Lonely Hearts Killer Read online

  PRAISE FOR

  LONELY HEARTS KILLER

  At once loved, reviled, exploited, and forgotten, Japan’s emperor system is recast in all its current mass-mediated glory as a way to engage and to critique contemporary Japan in Hoshino’s brilliant novel. Its vision belongs to the rampant disaffection that riddles Japanese youth today as does its explosive subversive energy, while at heart it is an activist quest to obliterate the effects of a nation and world reduced to spectacle.

  –James A. Fujii, Professor of Japanese Literature, the University of California-Irvine and author of Complicit Fictions: the Subject in the Modern Japanese Prose Narrative

  A major novel by Tomoyuki Hoshino, one of the most compelling and challenging writers in Japan today, Lonely Hearts Killer deftly weaves a path between geopolitical events and individual experience, forcing a personal confrontation with the political brutality of the postmodern era. Adrienne Hurley’s brilliant translation captures the nuance and wit of Hoshino’s exploration of depths that rise to the surface in the violent acts of contemporary youth.

  –Thomas LaMarre, Professor of East Asian Studies, McGill University and author of The Anime Machine: a Media Theory of Animation

  Since his debut, Hoshino has used as the core of his writing a unique sense of the unreality of things, allowing him to illuminate otherwise hidden realities within Japanese society. And as he continues to write from this tricky position, it goes without saying that he produces work upon work of extraordinary beauty and power.

  –Yûko Tsushima, award-winning author of Child of Fortune

  Reading Hoshino’s novels is like traveling to a strange land all by yourself. You touch down on an airfield in a foreign country, get your passport stamped, and leave the airport all nerves and anticipation. The area around an airport is more or less the same in any country. It is sterile and without character. There, you have no real sense of having come somewhere new. But then you take a deep breath and a smell you’ve never encountered enters your nose, a wind you’ve never felt brushes against your skin, and an unknown substance rains down upon your head.

  –Mitsuyo Kakuta, award-winning author of Woman on the Other Shore: a Novel

  Adrienne Hurley’s beautiful translation of Tomoyuki Hoshino’s Lonely Hearts Killer is a much-needed contribution to the very small body of translations of radical contemporary Japanese fiction that has little or no connection to the nostalgic, pop uncanniness of Haruki Murakami, and belongs to an entirely different universe from the SF worlds of anime and manga. Here is a novel that believes in radical political action, and that stubbornly sticks to its vision to the bitter end.

  –Livia Monnet, Professor, University of Montréal, author of Critical Approaches to Twentieth Century Japanese Thought

  Lonely Hearts Killer considers the ways in which seemingly ‘meaningless’ symbols and structures profoundly affect society, calling into question the power of the dangerous fictions which are constantly perpetrated on us, as well as the mass hysteria that lurks below the surface.

  –Nate George, filmmaker, Beirut, Lebanon

  LONELY

  HEARTS

  KILLER

  LONELY

  HEARTS

  KILLER

  TOMOYUKI HOSHINO

  TRANSLATED BY

  ADRIENNE CAREY HURLEY

  PM PRESS 2009

  LONELY HEARTS KILLER. Copyright © 2004 by Tomoyuki Hoshino. English Translation copyright © 2009 by Adrienne Carey Hurley. This edition copyright © 2009 by PM Press

  ISBN: 978-1-60486-084-9

  LCCN: 2009901379

  PM Press

  P.O. Box 23912

  Oakland, CA 94623

  PMPress.org

  Printed in the USA on recycled paper.

  Cover: John Yates/Stealworks.com

  Inside design: Josh MacPhee/Justseeds.org

  This novel was originally published in Japan by Chuôkôron Shinsha under the title RONRII HAATSU KIRAA.

  Contents

  Translator’s Introduction

  Author’s Preface

  Lonely Hearts Killer

  Author/Translator Q & A

  TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION

  Adrienne Carey Hurley

  Eric Shih, a young activist working for the Chinese Progressive Association in San Francisco, was the first person I heard respond to a news story by saying he felt like he hadn’t taken his “crazy pills.” Having heard this expression countless times since then, I suspect Eric is far from alone in feeling like “crazy pills” are necessary to accept the official versions of reality presented to us on the nightly news. Tomoyuki Hoshino’s Lonely Hearts Killer is a novel for those of us (like Eric) who are not living under the influence of officially prescribed “crazy pills” –– and those of us who are desperately trying to get off them.

