Takayama Haneko 高山羽根子. Shuri no uma 首里の馬. Shinchōsha, 2020.
This shared the 163rd Akutagawa Prize, for early 2020. The story was published in March 2020 in Shinchō. Takayama has been writing for a little over ten years, and this was her third story to appear as an A-Prize finalist. She’s mostly associated with speculative fiction, but this one has only the gentlest of hints of magical realism. As an Okinawa story (the title translates to The Shuri horse) it was timely, given Shuri Palace’s destruction by fire in late 2019, but there’s no overt reference to that event here. But it was even more timely as a story about isolation and entropy published in March 2020 and being voted on for the A-Prize in summer 2020.
It’s about Minako, a woman in her early 20s living in a historic part of Naha. She was raised by her father, but he’s deceased now and she lives alone. She has a job and a volunteer position, both of which occupy center stage in the story, because aside from them Minako has very little in her life: no friends, no family, seemingly no hobbies. She seems to be all but a shut-in, although the third-person narrative gives us very little purchase on her feelings about this.
Her volunteer work is at a local history archive run by a woman named Yori, a retired ethnographer whose collection of notes, tapes, publications, and artifacts, mostly related to Okinawa, fill the small archive. Minako is not trained in ethnography and in fact isn’t described as being particularly interested in it, but ever since childhood she has been coming to the archive as a refuge – its dusty isolation fits her mood – and that gradually turned into her work collating and updating Yori’s index system. Being a digital native, Minako has also taken it upon herself to start digitizing Yori’s records, simply photographing objects and their index cards with her smart phone. Yori’s history is sketched in, but she doesn’t really appear in the story as a character – mostly Minako is working alone, since Yori is too old to do much.
The author herself is not from Okinawa, but she takes great care to ground her story in a sense of place, describing the history and architecture of the neighborhood for several pages before introducing any characters; Minatogawa and Shuri are as much characters in the story, in a way, as Minako herself is. The descriptions of Yori’s ethnographic work, and the archive that houses her materials, enhance this sense of rootedness; the collection contains everything from newpaper clippings to interviews on cassette to bone fragments of the prehistoric Minatogawa people. Yori’s life and work represent an overpowering desire to preserve the prefecture’s heritage, and are contrasted neatly with the historical tenuousness of human society in Okinawa, threatened not only by a history of warfare, but by more or less constant exposure to typhoons (three arrive in the brief span of the narrative).
And yet the archive is also presented as an exercise in futility: Yori, originally from elsewhere, is viewed with suspicion by locals, and she has never bothered to get her collection registered for government support. Minako realizes how vulnerable this leaves it – and indeed, Yori dies over the course of the story, and the building is torn down. We never find out what happens to the collection, aside from Minako’s incomplete digitization of it; and although Minako has taken steps to ensure the digital files survive, we don’t get the sense that she’s intending to carry on Yori’s work. She’s not actually all that interested, we suspect; it was just a place to be alone.
Minako’s job is equally calculated to explore the theme of isolation. After working at a call center (a common occupation in Okinawa) she now works for a company that, as far as Minako understands it, provides remote mental stimulation to people in occupations that keep them isolated from human contact. Minako herself works alone – the company has an office in a building in Naha filled with computers and the like, but Minako’s the only one who works there, and she’s only met her Tokyo-based boss once. Minako has three clients with whom she meets over videoconferencing software (a very, if accidental, 2020 detail). Oddly, all she’s required to do for them is administer brain-teasers, which are provided by the software. She just reads them. The clients are overseas in unspecified locations, and are not Japanese, although their interactions with Minako are all in Japanese.
Is this company what it appears to be? The tradespeople who deliver to it seem suspicious, and there are moments when the reader (this one, at least) wonders if these “quizzes” are coded messages, and Minako is involved in espionage or something dark-web without even knowing it. But no, it seems to be just that, a paid connection for people who are otherwise totally isolated. When Yori dies and Minako stops volunteering at the archive, she also quits her job, and in her last remote meetings with her clients, they each tell her their stories. One is stuck on a space station, since his country has had a regime change since he launched, and he has no country to go back to; another is in an undersea research lab, completely alienated from her family; the third is a hostage in a war zone. For all of them, the chance to communicate semi-regularly in a language not their own seems to have been one of their few chances for human contact. Minako realizes that for her, too, the job was perfect – this extremely attenuated form of interaction was just right for her.
By the end of the story, then, she seems to have lost both of her connections to human society, having lost the archive and quit her job. Her isolation is complete. But this is where the hints of speculative fiction come in, because while she’s lost her people she’s gained a horse. One morning after a typhoon she wakes up to find that a horse has taken shelter in her garden. It’s a native breed, a Miyako horse, but she’s never seen one and has no idea what to do with it. No idea where it came from, and nobody seems to be looking for it. She turns it over to the police, who give it to a petting zoo, but later Minako decides to steal it back and hide it in a cave. There she learns to ride it, and so she watches from horseback as the archive is demolished.
What’s the deal with this horse? As a Miyako horse, it’s the only native Okinawan character in the story – Minako moved to Naha with her father as a young child. Thus it’s obviously a symbol of the persistent but endangered indigenous culture. But near the end of the story Minako learns that Yori collapsed and was hospitalized on the same night the horse appeared – while the suspicion isn’t verbalized, the reader is allowed to imagine that somehow Yori’s spirit has manifested itself as this symbolic animal. Representation in this story is a vexed thing, then: it’s written by a non-native, all its characters are non-native, and the magical intervention that gives it its title may be a native phenomenon (romanticized) or may be the transfiguration of one of the non-native characters, exalted by being merged with a native phenomenon.
Then again, the story doesn’t really claim to speak for Okinawa. Indeed, Yori as an ethnographer seems to have been an amateur, and no reference is made to her writing anything interpretive – she just collected and indexed. And Minako doesn’t even do that; she only preserves and transposes the indexing of the collection. That’s enough for her, and in that sense the story seems conscious of the difficulties of representation. It speaks of historical events, of buildings, and of a horse, but refrains from saying much about Okinawan people; like Yori and Minako, it feels a duty to record facts and preserve items, but remains mute beyond that. Even the horse is strangely docile and passive.
And this depopulated silence resonates with the interpersonal isolation that’s foregrounded in the story’s account of Minako. The world it presents is one where people are alone, only able to connect with each other remotely; it’s easier for them to connect with things, but even then, it’s not with any understanding. It’s just about record-keeping, and surviving the typhoon. The story’s depiction of loneliness was cited by Prize judges as one of its strong points, and in the way it intertwines an examination of social atomization with the digital age’s tendency toward data rather than knowledge it echoes Ueda Takahiro’s Prize story from the previous year.
But of course, by summer 2020, early 2019 seemed like a lifetime ago. This was an apt story for its moment, even if the timing was accidental.