Lonely Hearts Killer

Tomoyuki Hoshino, Andrienne Carey Hurley

Description

What happens when a popular and young emperor suddenly dies, and the only person available to succeed him is his sister? How can people in an island country survive as climate change and martial law are eroding more and more opportunities for local sustainability and mutual aid? And what can be done to challenge the rise of a new authoritarian political leadership at a time when the general public is obsessed with fears related to personal and national “security”? These and other provocative questions provide the backdrop for this powerhouse novel about young adults embroiled in what appear to be more private matters—friendships, sex, a love suicide, and struggles to cope with grief and work.

PM Press is proud to bring you this first English translation of a full-length novel by the award-winning author Tomoyuki Hoshino.

Sujets

• Conformity
• Derealization
• Challenge
• Claustrophobia
• Emotional
• Dystopia

Informations

• Publié par: PM Press
• Date de parution: 01 novembre 2009
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781604862850
• Langue: English

Extrait

PRAISE FOR LONELY HEARTS KILLER
At once loved, reviled, exploited, and forgotten, Japan s emperor system is recast in all its current mass-mediated glory as a way to engage and to critique contemporary Japan in Hoshino s brilliant novel. Its vision belongs to the rampant disaffection that riddles Japanese youth today as does its explosive subversive energy, while at heart it is an activist quest to obliterate the effects of a nation and world reduced to spectacle.
-James A. Fujii, Professor of Japanese Literature, the University of California-Irvine and author of Complicit Fictions: the Subject in the Modern Japanese Prose Narrative
A major novel by Tomoyuki Hoshino, one of the most compelling and challenging writers in Japan today, Lonely Hearts Killer deftly weaves a path between geopolitical events and individual experience, forcing a personal confrontation with the political brutality of the postmodern era. Adrienne Hurley s brilliant translation captures the nuance and wit of Hoshino s exploration of depths that rise to the surface in the violent acts of contemporary youth.
-Thomas LaMarre, Professor of East Asian Studies, McGill University and author of The Anime Machine: a Media Theory of Animation
Since his debut, Hoshino has used as the core of his writing a unique sense of the unreality of things, allowing him to illuminate otherwise hidden realities within Japanese society. And as he continues to write from this tricky position, it goes without saying that he produces work upon work of extraordinary beauty and power.
-Y ko Tsushima, award-winning author of Child of Fortune
Reading Hoshino s novels is like traveling to a strange land all by yourself. You touch down on an airfield in a foreign country, get your passport stamped, and leave the airport all nerves and anticipation. The area around an airport is more or less the same in any country. It is sterile and without character. There, you have no real sense of having come somewhere new. But then you take a deep breath and a smell you ve never encountered enters your nose, a wind you ve never felt brushes against your skin, and an unknown substance rains down upon your head.
-Mitsuyo Kakuta, award-winning author of Woman on the Other Shore: a Novel
Adrienne Hurley s beautiful translation of Tomoyuki Hoshino s Lonely Hearts Killer is a much-needed contribution to the very small body of translations of radical contemporary Japanese fiction that has little or no connection to the nostalgic, pop uncanniness of Haruki Murakami, and belongs to an entirely different universe from the SF worlds of anime and manga. Here is a novel that believes in radical political action, and that stubbornly sticks to its vision to the bitter end.
-Livia Monnet, Professor, University of Montr al, author of Critical Approaches to Twentieth Century Japanese Thought
Lonely Hearts Killer considers the ways in which seemingly meaningless symbols and structures profoundly affect society, calling into question the power of the dangerous fictions which are constantly perpetrated on us, as well as the mass hysteria that lurks below the surface.
-Nate George, filmmaker, Beirut, Lebanon
LONELY HEARTS KILLER
LONELY HEARTS KILLER
TOMOYUKI HOSHINO
TRANSLATED BY ADRIENNE CAREY HURLEY
PM PRESS 2009
LONELY HEARTS KILLER. Copyright 2004 by Tomoyuki Hoshino. English Translation copyright 2009 by Adrienne Carey Hurley. This edition copyright 2009 by PM Press
ISBN: 978-1-60486-084-9 LCCN: 2009901379
PM Press P.O. Box 23912 Oakland, CA 94623 PMPress.org
Printed in the USA on recycled paper.
Cover: John Yates/Stealworks.com Inside design: Josh MacPhee/Justseeds.org
This novel was originally published in Japan by Chu k ron Shinsha under the title RONRII HAATSU KIRAA.
Contents
Translator s Introduction
Author s Preface
Lonely Hearts Killer
Author/Translator Q A
TRANSLATOR S INTRODUCTION
Adrienne Carey Hurley
Eric Shih, a young activist working for the Chinese Progressive Association in San Francisco, was the first person I heard respond to a news story by saying he felt like he hadn t taken his crazy pills. Having heard this expression countless times since then, I suspect Eric is far from alone in feeling like crazy pills are necessary to accept the official versions of reality presented to us on the nightly news. Tomoyuki Hoshino s Lonely Hearts Killer is a novel for those of us (like Eric) who are not living under the influence of officially prescribed crazy pills -- and those of us who are desperately trying to get off them.
