In his Akutagawa Prize-winning Cannibals, Shinya Tanaka doesn’t shy away from dark topics, dealing with crippling poverty, violence and sexual abuse in an often matter-of-fact way. Perhaps the author’s candor is part of the reason that Cannibals (a literal translation of the original Tomogui, though the original has a secondary meaning of ‘mutual destruction’) received Japan’s most prestigious literary prize, although it often walks such a fine line between the frank and the gratuitous that readers themselves may settle on either side in their own assessment.
In a stiflingly hot and forsaken little town beside a polluted river, seventeen-year-old Toma tries to avoid the fate of becoming just like his abusive father, Madoka. Toma’s mother, Jinko, has already left to escape Madoka’s violence, and now makes her living as a fishmonger. Using a hook in lieu of the hand she lost during a fire bombing, she guts eels from the sewage-filled river and asks Toma to deliver them to his father, who readily devours them. As Toma struggles with the emergence of his own sexual and violent impulses, things at home take a turn for the worse when Madoka’s current girlfriend, Kotoko, becomes pregnant and decides to leave the riverside for good.
Familial conflict provides much of the drama in the story. Madoka is a violent lover and eventual rapist; he is a man stripped of restraint and full of the destructive impulses that his son dreads he himself may one day possess. Toma’s core desire is simply to never become his father, a reluctance that mirrors the real ideological divide between the generations born before and after the Second World War. Although it is set over thirty years later, the War’s presence looms over Cannibals, whether in the mood of despair or in physical wounds, such as Jinko’s missing appendage:
The skin from her wrist up to near the elbow was still scarred with burns shaped like the brilliant waves of flame that had incinerated the riverside.
Set in the shadow of wartime defeat, the novella is a work of sobering realism that gives voice to a generation and social class that felt they had been failed—or worse, forgotten—by society at large. In doing so it gives readers a glimpse of the dark underbelly of Japan’s post-War pursuit of progress. Toma’s inner turmoil about his inescapable fate is compounded by the dire state of his surroundings. While the 1980s were a time of ostensible prosperity in Japan, Cannibals makes clear that the morally hollow binding of the hopes of a nation to its economic success leaves many behind. Toma’s escape from the riverside seems just as impossible as from his own genetic legacy. The other impoverished inhabitants have just as little hope for the future, but for Toma this hopelessness in particular leads to a pronounced nihilism:
When he wondered if he and Jinko-san would also spend their whole lives in the riverside like his dad, he felt that everything he did was pointless.
Tanaka gives these overlooked characters a voice, handling even the most flawed with an empathy that humanizes them. This even extends to Madoka, who, while otherwise irredeemable in some of his actions, never strikes his son and goes out of his way to arrange a prosthetic limb for Jinko. While clearly an antagonist, he rises above the clichéd villain.
There is a restless fluidity to Cannibals that makes it easy to read despite its tough content.
Tanaka has been writing for the better part of three decades and is the recipient of a number of awards, including the Yukio Mishima Prize and the Yasunari Kawabata Prize, but this is the first of his works to be translated into English. On the whole, the translation is handled well by Kalau Almony, who stays faithful to the original while still delivering solid prose. There is a restless fluidity to Cannibals that makes it easy to read despite its tough content, and one can only hope this publication can act as a catalyst for more of Tanaka’s work to appear in translation.
A novella about the next generation’s attempt to escape a tainted legacy, Cannibals can be at times heavy-handed and its tone overwrought, yet the work asks difficult questions about the nature of good and evil, and how we can live in a world fraught with violence when we fear that some of that violence comes from within. The “net of blood” that smothers Toma in a frenzied dream is not so easily broken, however at its close the novella is hopeful of change, though not without sacrifice. This is representative of a work that as a whole never sugarcoats reality but delves into ugliness so that readers may extract a hard-won but ultimately more rewarding hope for themselves.