Li Kotomi 李琴峰. Higanbana ga saku shima 彼岸花が咲く島. Bungei Shunjū, 2021.
This tied for the 165th Akutagawa Prize, for early 2021, and this one might just be the great Covid novel we’ve all been waiting for. Among many other things.
The author was born in Taiwan in 1989; she began studying Japanese as a teenager and moved to Japan for grad school in 2013. She’s been writing professionally (in Japanese) since 2019. The Chinese reading of her name is Li Qinfeng; she uses the reading Ri Kotomi (りことみ) in Japanese, and romanizes it Li Kotomi.
The title translates to “The island where red spider lilies bloom,” but the Japanese name for the flower (Lycoris radiata) is significant. Higan is both the period of the autumn equinox and the “far shore” in Buddhism, i.e. the afterworld or the point of reincarnation. The flowers that bear this name are significant both economically and culturally on the island where the story takes place. They have medicinal properties (true in real life) and also turn out to be used as a narcotic, and to be addictive (not so true in real life). Thus a valuable cash crop, in addition to the associations with death and the other world.
The story is speculative fiction, taking place at an unspecified point in the future in a society that’s recognizably descended from, but also provocatively transformed from, today’s. It’s an exercise in world-building, and like many specimens of this kind of fiction, the plot and characters are essentially devices to lead the reader into the world and explain how it came to be this way. We meet a teenaged girl who wakes up on a beach with no memory of her past life, and we follow her as she’s gradually integrated into the society of the island where she finds herself, until finally at the end of the story she comes to understand the history of the island and its place in the world.
She’s forgotten even her own name. The girl who finds her, Yona, names her Umi and brings her home to her parent (female), Sera. Umi soon learns that the island – small, and home to only a few thousand people – is a matriarchy, led by a class of shamaness-like figures known as noro. It’s an agrarian society, but with technology (cars, for example); machines and other items that the island can’t make for itself are brought to the island from elsewhere by the noro, who then distribute them according to the islanders’ needs. The noro thus have both religious and secular authority, and despite the relative technological sophistication of the islanders’ lifestyle, the noro keep them in a state of almost childlike faith and dependence on their shamanesses. For example, the imported machines are (we ultimately learn) acquired in trade for the island’s crop of higanbana, but are presented as gifts from the gods, which the noro bring back from a mythical island of the afterworld.
This last fact is something Umi, and thus the reader, only learns at the end of the book. As an outlander, Umi has to be given permission to stay on the island, despite having nowhere else to go (for all the islanders know, no other land exists). The Great Noro allows her to stay on condition that she become a noro herself, something Yona is also studying for. Much of the book follows the girls’ studies and initiation into the island’s religion; since the noro are also keepers of the island’s history, this allows the reader to, in the end, learn what’s exactly up.
This also means that Umi’s final initiation is a moment of great disillusion, as she learns from the Great Noro herself that the gods aren’t real, that there’s no afterworld, and that the crop of spider-lily anesthetic is not an offering but in fact a crop that outsiders are addicted to, and that funds the island’s survival. This reveals sinister and exploitative aspects to what until then has seemed like a tropical utopia – a self-contained society where perfect harmony reigns and everyone’s united in the cycles of cultivation and worship. We realize, along with Umi, that the noro are intentionally keeping everyone in the dark so as to maintain social cohesion; but Umi also comes to feel that they’re justified in doing so, not only by the obvious happiness of the islanders but by the horrifying history that led to this moment, and that the noro preserve, while keeping everyone else in the dark about it.
That history in a nutshell: in the wake of a deadly pandemic, Japan is seized by a violent xenophobia that leads it to expel or kill all resident foreigners. Some refugees arrive on the island – which is never otherwise named, but which certain geographical details (plus its shape on the map in the front of the book) suggest is Yonaguni. They’re joined by refugees from Taiwan, which has been violently taken over by China at about the same time. Together these two groups of refugees exterminate the people already living on the island and set up a new society. Eventually they decide that all the problems they’ve fled from came from the fact that it was always men making the decisions, men controlling the history, men starting wars and killing women and children, so they decide to put women in charge. From the perspective of the present, it has worked very well. The noro live humbly and spend their lives protecting and helping the islanders, while preserving knowledge of the outside world and overseeing a limited (and religion-disguised) trade with Taiwan.
