tinycl0ud's reviews
134 reviews

wonderful!! cleverly written, very meta, and deeply affecting.

Liow writes all-encompassingly, her stories taking you back in time to the previous decade, the previous century, and occasionally even further. The details that furnish the stories are so realistic this book should qualify as historical fiction, yet it was so elegantly done and had none of the regular clunky, “Look how much research I did!” ways of writing about a past Singapore that others do. There is just enough to transport you back, no less and no more.

I really appreciate the economy in her short stories. To call them “short” feels somewhat inaccurate because each story is so full and so rich that reading a few at once can be overwhelming. I needed some time to digest each story. And then when you look back you marvel at how it was only a handful of pages because it felt like much more.

Her characters are impossible not to feel for—regardless of race or religion, you are made keenly aware at all moments that they are painfully and devastatingly human. Liow is not interested in creating clear-cut victims and villains, but the social critique nevertheless shines through without being shouty. She subtly constructs layers of marginality that problematise binarist ways of reading her stories.

Her characters may strive against their bonds, but you know it is futile because these are not fairytales, and there are no happy endings in store. The heavy focus on the passage of time, as indicated in the frequent use of the flashback and the the unstable slippery way in which their minds oscillate between the past and the present, is an accurate attempt at portraying how we actually experience time ourselves—not in neatly labelled and chronologically arranged pockets, but a soupy mess with the days blended into one another and our emotions colouring our memories of them.

“For the world to be real (リアル), it must be sufficiently electrified by desire. A world not given depth by desire, no matter how exactingly it is drawn, will always be flat and impersonal, like a backdrop in the theatre.” (p.162)

Been a couple of years, but thanks to my resourceful friend I finally got to reread this marvellous book at my leisure instead of rushing through it for an essay. Being translated, of course it’s not the best and the chapters lack unity (on top of the constant deferral of the main argument to the final chapter) but each individual chapter offers ideas that still hold relevance today.

While the main topic appears to be the trope of the beautiful fighting girl, Saito’s actual focus is how this beautiful fighting girl emerges as a “remarkable invention of otaku bricolage” (p.31). He posits that only very specific (and Japanese) conditions are able to produce this “fable of fierce flesh” (Allison), and that instead of viewing these girls as symptomatic of feminist advancement/regression, we should go beyond merely cultural analogising and see the way the otaku’s forms relationships with these images as a natural result of rapid media consumption.

Throughout his book, Saito draws on Lacanian concepts like the Real vs. Symbolic vs. Imaginary to urge us not to mislabel what we do not understand. Given that the Real is impossible to access and thus all our conscious experiences can only happen in the realm of the Imaginary, to say that the otaku are divorced from reality is denigratory and borderline delusional. He writes that what we constitute as “everyday reality” is in fact another Imaginary construct, perhaps mediated somewhat by the Real/ Symbolic, but in no way reflecting either. In doing so, Saito makes a strong attempt at rehabilitating the reputation of the otaku, suggesting that non-otaku who believe they are firmly in reality (and hence not neurotic) are in fact in denial; we are all neurotics and we all live in an imagined reality no matter how “real” or material you think your life is.

p.s. - re: the chapter on Henry Darger’s art, I know many critics found it irrelevant/ out of place, but I found it utterly fascinating!

An intriguing read!

This novel seems to me a pointed examination of young womanhood in singapore. I never attended a girls' school but I have many friends who did and many of the descriptions/ depictions in this book ring true. It’s not easy being 15-16 in this climate, education system, or society. I think the author did a fantastic job capturing that very feeling of being a teenager not blessed with beauty, money, or talents that everyone else seems to have. Her young protagonists live life intensely, feeling everything, and experiencing things to the extreme. They are immature, imperfect, hurtful, but also very fragile. Running parallel to their stories is a 3rd plot, that of a mother's life before she became a mother. Like the female ghost she plays on screen, her image continues to haunt the girls after her death and even after they grow up. As with her daughter's growing eating disorder, her post-natal depression is never explicitly spelled out but its traumatic effects indelibly
mark everyone around her. What I really appreciate are the little affirmations of the supernatural, embedded deeply in woman's experience. Brokenness begets brokenness, but brokenness also /recognises/ brokenness, even across generations. In spite of everything, the future contains hope, reparation, and reconciliation.

Chapters I particularly enjoyed:

3. Alien Spaces and Alien Bodies in Japanese Women’s Science Fiction (Kotani Mari)
A very interesting and v different take of the monstrous maternal than western literature/film.

6. When the Machines Stop: Fantasy, Reality, and Terminal Identity in Neon Genesis Evangelion and Serial Experiments: Lain (Susan J. Napier)
In-depth analysis of medium/style!

9. Sex and the Single Cyborg: Japanese Popular Culture Experiments in Subjectivity (Sharalyn Orbaugh)
This was so interesting!! A reading of NGE and GitS through a rigorous psychoanalytical framework IN CONTEXT.