Usami Rin 宇佐見りん. Oshi, moyu 推し、燃ゆ. Kawada Shobō, 2020.
This won the 164th Akutagawa Prize, for late 2020. The author was born in 1999 and is currently a college student; the book has been a big publishing phenomenon in Japan, probably for easily guessable reasons. It’s well written and moving – we’ll get to that. But it also addresses a subculture (pop idols and their obsessive fans) that, while stretching back decades or longer, has taken on new visibility and contours in the social media age. Then there’s the author’s age. She’s writing about a high school student from a vantage point only a few years removed. She comes across as the representative of a new generation (if this was in English she’d be touted as the Voice of Generation Z or something), meaning the book can strike a chord both with readers who have shared her life experiences and with their mystified elders. In terms of A-Prize history, the obvious comparisons (made by the judges themselves, even) are with Kanehara Hitomi and Wataya Risa (who shared #130 in 2003). The pop idol obsession is even prefigured in Wataya’s book, but the similarities end there.
The title takes some unpacking – some googling, perhaps for those of us who happen to be olds. Oshi comes from the verb osu, which means to recommend or promote but which can be thought of in fandom terms as “to support” – as in, you’re not just a passive receiver of a singer’s product but an active supporter of their career. A superfan, or an okkake (chaser); clearly related to otaku, but more about pop groups than anime or manga. Oshi, the nominalized form of the verb, is used to denote the object of this support. That’s what’s going on here. The narrator is obsessed with a singer named Ueno Masaki, but she usually calls him Oshi or Oshi-kun. Moyu is, curiously, the classical-grammar infinitive of the modern verb moeru, to burn, as in to catch fire on social media, as when something blows up on Twitter. So the title is something like “My idol blows up.”
From the get-go, then, this book is carefully pitched to speak to younger readers in their own language, and to either tantalize or alienate older readers – probably both. In that sense it’s exploring a subculture’s own language in a way that Wataya Risa’s book didn’t. There are lots of passages that would be intelligible as eloquent, evocative writing in any age, but lots that require a real sense for how language is used by social media natives. Again, I picture parents reading this book trying to figure out their kids. And probably kids reading this book thinking their parents don’t get them.
The story: it’s narrated by Akari, a high-school girl who’s obsessed with the aforementioned Oshi-kun. The book begins with the titular blow-up – he hits a fan – and the fallout over the next year and a half, as his popularity falls and he ultimately decides to leave the entertainment business. He never appears as a character; we only see this through Akari’s eyes. She stays loyal to him until the end, but his decline is tough on her, and his retirement is devastating. Like a death in the family, or more accurately, like her own death.
His decline is paralleled by hers. She’s never done well in school, and during the course of the book she ends up dropping out. She has a part-time job in a diner but loses it by the end of the book, and can’t even bring herself to look for more work. She has an unspecified illness that sounds like bulimia. And she has a difficult family situation; dying grandmother, overworked and unsympathetic mother, absent father. In some ways it’s hinted that her problems come from her obsession with Oshi-kun; she spends staggering amounts of time and money on her fandom. In other ways it’s clear that her obsession is an escape from an oppressive life, and the only thing she feels is worth living for. This may be a story about being sucked into a debilitating addiction, or it may be an account of how pop culture can comfort us on our way to the grave.
The connection with death is made pretty inescapable in the end. Her grandmother dies, but Akari can barely think about that, since it coincides with news of Masaki’s retirement. In a daze, she finds Masaki’s apartment, and we think she might do something stalkery; instead she goes home and realizes just how miserable and incapable of dealing with life she is. She scatters a box of cotton swabs and then begins picking them up like one picks out bones from ashes after a cremation. Is she mourning Masaki or herself? Both. But maybe she can start again now.
It’s a powerful book, and despite the difficulties this old had in getting acclimated to the language, really well written. It’s also a vivid portrait of fan culture – but oddly, that part of the book, which in some ways is the most contemporary, felt oddly dated. After all, we’re decades into the global otaku age now, and even though Instagram and Line and whatever are new, all of us who were raised in pop culture can recognize ourselves as the high-school student who finds transcendance in dumb pop music. Many of us can even recognize ourselves as the kid who finds a way to argue that dumb pop music is not intrinsically dumber than smart lit, and that the way we interact as fans with each other and the object of our fandom is not completely unrelated to older forms of being such as tribal organization and religious belief.
In other words, this book reads like it was written by someone who has lived the life – it has that ring of authentic detail to it, and it’s no surprise that in interview after interview Usami mentions having spent years chasing a pop idol herself. But at the same time the book reads like it was written by someone who has taken classes (now ubiquitous in the academy) on media theory and fan culture – it will fit perfectly into syllabi the world over.
The book had already been blogged in English by the time I got to it; read another take here.