In the pages that follow, Hoshino takes us on a journey through our own world amplified. I say our own world because while much of the novel seems specific to contemporary Japan, readers living in North American or other G8 (or even G20) states will surely encounter familiar problems, questions, and developments. Hoshino draws on the everyday and headline news stories to create an alternate reality that is often every bit as realistic as it is fantastic. Because we experience violence, hope, oppression, resistance, discrimination, mutuality, emotional distress, love, and catastrophes of all sorts in our own world, readers should expect the same (and quite a bit of it) in this novel.
The novel takes its title from actual events that inspired films such as the 1970 cult classic The Honeymoon Killers . Martha Beck and Raymond Martinez Fernandez were dubbed the Lonely Hearts Killers of the late 1940s and were executed in 1951 after a high-profile trial. Beck and Fernandez had posed as siblings and contacted women through lonely hearts personal advertisements and killed some of them. Coverage of the pair invariably focused on elements of their lives deemed different or strange. Beck, a survivor of physical and sexual abuse, for example, was routinely criticized as fat and sexually deviant in the press. The foreignness of Fernandez, the Hawaiian-born son of Spanish parents, also figured prominently in the sensational news reports. No explicit mention of Beck or Fernandez is made in Hoshino s Lonely Hearts Killer , but readers will notice similarities in how the mass media in the novel relay sensationalized information about individuals, relationships, and incidents to the public. By the end of the novel, some readers might even draw comparisons between certain characters and the real-life pair whose story inspired the title.
Hoshino s interest in incidents developed in part through his experience working as a journalist for a conservative newspaper, the Sankei Shimbun , for two years after his graduation from Waseda University (with a degree in literature) in 1988. In the late 1980s Japan s bubble economy was about to burst, and political scandals dominated the headlines. One such scandal was the notorious Recruit Incident of 1989, an insider-trading debacle that involved many politicians, including several former prime ministers, and newspaper CEOs. Occasionally, headlines about political and corporate corruption would be eclipsed by sensational coverage of cases such as the brutal killings of four girls under the age of ten by Tsutomu Miyazaki, who was arrested in 1989 and executed in the summer of 2008. 1989 was also the year when Japan marked the end of the previous emperor Hirohito s Sh wa era and the beginning of his son Akihito s Heisei era. Culturally, the release of the anime megahit Akira in the summer of 1988 and the death of the singer and postwar superstar Hibari Misora (the Queen of Sh wa ) in the summer of 1989 seemed to suggest that times really were changing. This was surely a heady and disillusioning time for a young student of literature to work for a large (and fairly nationalistic) newspaper. In an issue of a Japanese literary journal dedicated to his work, he recalls simply, I traveled to the K shien Stadium in the spring [of 1990] to cover the national high school baseball championships. I took a few days vacation on my way back, and, while kicking around the streets of Osaka, lost my desire to carry on as a newspaper reporter. ( Bungei Tokush : Hoshino Tomoyuki , Spring, 2006, 81-82, translation mine) He left the Sankei in October of that year and soon after left Japan to spend the better part of the next four years in Mexico, where he would begin his journey toward becoming a novelist.
The politics and ethics of information and storytelling are central to Lonely Hearts Killer , as is the case with much of Hoshino s other fiction. Whether it s in the footage of a 9-11-esque event on the television in his novel The Worussian-Japanese Tragedy , the dissociative break a newspaper reporter experiences in Sand Planet , or the two teen killers turned terrorists loosely modeled on figures from the news in The Treason Diary , cameras, journalists, and incidents are everywhere in his work. In Lonely Hearts Killer , Hoshino invokes a wide range of hot issues drawn from contemporary Japanese tabloid news (the lives of Japanese royalty and internet suicide pacts) and transnational right-wing punditry (anti-immigrant xenophobia and support for martial law), as well as incidents from Japan s present and past. For example, roughly two-thirds of the novel takes place in a mountain lodge that may evoke images of the headquarters of the Aum cult that carried out the attack on the Tokyo subway system in 1995.
A mountain lodge was also the site of one of the most shocking incidents of the 1970s, the Asama Sans Incident. In February of 1972, five members of the Japanese United Red Army ( Reng sekigun ) fled a remote mountain training retreat where some of their comrades had been purged, beaten, and lynched. In what was surely a desperate moment, they sought refuge in a mountain lodge and held the manager s wife, the only person there at the time, hostage. T