I hate using labels like “transgressive” to describe anything, especially given how much blood gets drained out of such words with overuse. Asura Girl is, I guess, a “transgressive” novel, in that it describes a great deal of deviant behavior, studiously avoids the regular beginning-middle-end rules of fiction, and does so all out of some greater ambition that presumably can’t be encapsulated in a “conventional” story. All that is fine by my; after all, art’s about taking chances. But you have to be willing to concede that any experiment can fail, and Asura Girl is transgressive and difficult and (another word I hate) different without actually being all that interesting.
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If I must invoke influences, I might as well, so here goes. Girl is indeed reminiscent of two other Japanese authors whom I’ve read and enjoyed. The first is Ryū Murakami, whose Almost Transparent Blue (1976) launched a career of transgressive cultural critique, one that came most to the mainstream attention of the West through Takashi Miike’s film version of his novel Audition. The other is, I guess either Hideo Okuda (Lala Pipo, In the Pool, the Dr. Irabu stories recently animated, and excellently so, as Trapeze) or Genichiro Takahashi (Sayonara Gangsters). Both of those authors sported the wacky, unhinged humor of Donald Bartheme or Lot 49-era Thomas Pynchon. Girl has all the blood’n’guts and professed social commentary of the first and the fractured storytelling of the latter two, but the way the whole thing is stitched together feels arbitrary, a style looking for an actual story to be about.
The story, as best can be discerned from Otaro Maijo’s fractured first-person narrative, goes something like this. High-school girl Aiko has a crush on her classmate Yoji, but instead indulges in repellent sex with another classmate, Sano. Then Sano goes missing, ostensibly because he has become the latest victim of the serial killer christened the "Round-and-Round Devil". Word on the 'Net — especially the underground site "Voice of Heaven" — circulates about who he might be, and before long riots are fomenting in the streets to bring the killer to justice.
So far, sort of straightforward — except that after this point, the book takes several major detours, most of them with only the most peripheral connection to the story. E.g.: one of Aiko's fantasies about a family straight out of a European storybook becomes part of the story itself, with the action having some allegorical back-connection to everything else. Eventually, there's a sort of conclusion, one where all the disparate threads of the story are tied together in a way that only a lit major writing a dissertation could find compelling. (The blurb on the back of the book, I should add, covers only a small and relatively coherent fraction of what goes on in about the first third or so of the story.)
The book contains a great many things—disaffected youth, hate-riots spurred on by anonymous message boards—but it isn’t actually about any of them. I imagine some of those elements are going to seem all the more resonant in the light of recent events, e.g., Gamergate. But that’s not the same as the book actually doing anything with those ideas, and from what I can tell they are mostly deployed for the sake of color and atmosphere. The book doesn’t really care about them as such or use them to tell much of a story; they’re just ingredients mixed in to make Aiko’s world look all the more chaotic and threatening, and to provide that many more threads to be artificially stitched together at the conclusion, one where she laboriously explains to us the way it's all supposed to fit together — in her head, at least. I am, I guess, supposed to say that this whole mental process of hers is the actual story, as opposed to the goings-on which are merely plot, but
How all of this stuff is described is, I suppose, also what is supposed to make the book interesting, or at least not mundane. Half of it is teenager-isms ("These days it always turns out to be kids who do really wacked-out shit"), and the other half of it is pseudo-philosophy ("I have absolutely no idea what's real and what's made up, but at least that I know that I don't know"), garnished with the kinds of pop-culture references that aggressively call attention to themselves. Does a teenaged girl in modern Japan really draw parallels between what's happening to her and movies like The Big Lebowski? Maybe I'm not required to believe that they do, and just take it in stride as part of the story's texture, but that doesn't make it any less distracting.
Look. I know full well this kind of material has its fans and stylistic adherents, and it ought to go without saying that my criticisms aren’t aimed at them; they’ll find something to mine out of Asura Girl no matter what I say. I’m writing this more for the people who might expect something along the lines of Battle Royale, or one of Japan’s other recent works of social transgression. Asura Girl has less in common with those stories than you might think, since again it isn’t really about the social unrest or the alienated behavior it features so prominently in its first third or so. It’s a showcase for authorial style, and if the style is to your taste, so is the book. But the style exists mainly for the sake of showcasing itself, not for the sake of telling a story that requires the style to work to the exclusion of another style.
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It wasn’t until I was most of the way through Asura Girl that another book—in fact, a whole other author—came to mind where the story and the style were wholly dependent on each other. The author was Boris Vian, the French quasi-surrealist and black comedian, and the book in question was his L’écume des jours, better known to English-speaking audiences as Mood Indigo by way of the Michel Gondry movie recently adapted from it. That book used a magical-realist/fairytale atmosphere to tell a story that began sweet, but by degrees became elegiac and even horrific. Even at its most absurd, it found ways to make you care about what was going on and who it was happening to.
Asura Girl, at the very least, has the absurdity down pat, and I give it points for being its own maddening self, something few enough books are these days. I give Haikasoru points, too, for taking a risk on publishing it instead of, say, an easy light-novel acquisition. But in the end, the book's a stunt, not a story.
