In Suzuki Suzumi’s new novella, an unnamed woman plods through her routine life while the ghosts of her traumatic past resurface, to her increasing dismay. Translated from Japanese by Allison Markin Powell, Gifted was shortlisted for Japan’s respected Akutagawa Prize, making its English release highly anticipated. With a style both clinical and aloof, the novella unfolds a heartbreaking story about the distance and closeness between mother and daughter, of unrealized affection and unfulfilled dreams.
It’s 2008, and the narrator works as a bar hostess in Tokyo’s red light district. She is a provider of companionship, creating the illusion of a chaste date—she plays the role of a beauty, flirting with customers, and deflecting offers of sex work. The narrator reels from the grief of losing two friends, one who ran away and one who committed suicide. The latter, Eri, worked as an on-call dominatrix and frequently yet casually talked of putting an end to her suffering. The repetitiveness of this sentiment lent an air of harmlessness to her words until she finally followed through, jumping to her death from a rental condo in Osaka. Following these events, the narrator’s days involve shrugging off the heaviness of guilt, grief, and loneliness with a steady supply of indistinguishable pills and shochu, Japanese hard liquor.
Part of the narrator’s daily routine involves using skin tape to cover up the large tattoos that flow across her upper arm and curve down to her back, dispelling the conventional association between the yakuza—the Japanese mafia—and herself. Yet even this body art is haunted, used merely to cover the extensive burns that cover her skin. When the narrator was a teenager, without warning or reason, her mother pressed a lit cigarette into her arm, entranced in a daze and oblivious to her daughter’s wails. She then proceeded to pick up her lighter and burn the narrator’s cheap, skin-tight tee. The tee
ignited in a fraction of a second, producing an awful smell and clinging to [her] skin as it went up in flames.
Her mother, almost “surprised” by her screams, doused the flames with a cup of stale coffee. The moment solidified into fact, and the ghosts it produced marred her skin and memories.
I had thought the scars would fade in time, but instead they became gradually more discolored, with the centers turning white—it was grotesque.
Her disgust with the burns is layered: she despises her passivity during the burning, hates her mother for her actions, and resents the permanent reminder of such cruelty. The horror of the scene is incomprehensible and the lack of emotion the narrator relays it with is tragic; she recalls these memories with distance, in the midst of the haze and sweat of a club. It seems as though her survival is based on a wilful suppression of memory.
Years after the narrator ran away, sealing the emotional distance between her mother into the physical, her mother—now aging and ill—re-enters her life, carrying the kind of emotional baggage that spills over the walls of Tokyo’s notoriously small apartments. Unable to afford full-time care and too weak to live independently, her mother makes a home for herself with her daughter, creating a bubbling tension that intensifies as the story progresses. What follows is a profound meditation on what it means to reconcile with violence that remains unacknowledged yet repeatedly makes its presence known in the everyday. Years after the narrator’s scars have turned white, her arm glows “warm” when her mother touches it, and her mother’s indifference to the tattoos—a symbol of trauma and grief for the narrator— adds a heavy silence to their interactions. As her mother’s health worsens, the narrator’s impending grief juggles between relief and doom, an exhausting cycle of emotions staved off through substances. She searches for the reason behind her mother’s violence, noting that there are “no memories of my mother beating me or yelling at me.”
Gifted is a unique and propulsive story reminiscent of the emotional elusiveness of Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman (translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori); both are written with the same sense of cold detachment. It’s almost as though the effects of shochu seep into the narrative style, adding a blurry haze to the emotions the novel seeks to explore. This style widens the separation between the reader and narrator and allows for a tone that is more confessional than diaristic, relayed factually rather than with vulnerability, crafting a tale that tries to question how heavy the burden of trauma can be, both for the victim and perpetrator.
You must be logged in to post a comment.