SOLO DANCE, East Asian queerness finds an English-language voice BUT CW for suicidal ideation

SOLO DANCE
KOTOMI LI (tr. Arthur Reiji Morris)
World Editions
$17.99 trade paper, available now

ONE OF NBC'S BEST LGBTQ BOOKS OF 2022!

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: An important queer voice from East Asia’s millennial generation

Chō Norie, twenty-seven and originally from Taiwan, is working an office job in Tokyo. While her colleagues worry about the economy, life-insurance policies, marriage, and children, she is forced to keep her unconventional life hidden—including her sexuality and the violent attack that prompted her move to Japan. There is also her unusual fascination with death: she knows from personal experience how devastating death can be, but for her it is also creative fuel. Solo Dance depicts the painful coming of age of a gay person in Taiwan and corporate Japan. This striking debut is an intimate and powerful account of a search for hope after trauma.

I RECEIVED THIS DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Asian cultures don't, as a rule, deal well with modern QUILTBAG identities. The perception of queer folks isn't anything like as angry as the anti- crowd here in the West but it's close in emotional terms to our unenviable habit of emotional violence and rejection. Homophobia is something queer folks battle no matter where we are. Doesn't say great things about human beings, does it.

What Author Li does in Solo Dance is deeply personalize the costs of being out in the culture of Taiwan, which leads to violent assault, and in Japan's less physical homophobic world, where it's simply ignored. Slighted, denigrated, and rejected; but without ever saying the awful words "gay" or "lesbian". This ostracization is crueler even than physical beatings.

But that is what Chō Norie prefers to her native Taiwan's brutality. She came to Japan unable to speak Japanese, as a Taiwanese woman, with all the cultural frieght that carries. Her great-grandmother's generation was used as "comfort women" and her own is a kind of slighted immigrant worker-bee, needed but not valued in larger Japanese society...and that suits Chō down to the ground. Maybe, after all, if she *can't* speak the language, no one will demand she speak at all. Thus is denial and emotional cowardice perpetuated in Chō's new, self-selected life.

With the long-standing Japanese cultural celebration of suicide, the Ghost Forest and the Wind Phone joining the long-standing ritual suicide of seppuku; it seems utterly unsurprising, then, that Chō comes here to make a life while obsessing over, planning for, lovingly dwelling on, her own suicide to come, as well as the past. (It should be noted that Japanese society is being deliberately steered away from this cultural acceptance.)

She didn’t have a strong inclination towards death, but she had no attachment to living either. While she still had breath in her lungs, she would do her best in life, yet should it ever reach that point where it was no longer bearable, she would choose death without hesitation.

Since that is the very first page of the story, I think it acceptable to quote it here; if this is in the least triggering for you and you've read this far into the review, it's a poor fit for you.

The main point of my discussing this book, though, is to say that it is a gorgeous work of prose, in a quiet and mannered way. It is an honest and bleak account of Otherness in a culture that greatly values comformity. It is a deep dive into a woman's blocked relationship with her body, with the pleasures of sex and intimacy, stemming from sexual violence. Chō runs away from Taiwan because she does not want to confront her rape in every living moment. Japan does not, to no one's surprise, encourage healing in its culture of silence around matters sexual. Her own fearfulness about her emotional state, then, is never in any way the focus of any positive intervention.

It is not a hopeful story of a survivor.

She was twenty-seven and this real-world conversation shouldn’t feel so remote, but she couldn’t force herself to get interested. There was an insurmountable wall that prevented her from fully engaging with it. All this talk of a decade from now, two decades from now, seemed like the distant future—hundreds if not thousands of years away. A world in which her existence wouldn’t make any difference. That was the true representation of her feelings.

Chō Norie, as she has chosen to be known, is not Yingmei the child whose early life contains earthquakes (fascinating to read about how her family copes with those!) and the death of a classmate-cum-crush-object of Yingmei's which is met with emotional ceremonies and discussions that she is utterly unable to process or participate in. Chō is a woman born out of intent...a creation not the being created, an auto-Galatea. And as a result, Chō has few inner resources to meet the few concerned people she encounters in Japan, even fewer to meet the awful and brutal rejection of a character Chō is (somewhat bloodlessly) involved with.

What, then, is the source of my four-star rating? First, beautifully translated imagery-laden writing. I think Translator Arthur Reiji Morris did a beautiful job of putting flattering English clothes on this very Japanese body. Enough context is presented that I never felt lost or left out; I suspect those were crafted for the translation, and it was done with great facility. Second, the fact that Chō was a woman made up, and one composed of literary antecedents. There are many works of literature harkened back to and that always gets my upvote.

There's a last thing you should know before starting on this journey: The ending. It is, to be as succinct as I can be, fantastical. Whether real or fantasized or merely cooked up, it does not resolve the events of the book. It leaves room for you to do that and, in the context of a book of this kind of interiority (though not a récit, it comes close), that fel to me like a worthy choice. It was not satisfying, though, in that "...and that was a fascinating story! *closes cover*" way.

Like all unfinished business, it lingers.