The Melancholy of Mechagirl

This is Catherynne M. Valente’s collection of the stories and poems with a connection to Japan. In the stories with less of a connection, the references to Japan are subtle and as hard to distinguish as a thread woven into fabric. You will also notice other recurring themes. Descriptions of houses and families appear several times. A wife is separated from her husband, and disparate people (and non-human beings) find themselves sharing the same house. The stories are all dressed differently and are quite original. But if you have encountered this author’s works before, you already know how the worlds she depicts are unfamiliar, and you can continue without any trouble and never lose the way. Her prose is as carefully refined as a smoothly paved road.

I first came across Valente’s work in 2010 when her novel Palimpsest was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel. I visited her website and found that some of her works were influenced by Japanese culture. For example, the title of one of her books, Yume No Hon: The Book of Dreams (2005), is in Japanese, and she named her monthly letter project after omikuji, fortunes written on paper strips and sold in shrines and temples. Soon after I started reading her stories, I realized that her interest in Japan is informed by both study and by authentic lived experience.

Did you know that there are 45,000 US soldiers living in Japan? There are another 45,000 members of military families here as well. Valente spent several years living in Japan as part of a Navy family. Consequently, some of her stories seem semiautobiographical, such as “Fifteen Panels Depicting the Sadness of the Baku and the Jotai,” and “Ink, Water, Milk,” the latter of which was written for this collection. Both stories are set in Yokosuka, a city with a US Navy base, and in both appear yokai, imaginary creatures, and a lonely Navy wife.

Japanese mythology is a hybrid of indigenous folklore and Shinto religion, Buddhism, and foreign myths and folklore, which came to Japan from Eurasia via China. By paging through just the beginning of this book, you will come across the said “Fifteen Panels Depicting the Sadness of the Baku and the Jotai,” on the chaos of Yokosuka—and Paradise—described in a manner that will totally blow you away. In this powerful opening story, Valente introduces her Japanesque view of the world and quickly immerses you in it.

You will see many yokai in this book. Yokai are imaginary Japanese creatures such as fairies, ghosts, and monsters from myths and folktales. During the Edo period, book-rental shops became common, and leisure reading became a popular hobby in Japanese cities. In those days, yokai were an especially popular theme, and many ukiyo-e artists drew yokai pictures. One of these artists, Toriyama Sekien (1712–1788), made some yokai picture books. He drew famous traditional yokai as well as some he created himself. Kyorinrin and Futsukeshibaba, which appear in “Ink, Water, Milk,” are understood to be Sekien’s creations.

Valente finds inspiration in traditional yokai tales but doesn’t simply retell classic stories. In “One Breath, One Stroke,” she describes Sazae-Oni (the Horned Turban shell spirit or Snail Woman), a Japanese version of a Siren, in this way: “Sazae-Onna lives in a pond in the floor of the kitchen. Her shell is tiered like a cake or a palace, hard and thorned and colored like the inside of an almond, with seams of mother of pearl swirling in spiral patterns over her gnarled surface. She eats the rice that falls from the table when the others sit down to supper. She drinks the steam from the teakettle.” Valente here shows us her version of cute Sazae-Oni that no one else would ever imagine.

The image of Japan in Anglophone science fiction has tended to take the form of futuristic megacities, such as Chiba City in Neuromancer by William Gibson. This trend continues today. New writers such as Lauren Beukes and Hannu Rajaniemi have described imaginary future Tokyos—and their work is funny and good—but megacities represent only a small facet of Japan. This country is long, spanning from north to south, and it has many suburban areas, rural locations, and historical ruins. Valente has written about places in Japan not widely portrayed in science fiction and fantasy before, for example, Hokkaido, the northernmost prefecture on the Russian border. She also explores Hashima, a small uninhabited island known as Gunkanjima, where over five thousand people once worked in a coal mine, in “Ghosts of Gunkanjima.”

In reading this collection, you may discover not only another view of Japan, but also another side of the author, thanks to the stories she published in Clarkesworld Magazine. These include “Silently and Very Fast,” which according to Valente is “real science fiction.” This family history story begins in the near cyberpunkish future and ends in the age of Singularity. It is rich in references to myths and folktales as well. “Thirteen Ways of Looking at Space/ Time” is also an ambitious story. It dismantles and reconstructs Creation myths from around the world in scientific terms. “Fade to White” is a dystopian story set in the days after the apocalypse with a slight fragrance of Japanese history. Valente is a masterful “story engineer,” one who adapts and transforms traditional terms and symbols to tell thoroughly modern stories. She demonstrates her power in a freer and more dynamic way in these new pieces. Through the latest work, I am certain that Valente should, and likely will, continue transforming and soaring far beyond possible boundaries of country, new and old, genre and everything.

Imagine this book as a set of traditional Japanese paper doors. By turning the pages, you slide the doors open. Soon you will enter a place where you have never been.

Teruyuki Hashimoto is a Japanese reviewer and critic of science fiction, mainly for Hayakawa’s SF Magazine. Born in Hokkaido in 1984, Hashimoto currently lives in Tokyo.

THE MELANCHOLY OF MECHAGIRL

X Prefecture drive time radio

trills and pops

its pink rhinestone bubble tunes—

pipe that sound into my copper-riveted heart,

that softgirl/brightgirl/candygirl electrocheer gigglenoise

right down through the steelfrown

tunnels of my

all-hearing head.

Best stay

out of my way

when I’ve got my groovewalk going. It’s a rhythm

you learn:

move those ironzilla legs

to the cherry-berry vanillacream sparklepop

and your pneumafuel efficiency will increase

according to the Yakihatsu formula (sigma3, 9 to the power of four)

Robots are like Mars: they need

girls.

Boys won’t do;

the memesoup is all wrong. They stomp

when they should kiss

and they’re none too keen

on having things shoved inside them.

You can’t convince them

there’s nothing kinky going on:

you can’t move the machine without IV interface

fourteen intra-optical displays

a codedump wafer like a rose petal

under the tongue,

silver tubes

wrapped around your bones.

It’s just a job.

Why do boys have to make everything

sound weird? It’s not a robot

until you put a girl inside. Sometimes

I feel like that.