Idogawa Iko 井戸川射子. Kono yo no yorokobi yo この世の喜びよ. Kōdansha, 2023.
This tied for the 168th Akutagawa Prize, for late 2022, sharing it with Satō Atsushi. Idogawa was born in 1987 and began publishing poetry in 2016, turning to fiction in 2020. She’s also a high school language-and-literature teacher.
The title may be easily translated as “The Joy of This World,” although I’d want to do something with the emphatic yo at the end; especially knowing the author is a poet, I take it as less an exclamation marker than a literary-style interjection, as when apostrophizing something. “O Joy of This World”? In any case, the question hovering over the story is: what is the joy of this world? Is there any?
The story is written in the second person. That is, the main character is addressed throughout as anata, “you” – you think this, you do that. It’s a complete second person, unlike the device Fujino Kaori employed, where the reader knew that the narrating voice came from one of the characters, addressing another. Here there’s no indication that the narrative voice belongs to anybody in particular. Although a curious thing happens in the final paragraph, where the narration shifts from you-ing one character to you-ing another.
Luckily the main character, the “you,” is given a name – Hoga-san – so I’ll use that to avoid sounding too precious. 
Hoga is a middle-aged woman working in what the text calls, in borrowed English, a “shopping center,” but which in American parlance is closer to a mall. I.e. fully enclosed, with separate stores and a couple of food courts. All of the action in the narrative present takes place within the mall, and concerns Hoga’s simple interactions with a few other denizens of the mall, both coworkers and customers. Much of the narrative is occupied with Hoga’s memories, which are presented both as fully-realized flashbacks and as shorter fragments interspersed with now events in a stream-of-consciousness fashion.
Those memories are entirely about Hoga’s daughters. She has two: one in college and the other a recent graduate, now working as a teacher. She raised them alone, as her husband works in another city and only visits home a few times a year; we learn almost nothing about her relationship with her husband, and it’s not even clear if they’re still married. All the memories we’re presented center around child-rearing.
The other major character in the story – the one we’re briefly interpellated as in the final paragraph – is a fifteen-year-old girl who Hoga meets in the food court. The girl hangs out there to study whenever she gets a chance, and since Hoga spends her break times wandering around the mall, she notices the girl, and eventually ends up striking up a relationship. It’s this relationship that’s the heart of the story. The girl reminds Hoga of her own daughters, and when she learns that the girl has an infant brother she has to care for (the mall for her is an escape from these responsibilities), it sends Hoga into reveries about her own daughters’ baby years. Hoga briefly bonds with the girl over the burdens of caregiving, but then goes too far with motherly advice and the girl pulls back. That’s where the story ends, leaving Hoga in anguish over things she wishes she could say to the girl, and by implication to her own daughters.
In a way, then, the story is about a brief encounter that sends the protagonist into a series of reveries on motherhood. But that’s probably overstating the importance of the fifteen-year-old girl. Everything reminds Hoga of her babies; they seem to be all she thinks about. Her job doesn’t help. The mall she works at is near her home, and she brought her girls here their whole lives, so everywhere she turns something reminds her of them. And we’ve inhabited several nostalgic reveries about babies before Hoga meets the girl.
It’s hard not to read this story as a meditation on motherhood. Some second-person narratives end up resolving in the reader’s mind into something little different from a first-person story – I think it’s the tight connection between perception and narration that does it. Here, though, the withholding of details about Hoga’s life prevent that from happening, at least for this reader. If I’m her, presumably I know more about her/my life than just that she/I misses having babies; the fact that this is all we get about her prevents us from experiencing Hoga as a fully-realized character. She ends up being a type, and a fairly reductive type at that: her whole life has revolved around being a mother, and she can’t think of the world or the people she meets in any other way. The narrative could present this as a critique of how Japanese society even today perpetuates a very traditional ideal of motherhood; but there’s little sense that Hoga or the narrator are chafing against that, or even aware of it. Fair enough: it’s a sympathetic portrait of a woman entirely defined by motherhood. But here again the lack of details hold it back, at least for this reader. We learn a lot about Hoga’s feelings about her daughters, her regrets and nostalgia, but despite several flashbacks introducing them, they’re never really individuated as characters. Hoga ends up being less a character than a type, in other words: perhaps even part of the ongoing idealization of motherhood.
It feels curious to assert that a lack of detail hinders the novel, because in fact it’s full of detail of a particular kind. The sights, sounds, and smells of the shopping center are rendered vividly, as are the tactile aspects of caring for small children. While I haven’t encountered any of the author’s poetry, it’s not hard to see a poetic quality, or a striving for poetry, in the prose: not elaborate or showy, but carefully calibrated to finding beauty in the mundane. Most of the Prize committee seemed enthusiastic about this aspect of the work, with some even finding it profoundly moving.
The volume is filled out with two shorter stories: “Mai hōmu” (My home) and “Kyanpu” (Camping). The former is about a young mother of twins whose husband is planning to build them a new house. He’s leaving the design up to her, and the story finds her staying the night in a model home as she evaluated the developer. The story is even more baby-fixated than “Kono yo no yorokobi yo.” The latter is about a boy whose uncle takes him camping with a group of his friends and their boys; the main character feels like an outsider at first, but gradually through his eyes we get a sense of the interpersonal dynamics of the boys and their fathers. Names are withheld in this story (we have “the boy,” “the older brother,” “the five-year-old,” and so on), so in a way it seems to echo the title story in being about types and relationships rather than individuals and identities.
(Go here for an explanation of my Akutagawa Prize project, if you’re curious.)