Auto Fiction by Hitomi Kanehara

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Japan through the eyes of a woman

I've just finished a book that reminds me of 'Catch 22' but it's set in Japan, with a young woman, in the 21st century. So actually not like 'Catch 22' at all. Except that once you finish it, you'll have a similar response, like you've just got off a roller coaster where you felt all the sensations of going up and down and hurtling around corners, but you wouldn't be able to describe the corners or the layout of the roller coaster to someone else. That's what 'Auto Fiction' by Hitomi Kanehara feels like.

I borrowed this from a friend who has been reading a lot of Japanese fiction lately, translated into English of course. The only Japanese book I'd heard of is 'Letters from Iwo Jima' and I only know that because Clint Eastwood made a movie of it (which I haven't seen). 'Auto Fiction' is pretty far from the stereotype of Japanese life and what you might expect Japanese fiction to look like. Or maybe it's just me who had this idea that Japanese fiction would look like tai chi and be graceful and more like 'Memoirs of a Geisha' - which was actually written by a man so I don't know what I was thinking. When the book starts, Rin, the protagonist, is 22. There's no introduction and no acknowledgment of you the reader. It sounds pretty normal till a couple of pages in when you raise your eyebrows and think 'whoa lady take a chill pill'. The first few pages set you up for the rest of the book, which shows the grey, industrial, sometimes seedy life of anyone who lives in a big city. Rin's got it pretty rough, I have to say, and I don't understand her completely. By the end of the book, after seeing Rin when she was younger, you feel a lot more sympathy for her, but there's still that big question about her life: 'Yes, but WHY?'. Rin acknowledges, without ever saying it, her own struggle with mental illness - or at least questions about her mental health. It was pretty clear to me early on that she wasn't quite balanced and that her extreme ups and downs were out of the ordinary. I have a family member who has pretty big issues with mental health, and I find that while I can try to accept it, I'll never fully understand. How can you, until you've lived in a world like Rin, who claims to have been picturing her own death since she was a kid, trying to imagine unusual ways of dying?

There's a scene when a younger Rin goes to a party with some girlfriends. From the stories she tells about herself and her friends, they have sex with a lot of different men and work pretty hard to be cool about it. Or maybe they just ARE cool about it. So in this one scene, Rin sees one of her friends being carried off by a couple of guys, seemingly against her will. Rin questions whether her friend is going to be gang-raped and the response she gets is 'probably'. It's a shrug-off answer and Rin pretty much shrugs it off. She leaves without her friends and the party doesn't come up again in the book. Pretty brutal.

That's what I mean about it not being how you'd expect Japanese life to be. Probably we've all heard the stories about schoolgirl-undies vending machines in Japan. I reckon most of us see it as a slightly shocking but acceptable idiosyncrasy that we can tuck into our image of Japanese culture. Like how we accept the idea of Vietnamese people eating dog meat, or voodoo magic.

But we have this view of cultures as being different to our own, based on different foods and different languages and different art - when actually these are not the things that define a culture at all. They're the outward expression of what's really going on inside a culture. When you think about it like that, schoolgirl undies in vending machines is actually kind of disturbing. This is the modern Japan that Rin shows you.

From what you can piece together about Rin, she hasn't lived with her family for a few years by the time you meet her at 22. She might even be a runaway. Which on its own is shocking enough - a runaway Japanese woman?? Who'd have thought it! But more jolting is that her experiences are what you'd expect for an American runaway or Australian or British: brutal men, violence, drugs, and a complete disconnection from the world around you. Feeling and being invisible.

There's no bullshit in 'Auto Fiction', and any self-pity is analysed without mercy. If you don't like the C-word, don't read this. I think there are lots of people who wouldn't like it at all, which is fine. But it's way to easy to sit in your life and think you know how things are. I would recommend it to people who want to challenge their preconceptions about the world and who can see beyond the story to recognise a well crafted novel.

Title: Auto Fiction
Author: Hitomi Kanehara
Format: Paperback, 224 pages
Publisher: Vintage