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Ju'nyuu ("Breastfeeding") by Murata Sayaka
I wasn't particularly interested in Murata Sayaka until last week, when I read this New Yorker profile on her that spends a good deal of time positioning her work in relation to the super-genre of science fiction. Previously I'd assumed that she was just another Quirky Alienated Japanese Woman (something that I think even Murata plays with, titling her stories things like “Breastfeeding” and “Boyfriends”) that the Anglophone litfic establishment seems to enjoy so much; but Batuman paints a picture of someone far more interesting and far more deranged.
Breastfeeding is Murata's first professionally published story (as well as lending its title to the collection in which it’s later reprinted), and she already demonstrates her skill with the estranging metaphor, deploying it with such flat affect that you have to question whether her "as if"s and "looked like"s are little more than nods to social propriety masquerading as literary flourish, a mask underneath which lies her narrator's fundamentally disgusted view of the world and people in her orbit. The barrier dividing metaphor and fabulism here is so thin, it feels like at any moment it could tear apart in a terrifying irrupture of one into the other. And while as readers we be may naturally inclined to fear the possibility of Murata's metaphors spilling over into our real, it's easy to imagine her neurosis-ridden characters fearing even more the violent intrusion of the real into those privileged mental spaces where they're still free to define the world in their own warped and private ways.
During one of her study sessions with her new tutor, Breastfeeding’s narrator briefly wonders what his penis looks like, only for the fleeting thought to be displaced by more interesting parts of his anatomy:
Any fascination with banal genital arousal is quickly overwritten by the search for the place where her tutor feels vulnerable and ashamed, while the extended metaphor itself makes it clear that this is still a sexual situation (fumbling with buttons, the instinctual response to seeing someone else’s unclothed body, Sensei’s bleeding hole), the traditional gender roles inverted and the traditional objects of sexual interest discarded for new ones.
When the narrator learns that anorexia causes the skin to grow small, dark hairs to regulate body temperature in the absence of energy caused by missing calories, she surreptitiously searches her diet-obsessed classmate's skin but is disappointed to find none. Those small black hairs appear soon after, however, on the legs of a moth intruding on a study session with her private tutor, haunting us with the lurking possibility of her classmate's own transformation into a moth (cf. Langelaan/Kafka). When she swats that same moth and splatters it across her tutor's face, she likens the resulting image to the "visible man" statue in her school's science lab, the moth's viscera becoming the tutor's viscera, erupting from the previously drab skin of his cheek. The body of the moth serves to furnish a kind of vitality onto the mostly-lifeless husks of the people around her; the moth, and the metaphors it brings with it, is more alive, more real than they are.
Breastfeeding is a story about neuroses and the grip they have over us: Murata's characters are all being controlled (Japanese "shihai"; influence, control, domination, etc...) by something. The narrator's classmate is “controlled by her diet”; girls her age are “controlled by [the] mysticism” of rituals and luck charms; her mother's world is “utterly dominated by her father” (to say nothing of her mother's own neurotic obsession with cleanliness); her tutor is controlled by the sustenance he longs for and only she can offer. Again the strength of Murata's metaphors against the dreariness of the real serves to heighten the unreal horror of the text; her characters inhabit a world where their actions are not fully their own, puppets driven to act by external forces. Our narrator herself is likely no exception—her actions in the story are certainly not what most would call normal, or expected—although we never quite put a name to what it is that is controlling her.
Darko Suvin, one of science fiction's most important literary critics, defines the genre in formal terms as the literature of "cognitive estrangement": SF posits something fictional, and then works to make it "real" through our ability to comprehend it (in Critical Theory and Science Fiction, Carl Freedman points out that this dynamic is at play, to some degree, in practically all fictional writing; science fiction is simply the name for that privileged genre where this action dominates the text). And while Murata is adept at producing estrangement, at least here the means by which we come to accept it is more affective than it is cognitive; the strength of her writing stems from juxtaposing vibrant impossibility with a pathetically uninteresting reality, subtly forcing the reader to consider which one they’d rather choose. In that sense her writing has less in common with SF and perhaps more in common with horror (a genre that, in my experience, also tends to skew a lot closer to the realm of “literary fiction”, at least in Japan), a genre that largely functions by driving us to accept that estrangement against our cognitive judgments to the contrary.
That being said, observing Murata’s familiarity with or even preference for the unreal (or at least its suggestion), it’s clear how her writing could very easily slip over into the realm of the more explicitly SF. In The Fairy Room, another story from the collection, she deploys even more straightforwardly science fictional language:
Samuel Delany, riffing off of Suvin, likes to highlight the way in which science fiction deploys the literal use of language where, in other genres, our default interpretation would be to read it as unproblematically figurative. An example he enjoys is the sentence, “Her world exploded,” which in any other writing we would read simply as an expression of someone experiencing an emotionally or psychologically intense experience, whereas in science fiction we’re forced to keep reading to determine whether or not someone’s actual world has actually exploded. Murata’s, “That was my switch,” recalls another of Delany’s favorite examples of this: “He turned on his left side” (if you don’t get it, just think about it for a second). In Murata’s case, the nagging temptation to read her literally is only heightened by the fact that Murata herself seems largely disinterested in justifying, explaining, probing, or making excuses for the real against which her unreal descriptions are ostensibly set as a mirror; her writing dissolves us into the figurative, and is barely concerned with trying to lift us out of it. She may not be writing science fiction yet, but from here it’s not so difficult to see how she could.
