*****
Yoriko Shōno is a giant of Japanese
literature, the only author ever to win all three major prizes for new writers,
and yet you’ve probably never heard of her. Her ‘avant-pop’ masterpieces remain
untranslated. Thirty four years after her debut, Shōno is, in the words of her
publishers, ‘the guardian deity of Japanese literature, and the eternal newcomer.'
Maybe it’s because her career hasn’t had
the usual trajectory. Born in 1956, Shōno began writing while
studying law at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto. After
her 1981 debut Paradise (‘Gokuraku’) won the Gunzo New Writers Prize, she
did not publish much and what she did publish attracted curiously little
attention. But after a decade in the wilderness, Shōno returned to the forefront of the literary scene
in a big way. Between 1991 and 1994, she won the Noma Literary Prize for New
Writers, the Yukio Mishima Prize, and the Akutagawa Prize. Those ‘triple crown’
winning works, Not Doing Anything
(‘Nani mo shitenai’), The Two-Hundredth
Death Anniversary (‘Ni-hyaku-kai-ki’), and The Time Warp Industrial Complex (‘Taimu surippu konbinaato’)
cemented Shōno’s reputation as an elegantly inventive postmodernist and
occasional autofictionalist.
Shōno writes lucidly and poetically in a
way that makes the strange seem perfectly reasonable, slipping her characters into languid dream worlds before
taking them on a detour into slapstick humor and rampant paranoia. Her
narrators frequently bear a resemblance to her (unattractive, single,
middle-aged female writers without money or fame), calling to mind the Japanese
tradition of the “I-novel”, which Shōno subverts in
order to explore her main themes: gender and feminism. Her background as a law
student, she says, is the main influence on her writing, making her question
the supposedly “logical” and giving her subjective reality higher importance.
She also uses mystical elements, from the Izanagi-Izanami origin story to
Shinto and Buddhist traditions, to interrogate the role of women in Japanese
society.
In The
Time Warp Industrial Complex, a writer is awakened from a dream about being
in love with a tuna fish by a phone call from a man she does not know and is
sent off to Umishibaura, a railway station at the end of a line near Tokyo Bay.
To one side of the station is a Toshiba factory; to the other side is the sea.
As she makes her way there, the past and present merge and the writer finds
herself both in “the scene of what’s left after everything is over” and the
industrial town she grew up in. A personal meditation on Japan’s Bubble Era, Shōno
depicts “the conflict between illusion and brutal reality” both in love and
economics.
Shōno has continued to invent and define
her own world through writing; her 2004 novel Konpira (‘Kompira’),
winner of the Ito Sei Prize, is about a female writer much like Shōno who comes to
the realization that she is the Hindu crocodile god Kumbhira, adopted in Japan
as Konpira, the Buddhist guardian of those at sea. In a review, her fellow
postmodernist, Gen’ichiro Takahashi, echoed Shōno’s
feelings about her own writing when he wrote that, “To be Konpira is to believe. It is
to offer ultrapersonal prayers. Prayer is not an illusion. It needs no
interpretation or metaphor.”
Her most
recent work, Record of a Non-Illness:
Collagen Disorder, “Mixed Connective Tissue Disease” (‘Mi-tōbyō-ki ――
kōgenbyō, “kongō seiketsu gōsoshikibyō” no’), won the 2014 Noma Prize for Shōno’s depiction of
the realities of life with a chronic autoimmune disease. In her comments after
winning the prize, she said, “I’ve been referred to as having become critical
of neoliberalism or said to have written about the nuclear state before the
2011 disaster, but I have only one simple rule: I write about what I see, and
when I can’t write I write about why I can’t…. Ten years ago I was diagnosed with
an incurable disease with little hope…. And now twenty three years later [after
her 1991 Noma Prize for New Writers win], I have received the prize I always
hoped for! Is this the irony of fate? No, this is divine will!”
If there is
such a thing as divine will, someday we’ll see Yoriko Shōno’s
writing in English. Until then, an excerpt from the beginning of The Time Warp Complex is all we have.
Konpira, save us.
*****
*****
An Interview with Yoriko Shōno: (Review of Contemporary Fiction, June 2002)
Many thanks to Morgan for her excellent introduction to a Japanese writer overlooked by the English-speaking publishing world (alas, one of far too many). If any publishers out there have had their interest piqued by this short biography, you know who to call ;)
