – Tor Nightfire’s focus, so far as I can tell – was not, in my opinion, conducive to the story that Khaw was interested in telling. They weren’t able to give the characters enough time and room to breathe and establish themselves as individual people, establishing the web of defects that are really necessary for the filmic horror genre to work.

An important note, though: while I did not like this book, I do not think that has any reflection on Khaw’s skill as a writer – it was most likely a mismatch between Khaw’s talents, the format (a novella presented as an audio book), and my own taste. I have, apparently, encountered Khaw’s writing in the excellent lo-fi horror game World of Horror, on which they were a co-writer. (Apparently, they were also connected to YIIK: A Postmodern RPG, touched upon by in several places, but I believe in some artistic capacity, based on blog posts.)

So, if you’re interested in experiencing her work and want my opinion, maybe go with World of Horror?

Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins (no bookshop link, take one to thriftbooks.)

A book I found references to in Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein (reviewed here, referenced often) and in David Graeber’s Debt (referenced more times than I care to count)

While Confessions is an interesting – that is to say damning – account from inside an American multinational company, I feel it is marred by the author’s insistence that the original American Republic was somehow good and the post-World War II American Empire is bad. This is a peripheral point, but I feel it is one that must be interrogated to get the most out of this book as is possible.

Let’s stick with what is important here: this book is a description of how nations on the global periphery are roped into debt peonage by America and other “imperial core” or “metropole” nations. This began as an anti-Soviet program of imperialism (think of it as Capitalist Campism), but has since taken on an autonomous quality in the absence of the Soviet Union: now it is what the IMF et al. do, simply because that what they do.

Fundamentally, this book is simply a version of Thank You For Smoking for the international finance industry. It’s good, but in a very eat-your-vegetables sort of way.

Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire

(Reviewed by Edgar here.)

Excellent book, prime afterfiction. I enjoyed it, but I will let Edgar’s review speak for itself.

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