Andō Jose 安堂ホセ. DTOPIA デートピア. Kawade Shobō, 2024.
Shared the 172nd Akutagawa Prize, for late 2024, with Suzuki Youi.
A straight phonetic reading of the author’s name would be “Andō Hose,” but it’s romanized “Jose Ando” on the cover. This suggests the author has a mixed-roots (ミックスルーツ) background, which most readers seem to assume is the case – but he doesn’t appear to have spoken publicly on the question. His fiction so far has centered mixed-roots characters, and this story is no exception. Andō was born in 1994 and debuted in 2022. His previous two books were also Akutagawa Prize finalists.
The title of this one is given in romaji: DTOPIA, glossed Dētopia デートピア. The pun doesn’t make sense if you read the romaji with an Anglophone pronunciation, but it’s explained early on, and makes sense from the perspective of other languages. The story concerns a Bachelorette-style reality dating show filmed in Bora Bora, and the name of the show combines the words “date” and “utopia.”
There is a lot going on in this book. In terms of plot, the story veers radically about a third of the way through and never quite gets back to where it started; in terms of writing, the author engages in several experiments whose purpose isn’t immediately apparent; and in terms of issues and themes, the book is full to bursting. The impression I was left with was of an all-out assault on both literary norms and popular conservative mores. I’m reminded of early Murakami Ryū – the novel has the same sense of almost quixotic anger, and holds out the same promise of a vibrant subculture that affords escape from the status quo. But where Murakami repeatedly enacted a liberating, violent apocalypse in his early work, this novel provides no such release. Violence, yes, but the end of the novel doesn’t seem to have delivered us to or from much of anything.
DTOPIA, the show-within-the-novel, is a frame device. We spend the first third of the book following the progress of the show episode by episode, and then follow the back story of one of the contestants and an extra on the set. At the end of the book we return to Bora Bora and the set, but nothing seems to be resolved; it’s curiously anticlimactic. This seems to be trying to make a point about the breakdown of unitary narrative in the internet age, however. The show is narrated to us, the reader, episode by episode in linear fashion, based on the series as it’s streamed on a major platform. But it’s also explained that these professionally edited episodes, with their neat narrative, are supplemented by raw unedited footage posted on the show’s website, which allows fans to construct their own preferred narratives, either focusing on their favorite characters or, as it happens, to deconstruct and defy the official narrative. The artificiality of the whole enterprise is being highlighted and monetized, in other words, which in turn recuperates everything into the manipulated world of the show. We the audience think we’re getting under the surface, but we’re just making ourselves part of the surface. When we reach the end of the book, instead of resolving the story, the narrator simply refers us back to the first part of the book, and tells us all is explained there (is it? hmm).
The latter two-thirds of the story concern one of the contestants, Mr. Tokyo (all the contestants are identified within the show by their home city), and his childhood friend, who appears in the show partway through as one of a boatload of nubile women brought in to liven up the set. Mr. Tokyo’s real name is Iya Kisui, and he’s called Kiisu, perhaps meant to be heard as “Keith.” His friend’s name is Momo. It’s here, by the way, that two of the narrative experiments come in. Kiisu is the main character, but the story at first appears to be narrated in the second person: “you” the reader are Kiisu, and the narrator is telling “you” what “you” do and say. Significantly, “you” in the original is the rough omae, which gives the narration an air of brospeak. The other experiment here is that the narrator’s voice, while at first seemingly omniscient, isn’t quite impersonal. At first it speaks for “we” viewers, setting up a narratorial situation where “we” viewers are addressing “you,” a character in the show. But once Momo is brought to the set we realize that Momo is in fact the narrator, and has been speaking to “you” first as a viewer of the show and now as themselves. Momo refers to themself in the third person: not “I said this,” but “Momo said this.”
Momo introduces themself to the reader as nonbinary, and from Momo’s appearance the story moves back to when Momo and Kiisu were first friends in middle school. They’re bonded by the fact that Kiisu, at Momo’s request, cut out one of Momo’s testicles in a deserted swimming pool one evening. This episode is narrated at length in a curiously affectless manner. Momo’s father struggles sincerely to understand and support Momo’s heretofore seemingly unvoiced sense of gender dysphoria while also being freaked out at 14-year-old Kiisu’s willingness to perform this surgery on 13-year-old Momo, with no experience and little knowhow. In fact the surgery doesn’t go well and Kiisu has to take Momo to a doctor to stop the bleeding. In retrospect Momo does wonder if Kiisu was merely being helpful or if he had darker motives.
As they move through their teens, Momo and Kiisu gradually lose touch, but Momo keeps track of Kiisu remotely, following his exploits online. Kiisu garners underground fame for a while as a mysterious figure who lurks in pedophile chat rooms and performs orchidectomies on willing participants. It also turns out that Kiisu was selling the severed testicles to an artisan who would encase them in glass and sell them as curios. When the heat gets too great, Kiisu gets a job as an interrogator-slash-torturer for a freelance agency that calls itself the Studio. Momo, meanwhile, dabbles in graphic design, then becomes involved in a performance-art collective made up of mixed-roots people involved in Japan’s growing LGBTQ+ Pride movement. One of their actions proves disruptive enough that Momo begins wondering if violence is next on their agenda…
Like I say, there’s a lot going on. But despite this surfeit of plot, the book seems to mainly be about Momo and Kiisu; Kiisu as a possibly psychopathic perpetrator of violence, who nevertheless wants to take the violence out of violence, and Momo as someone who has undergone Kiisu’s ministrations, but who does not consider themself, it seems, a victim of violence. I would say it’s a character study, but to me, at least, their characters didn’t emerge very clearly; given that the narrative is in the first-and-second person, that surprises me, in retrospect. Momo doesn’t tell us very much at all about what Momo is feeling. Motivations seem to be opaque, leaving us to guess at them.
Thematically, from the above it’s already apparent that the book is concerned with transgender issues and sexual minorities. What I haven’t mentioned yet is that the main characters all have mixed roots. This is implied from the start but in some cases not clearly explained until the end. Kiisu is of mixed Japanese and Korean parentage, and Momo is of mixed Japanese and French-Polynesian parentage. (We only meet Kiisu’s mother and Momo’s father, though – the non-Japanese parents are absent.) Several other characters, including the boss of Kiisu’s torture shop, have mixed roots, and of course there’s Momo’s collective. These characters are set in contrast to the cast and crew of DTOPIA, which is described as overwhelmingly white, occupying a space in Bora Bora that is, of course, inhabited by colonial subjects. Part of the narrative of the show involves the white Miss Universe suddenly objecting that there are no Black men among her suitors; and so she has an affair with a Bora Boran man on the support crew (who is, he reminds us, not Black in the way Miss Universe means), who is then beaten up by an unidentified assailant, who may or may not be Kiisu for reasons unspecified, or maybe Momo, or…
See above.