Harlequin Butterfly opens on a transpacific flight. Businessman AA Abrams introduces himself to an unnamed, first-person narrator and shows him a tiny butterfly net. “I use this net to go around capturing fresh ideas. That’s my trade,” he says. The rest of the chapter explains who Abrams is and the role of his net in his vast business empire.
Then chapter two explains the entire first chapter has been “the near-complete translation of To Be Read Only Under a Cat”—a book written so it can be understood only when a reader is, quite literally, underneath a cat.
Harlequin Butterfly isn’t a linear narrative. Roles shift. Items are forgotten and then remembered again. The setting changes from Asia, to North Africa, and eventually to America’s Pacific coast; the nationality, race, and spoken language of characters who pass through the narrative change with the setting. The American Abrams shifts in and out of the other chapters as fiction and non-fiction, alive and dead, but always as an important motivating force behind the action. (There is no character who identifies him or herself as a Japanese speaker until the novel’s closing pages.) The butterfly net reappears too, but not always in Abrams’s hands.
Aside from Abrams and the butterfly net, the third recurring figure is Tomoyuki Tomoyuki, the writer responsible for To Be Read Only Under a Cat as well as dozens of other books discovered all over the world, each written in a different and often obscure language. (To Be Read, for example, was originally written in an artificially simplified form of Latin, latino sine flexione. It is a real, historical language created by a 19th-century Italian mathematician.) There are also one or more third person narrators who may or may not be Tomoyuki Tomoyuki—or may be Tomoyuki Tomoyuki at certain times but not at others.
Harlequin Butterfly is being marketed in English as a work of science fiction. It is certainly how the novel is regarded in Japan, where the genre casts a wider net, encompassing speculative fiction and even mystery as well as what most Anglo-Americans would recognize as traditional sci-fi. There are no starcraft and no advanced technologies, just challenging reflections on memory, art, and the nature of reality.
The novel is perhaps most provocative as a meditation on language. The narrator of Harlequin Butterfly spends some time thinking about how Tomoyuki Tomoyuki must acquire his or her many languages, and whether that process must change the way humans understand language itself:
It’s only logical to consider the possibility of a cognitive anomaly—that a fundamentally different function is taking place within the author’s [Tomoyuki Tomoyuki’s] brain.
Once we arrive here, we have to ask: is language the same thing for Tomoyuki Tomoyuki as it is for the rest of us? It almost seems as though he’s some sort of vessel into which language has been poured. That’s not how language normally works.
Harlequin Butterfly and its extended meditations on language also call to mind other Japanese novels that have been translated in the last few years. Yoko Tawada’s Scattered All Over the Earth (published in Japan in 2018 and published in English translation by Margaret Mitsutani in 2022) is another speculative fiction novel, albeit with a more linear plot, about a world in which “the land of sushi” has disappeared, along with most speakers of its unique language. Minae Mizumura’s An I-Novel (1995, English translation by Juliet Winters Carpenter in 2021) is a partially-autobiographical work that takes up Mizumura’s lifetime concern about the out-sized role of English. (Her non-fiction work, The Fall of Language in the Age of English is also available in English translation by Mari Yoshihara and Juliet Winters Carpenter.)
To read Harlequin Butterfly in David Boyd’s translation from Japanese adds another level of complexity to the tightly woven, metatextual novel. Language, as the narrator reflects, is ultimately about communication—“In a language without users, you’re free to write whatever you want.” At one point, the narrator asks the reader to
Imagine a story—one that’s utterly meaningless, contradictory, incoherent. What if there’s a language somewhere in the world that would render that story logically sound?
Harlequin Butterfly isn’t meaningless, though it is intentionally contradictory and at points incoherent. Boyd’s English translation nevertheless presents a satisfying and reflective read.
The final chapter of Harlequin Butterfly provides a surprising solution to the central mysteries of the novel (and the novel’s title), albeit a solution that may send readers racing back to page one for a second read. It is not an easy explanation and makes the narrative almost circular. One suspects this was Enjoe’s intention.
Harlequin Butterfly is a thought-provoking work of speculative fiction. When it won the Akutagawa Prize, perhaps Japan’s most highly-coveted literary award, in 2011, it was one of the only science fiction stories to have ever earned that honor. Literary sci-fi is a fairly new addition to the canon of Japanese fiction available in English; Boyd’s translation of Toe EnJoe’s novel is an important addition. Dense and sometimes baffling by design, Harlequin Butterfly is nevertheless a worthwhile read for the strength of its ideas about memory, art, and language itself.