  In the pages that follow, Hoshino takes us on a journey through our own world amplified. I say “our own” world because while much of the novel seems specific to contemporary Japan, readers living in North American or other G8 (or even G20) states will surely encounter familiar problems, questions, and developments. Hoshino draws on the everyday and headline news stories to create an alternate reality that is often every bit as realistic as it is fantastic. Because we experience violence, hope, oppression, resistance, discrimination, mutuality, emotional distress, love, and catastrophes of all sorts in our own world, readers should expect the same (and quite a bit of it) in this novel.

  The novel takes its title from actual events that inspired films such as the 1970 cult classic The Honeymoon Killers. Martha Beck and Raymond Martinez Fernandez were dubbed the “Lonely Hearts Killers” of the late 1940s and were executed in 1951 after a high-profile trial. Beck and Fernandez had posed as siblings and contacted women through “lonely hearts” personal advertisements and killed some of them. Coverage of the pair invariably focused on elements of their lives deemed different or strange. Beck, a survivor of physical and sexual abuse, for example, was routinely criticized as “fat” and sexually deviant in the press. The “foreignness” of Fernandez, the Hawaiian-born son of Spanish parents, also figured prominently in the sensational news reports. No explicit mention of Beck or Fernandez is made in Hoshino’s Lonely Hearts Killer, but readers will notice similarities in how the mass media in the novel relay sensationalized information about individuals, relationships, and incidents to the public. By the end of the novel, some readers might even draw comparisons between certain characters and the real-life pair whose story inspired the title.

  Hoshino’s interest in “incidents” developed in part through his experience working as a journalist for a conservative newspaper, the Sankei Shimbun, for two years after his graduation from Waseda University (with a degree in literature) in 1988. In the late 1980s Japan’s “bubble economy” was about to burst, and political scandals dominated the headlines. One such scandal was the notorious Recruit Incident of 1989, an insider-trading debacle that involved many politicians, including several former prime ministers, and newspaper CEOs. Occasionally, headlines about political and corporate corruption would be eclipsed by sensational coverage of cases such as the brutal killings of four girls under the age of ten by Tsutomu Miyazaki, who was arrested in 1989 and executed in the summer of 2008. 1989 was also the year when Japan marked the end of the previous emperor Hirohito’s Shôwa era and the beginning of his son Akihito’s Heisei era. Culturally, the release of the anime megahit Akira in the summer of 1988 and the death of the singer and postwar superstar Hibari Misora (the “Queen of Shôwa”) in the summer of 1989 seemed to suggest that times really were changing. This was surely a heady and disillusioning time for a young student of literature to work for a large (and fairly nationalistic) newspaper. In an
issue of a Japanese literary journal dedicated to his work, he recalls simply, “I traveled to the Kôshien Stadium in the spring [of 1990] to cover the national high school baseball championships. I took a few days vacation on my way back, and, while kicking around the streets of Osaka, lost my desire to carry on as a newspaper reporter.” (Bungei Tokushû: Hoshino Tomoyuki, Spring, 2006, 81-82, translation mine) He left the Sankei in October of that year and soon after left Japan to spend the better part of the next four years in Mexico, where he would begin his journey toward becoming a novelist.

  The politics and ethics of information and storytelling are central to Lonely Hearts Killer, as is the case with much of Hoshino’s other fiction. Whether it’s in the footage of a 9-11-esque event on the television in his novel The Worussian-Japanese Tragedy, the dissociative break a newspaper reporter experiences in Sand Planet, or the two teen killers turned “terrorists” loosely modeled on figures from the news in The Treason Diary, cameras, journalists, and “incidents” are everywhere in his work. In Lonely Hearts Killer, Hoshino invokes a wide range of “hot” issues drawn from contemporary Japanese tabloid news (the lives of Japanese royalty and internet suicide pacts) and transnational right-wing punditry (anti-immigrant xenophobia and support for martial law), as well as incidents from Japan’s present and past. For example, roughly two-thirds of the novel takes place in a mountain lodge that may evoke images of the headquarters of the Aum cult that carried out the attack on the Tokyo subway system in 1995.

