Björn recenserade Snakes and Earrings av Hitomi Kanehara
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3 stjärnor
Lui is 19 and sick of being a good girl all dressed in pink and kawaii. She moves in with a violent boyfriend full of tattoos and piercings, and when he suggests piercing her tongue, she goes with it. It's all good and well until he introduces her to his tattoo artist, who enjoys inflicting pain a little more than most people... not that Lui minds.
Kanehara was 19 when she wrote this, a short novella of just 80 pages of three people pulling each other down into co-dependancy, alcohol and consensual violence, and it shows. Not that it's bad, absolutely not; much like Ryu Murakami's brilliant Almost Transparent Blue (Murakami wrote the foreword to this book too), it's a story of young people cut off from all accepted roles in Japanese society and responding by seeking pleasure in self-destruction, but where Murakami's story echoes on lots of different levels, …
Lui is 19 and sick of being a good girl all dressed in pink and kawaii. She moves in with a violent boyfriend full of tattoos and piercings, and when he suggests piercing her tongue, she goes with it. It's all good and well until he introduces her to his tattoo artist, who enjoys inflicting pain a little more than most people... not that Lui minds.
Kanehara was 19 when she wrote this, a short novella of just 80 pages of three people pulling each other down into co-dependancy, alcohol and consensual violence, and it shows. Not that it's bad, absolutely not; much like Ryu Murakami's brilliant Almost Transparent Blue (Murakami wrote the foreword to this book too), it's a story of young people cut off from all accepted roles in Japanese society and responding by seeking pleasure in self-destruction, but where Murakami's story echoes on lots of different levels, Kanehara deliberately refuses to delve beneath the surface (fittingly for a book about people who change their skin to reflect how empty they feel on the inside). Lui is a frighteningly blank narrator; everything that happens to her, including her lover asking her if he can kill her, is dismissed with "that's OK." By limiting the story to what the emotionally dead Lui can be bothered to tell us, we end up with a story where almost every single thing that happens is related in the same bored monotone with no justification of why anybody does anything, forcing the reader to ask - if they care - just why these people act the way they do. If you find it genuinely affecting and thought-provoking, or just gratuitous shock value, will probably be different for each reader. I find myself somewhere in the middle.