Breastfeeding is Murata's first professionally published story (as well as lending its title to the collection in which it’s later reprinted), and she already demonstrates her skill with the estranging metaphor, deploying it with such flat affect that you have to question whether her "as if"s and "looked like"s are little more than nods to social propriety masquerading as literary flourish, a mask underneath which lies her narrator's fundamentally disgusted view of the world and people in her orbit. The barrier dividing metaphor and fabulism here is so thin, it feels like at any moment it could tear apart in a terrifying irrupture of one into the other. And while as readers we be may naturally inclined to fear the possibility of Murata's metaphors spilling over into our real, it's easy to imagine her neurosis-ridden characters fearing even more the violent intrusion of the real into those privileged mental spaces where they're still free to define the world in their own warped and private ways.
During one of her study sessions with her new tutor, Breastfeeding’s narrator briefly wonders what his penis looks like, only for the fleeting thought to be displaced by more interesting parts of his anatomy:
The cold, black plastic buttons were inserted tightly into the tiny buttonholes, but one by one I was able to undo them. Eventually they shook free, the folds of Sensei's sleeve spreading slightly. Inside was Sensei's wrist. His skin exposed itself, and I sensed the slightest stutter in my breathing. I felt disgusted by it, so I held my breath, grit my teeth, and rolled up Sensei's sleeve. Deep blue veins snaked across his pale skin like a watercolor tattoo. Further up his arm was a dark gash, blood oozing from underneath the fresh scab.
Any fascination with banal genital arousal is quickly overwritten by the search for the place where her tutor feels vulnerable and ashamed, while the extended metaphor itself makes it clear that this is still a sexual situation (fumbling with buttons, the instinctual response to seeing someone else’s unclothed body, Sensei’s bleeding hole), the traditional gender roles inverted and the traditional objects of sexual interest discarded for new ones.
When the narrator learns that anorexia causes the skin to grow small, dark hairs to regulate body temperature in the absence of energy caused by missing calories, she surreptitiously searches her diet-obsessed classmate's skin but is disappointed to find none. Those small black hairs appear soon after, however, on the legs of a moth intruding on a study session with her private tutor, haunting us with the lurking possibility of her classmate's own transformation into a moth (cf. Langelaan/Kafka). When she swats that same moth and splatters it across her tutor's face, she likens the resulting image to the "visible man" statue in her school's science lab, the moth's viscera becoming the tutor's viscera, erupting from the previously drab skin of his cheek. The body of the moth serves to furnish a kind of vitality onto the mostly-lifeless husks of the people around her; the moth, and the metaphors it brings with it, is more alive, more real than they are.
Breastfeeding is a story about neuroses and the grip they have over us: Murata's characters are all being controlled (Japanese "shihai"; influence, control, domination, etc...) by something. The narrator's classmate is “controlled by her diet”; girls her age are “controlled by [the] mysticism” of rituals and luck charms; her mother's world is “utterly dominated by her father” (to say nothing of her mother's own neurotic obsession with cleanliness); her tutor is controlled by the sustenance he longs for and only she can offer. Again the strength of Murata's metaphors against the dreariness of the real serves to heighten the unreal horror of the text; her characters inhabit a world where their actions are not fully their own, puppets driven to act by external forces. Our narrator herself is likely no exception—her actions in the story are certainly not what most would call normal, or expected—although we never quite put a name to what it is that is controlling her.
Darko Suvin, one of science fiction's most important literary critics, defines the genre in formal terms as the literature of "cognitive estrangement": SF posits something fictional, and then works to make it "real" through our ability to comprehend it (in Critical Theory and Science Fiction, Carl Freedman points out that this dynamic is at play, to some degree, in practically all fictional writing; science fiction is simply the name for that privileged genre where this action dominates the text). And while Murata is adept at producing estrangement, at least here the means by which we come to accept it is more affective than it is cognitive; the strength of her writing stems from juxtaposing vibrant impossibility with a pathetically uninteresting reality, subtly forcing the reader to consider which one they’d rather choose. In that sense her writing has less in common with SF and perhaps more in common with horror (a genre that, in my experience, also tends to skew a lot closer to the realm of “literary fiction”, at least in Japan), a genre that largely functions by driving us to accept that estrangement against our cognitive judgments to the contrary.
That being said, observing Murata’s familiarity with or even preference for the unreal (or at least its suggestion), it’s clear how her writing could very easily slip over into the realm of the more explicitly SF. In The Fairy Room, another story from the collection, she deploys even more straightforwardly science fictional language:
I pressed on the joint at the base of my left thumb, a habit I've had since I was a child. That was my switch.
[...]
My father used to take a portable television with him into the bath, and watch baseball, the news, whatever. It was small but heavy, sheathed in gray rubber, and had a long, chunky antenna sticking out the top. I imagined having it inside my forehead. It was just about the right size to install in my skull. I thought about its black rubber buttons and pressed at the base of my left thumb, and a bright screen came on, and I could watch whatever I wanted in perfect detail. My father lost that TV somewhere on a business trip, but the one in my forehead never switched off.
Samuel Delany, riffing off of Suvin, likes to highlight the way in which science fiction deploys the literal use of language where, in other genres, our default interpretation would be to read it as unproblematically figurative. An example he enjoys is the sentence, “Her world exploded,” which in any other writing we would read simply as an expression of someone experiencing an emotionally or psychologically intense experience, whereas in science fiction we’re forced to keep reading to determine whether or not someone’s actual world has actually exploded. Murata’s, “That was my switch,” recalls another of Delany’s favorite examples of this: “He turned on his left side” (if you don’t get it, just think about it for a second). In Murata’s case, the nagging temptation to read her literally is only heightened by the fact that Murata herself seems largely disinterested in justifying, explaining, probing, or making excuses for the real against which her unreal descriptions are ostensibly set as a mirror; her writing dissolves us into the figurative, and is barely concerned with trying to lift us out of it. She may not be writing science fiction yet, but from here it’s not so difficult to see how she could.