  A mountain lodge was also the site of one of the most “shocking” incidents of the 1970s, the Asama Sansô Incident. In February of 1972, five members of the Japanese United Red Army (Rengô sekigun) fled a remote mountain training retreat where some of their comrades had been purged, beaten, and lynched. In what was surely a desperate moment, they sought refuge in a mountain lodge and held the manager’s wife, the only person there at the time, hostage. The lengthy stand-down with the police was simulcast on Japan’s national television network, NHK. The Choice of Hercules, a 2001 film starring Kôji Yakusho, depicts the stand-down with the leftist “terrorists” from the police point of view. The motives of the Red Army members are never mentioned in the film. They are all but invisible, shown only very briefly, with their faces almost completely hidden in the shadows. They are not real. Their stories do not matter. While never mentioned in the novel, the Asama Sansô Incident and NHK’s coverage of it are part of the televisual and filmic history that is layered into Lonely Hearts Killer. Hoshino’s focus, unlike that of the commercial film, is on figures that might otherwise be relegated to the shadows.

  The individual chapter titles are also replete with allusion. The title of the first chapter, “The Sea of Tranquility,” refers not only to the actual lunar landscape described in the story, but recalls the title of Yukio Mishima’s final tetralogy, The Sea of Fertility (Hojô no umi), named after another “sea” on the moon and closely associated with Mishima’s dramatic suicide. Mishima was a novelist and playwright who remains one of the most translated and studied figures in modern Japanese literature. His personal life, politics, and sexuality have generated perhaps even more interest than his work, and his death made news around the world. In 1970, Mishima and four members of his private militia, the Shield Society (Tate no kai), entered the office of General Kanetoshi Mashita of the Japanese Self Defense Forces (SDF). Purporting to be there for a visit, they held the general hostage while Mishima read a speech to SDF members assembled beneath the balcony outside Mashita’s office.

  His speech was not met warmly, but according to his plan, Mishima returned to the office and committed (rather anachronistically) seppuku (ritual self-disembowelment), as did Masakatsu Morita, one of his militia members. Because Mishima’s speech called for a reaffirmation of the emperor’s powers and a remilitarization of Japan, many have interpreted his suicide as a political act, as a call for a right-wing coup d’état. Others have interpreted it as a love suicide for Mishima and Morita, an aesthetic act, or simply the result of “lunacy.” Mishima’s fiction, interviews, essays, and other writings provide ample evidence to fuel a variety of such speculations. Like some of the characters in Lonely Hearts Killer, Mishima appealed to and tried to make use of the mass media, which has continued to generate profit off the promise of lurid spectacle, violence, sex, and “deviance” exacted from his story.

  The second chapter, “The Love Suicide Era,” is named after the news media’s label for the fictional period of time covered in that chapter. The term “love suicide” (shinjû) itself evokes a long literary tradition of pathos-filled tales of romantic impasses such as the eighteenth century Love Suicide at Amijima by Monzaemon Chikamatsu in which a couple unable to overcome economic and social barriers end their lives together. The term might also call to mind the real-life deaths of writers like Mishima and Osamu Dazai, who died in 1948 after several unsuccessful love suicide attempts. (Readers should not expect to find romanticized or elegiac accounts of suicide in this novel.) The third chapter and mountain pass where the retreat is located are named after Luis Buñuel’s 1951 film Subida al Cielo, which while released under the title Mexican Bus Ride in the U.S. would be more accurately translated as “Ascent to Heaven.” This film features an autonomous, somewhat communal village in the mountains of Mexico. Various media’s reach into the story includes other references to films, such as The Lady from Shanghai, the internet, cellular phones and text messaging, radio, and, of course, television.