As I say, the narrative interest is largely provided by the way this information is gradually (and then suddenly) delivered to the reader over the course of a year in Umi’s life, with us learning at the same pace she does, and feeling just as charmed by the organic wholeness of the island’s life as she is. The narrative is essentially a mystery, in other words. And most of the clues are provided by language.
Umi’s native language is called Hinomotokotoba ひのもとことば (land-of-the-rising-sun-words), and is essentially modern Japanese with most foreign loanwords excised by the xenophobic future government. The language is written entirely in kana, and all Chinese-derived words are replaced by “pure” Japanese ones (Shimizu Yoshinori 清水義範 imagined this as farce in “Kotoba no sensō 言葉の戦争” back in 1990, but here it’s tragedy). Yona’s native language calls itself Nihongo ニホン語, but contains a great deal of spoken Chinese elements, and is written with Chinese characters. The noro also preserve a third language, which is called Jogo 女語 or “women’s language,” and which is modern Japanese as the reader knows it. Hinomotokotoba and Jogo are closely enough related that Umi and Yona are able to communicate in Jogo while Umi learns Nihongo, which is otherwise largely unintelligible to her at first.
This complicated linguistic landscape makes sense once the reader (along with Umi) is initiated into the island’s history. But for most of the book it’s a mystery. Why is the island’s Nihongo so different from the reader’s? Why is the reader’s Nihongo the exclusive province of a shamaness class in the book? Why is Japan speaking something so different from both Nihongo and Jogo? One of the book’s great achievements is imagining and then bringing to life these various languages; in this aspect alone the reader is in a privileged position vis-à-vis the characters, because we soon realize that it’s Jogo that is (almost literally) the mother language of the three, and that the fracturing of Japanese in the novel must be the result of some sort of cataclysm.
But even before we learn the nature of that cataclysm, we’re led to some provocative meditations on the nature of Japanese as we know it, and how it relates to both Japan and Taiwan in the present world. It’s well known that, compared to China, Taiwan has relatively positive memories of the Japanese colonial era, and cultivates much closer cultural ties with contemporary Japan. Before we realize that the island in the story is a conquered and remade Yonaguni, it’s possible to see it as an idealized version of present-day Taiwan, with both Chinese and Japanese elements in its cultural makeup. Then once we realize how this hybrid society and language were made, we’re invited to see it as a place where the best (least nationalist) elements of both China and Japan have learned to thrive – again, perhaps an idealized present-day Taiwan. (Of course, the story also carefully echoes the history of Yonaguni itself, even as the people who inhabit it in the story overwrite themselves onto it.)
The preservation of modern Japanese as Jogo is also a provocative element, if we’re to see the island as a refuge from a dystopian China and Japan. The noro’s efforts to preserve it (there’s no mention of them doing anything similar with Chinese) suggest they see it as part of a valuable heritage from the vanished world. And yet it’s the exclusive property of the noro. Only they possess the dictionaries that define it, and males are expressly forbidden to study it. Women aren’t even supposed to speak it in front of men. This suggests that it’s less the noro’s privilege than their burden. They keep the history of patriarchal societies secret from the rest of the islanders – particularly the men – precisely so they won’t get any ideas about questioning the matriarchy. Japanese is kept secret in just the same way, suggesting that it’s a hopelessly patriarchal thing that belongs to the women of the island only as something they need to keep under lock and key.
I suggested above that the characters in the story are only devices to assist in the world-building. This is mostly true, but not quite fair. Umi and Yona are certainly well realized enough to serve their purpose as focal points for the reader. We root for Umi, and admire Yona; we’re touched by the inarticulate erotic tension between them, which turns out to be doubly significant when we learn that Umi was cast out of her homeland for unapproved sexuality. There’s one boy character, too, and he’s important both for his plight and for the quandary he presents the girls with. He’s fascinated by Jogo and desperate to learn the history of the island – with only, it seems, the best intentions. Umi and Yona promise to tell him what they learn, but once they learn it they need to decide if it’s safe to share it with him. It’s a poignant question, and this male reader for one doesn’t know how to feel about the decision they make.
A very interesting book.