  The country where events unfold in the novel is at once identifiably Japan and not Japan. Although the proper noun nihon ( Japan) is not used in Lonely Hearts Killer and the word nihongo ( Japanese language) appears only once (when Iroha is badgered by a reporter), the story takes place in a nation referred to as the “Island Country.” The real names of places in Japan, such as the Shinjuku district of Tokyo or the Isetan department store chain, are referred to by their usual names. Titles of famous Japanese newspapers, literary journals, and magazines are only slightly altered, often in humorous ways. The conventional words for China and Chinese (chûgoku and chûgokugo) are replaced with words based on the root usually reserved for Chinese food and Chinese neighborhoods

  Some anarchist and anti-authoritarian fantasies involve what official discourse terms terrorism. While the word terrorism might not immediately lead some readers to think of Japan, many of you will recall the Aum cult’s 1995 sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo subway system. Some of you may be old enough to recall the Japanese Red Army’s activity in the 1970s and events such as the Asama Sansô Incident. Less familiar to some readers will be the stories of Japanese anarchists, such as those who hoped to abolish the emperor system in the first decade of the twentieth century. All of these legacies, particularly the latter, are called forth in Lonely Hearts Killer, a novel in which metropolitan paranoia over terrorism, suspicion directed at separatist or autonomous community formations, and yearnings to transcend national identity coalesce in a story that can be read as nightmarish, predictive, cautionary, and even utopian.

  (chûka), such as chûkago (an invented word something akin to how “Chinaese” might sound in English). Hoshino plays with national identity in ways that beg larger and very serious questions, many of which turn on notions of terrorism.

  While Hoshino makes no explicit mention of historical anarchist desires to abolish the emperor system in this novel, his characters inhabit a society we might understand as the worst case scenario early anarchists in Japan imagined developing out of Japan’s aggressive imperial expansion. Put simply, that worst case scenario might be summed up as life under neoliberalism. Neoliberalism has reached a level of dominance that renders it practically invisible in the sense that belief in it feels good, fair, and “natural” to many people. Like the emperor system, neoliberalism is presented to us as a matter of faith. Early Japanese anarchists would be particularly dismayed to see neoliberalism’s tough incursions into precariously situated communities, such as the forced removals of homeless people fr
om public parks in Japanese cities prior to international sporting or other events. Several recent “removals” have targeted autonomous homeless communities in which members provided community food and health services for one another. The “removals” are justified as economically “rational” due to the increased possibilities for profit-generation through special event-related tourism. They are touted as beneficial for all even when the process is violent and homeless people themselves are put in more dangerous and isolated situations. It warrants mention that violent attacks on homeless people, including lynching and murder, have increased along with the “removal” programs.

  The “sacrifice” of precariously situated homeless populations in Japan, the mass incarceration of people of color and immigrants in privately run U.S. prisons, or the criminalization of poverty in the form of anti-loitering laws are justifiable according to the neoliberal demand that nothing inhibit the flow of capital. If certain people are not good for business, removing them from city streets where they might make shoppers and tourists uncomfortable and sequestering them in privately operated prisons, for example, frees the state – and us – from having to acknowledge inequities or address people’s social needs and also creates more avenues for profit generation. Through his fiction, including Lonely Hearts Killer, Hoshino gives us very different ways of looking at these contemporary problems. He also invites us to reflect on how difficult it can be to resist neoliberalism, the emperor system, and other forms of authority (or divinity), and he challenges us to imagine more for ourselves than battles over sovereignty or national identity.

  These treasonous musings are perhaps the unfinished business of twelve anarchists and socialists who were executed in 1911 in what is known as the High Treason Incident. They were executed for thinking about killing the emperor – of having criminal intent without the crime. At the time it was a capital offense just to think about harming a member of the imperial family. Later, it was revealed that the case against the executed twelve (as well as their alleged co-conspirators whose sentences were reduced) was manufactured. The government’s disingenuous prosecution should not, however, lead us to downplay the seriousness of some of those anarchists’ abolitionist dreams. In those final years of the Meiji era, some anarchists believed that only by abolishing the emperor system could a society without authoritarian differential power begin to grow.