One Only Has to Use One’s Head

「少し頭を働かしなさいや」

―谷崎潤一郎　『細雪』

A few years ago I remember hearing about a movement in the publishing industry, particularly concerning books for younger readers, called “Own Voices.” Own Voices was based on the idea that writing that involves representational concerns—a term that here means concerns about how historically disadvantaged types of people are represented in the text—should, either generally exclusively, be by people who belong to the groups in question. Thus an LGBT author should be writing about LGBT characters, a black author about black characters, and so forth. Own Voices was roundly criticized, partly for forcing closeted authors of LGBT literature to come out or incur serious reputational harms, and is no longer in vogue. (Personally my criticism of Own Voices was somewhat different: it makes internally diverse ensemble casts of characters impossible. A thoroughly Own Voices literary scene would be one in which most books published in the West are still about straight white people and most that are not are set in homogeneous, pillarized communities. Even among socially aware stories of yore, you can’t have a Deep River that’s Own Voices for Indian people as well as for a religious minority in a country other than India, or an Across the Barricades that’s Own Voices for both Protestants and Catholics. I don’t read a lot of “issues novels,” and someone who does could probably come up with better examples.)

            But what about the actual literary and artistic merit of the kinds of books Own Voices was supposed to produce, and those against which it was supposed to be a reaction? That might be a different question than its effects on the industry or the culture. Indeed, I think it almost indisputably is; there is an awful lot of bad art and fiction out there written about disadvantaged or marginal populations by writers from privileged and mainstream ones. We could name minstrelsy, Old Mother Riley, and most depictions of women in pornographic literature written by and for straight men, just to name a few of the most infamous examples. I do not think, however, that this needs to be the case; rather it represents an abdication of imaginative faculties by writers writing characters about whom they have prejudiced or stereotyped ideas. The fact that this is not necessarily intentional—Moby-Dick is genuinely not supposed to seem as hostile to Polynesian people as it does, nor Heart of Darkness to Congolese people—goes some way towards explaining the appeal that a blunt-force solution like Own Voices had.

            Lately I’ve been getting deeply into a book series called Otherside Picnic, by a male Japanese author called Miyazawa Iori. (Miyazawa has alluded to some degree of gender dysphoria in at least one interview, but I am just about the last person to look too closely at something like this if the person in question does not want to emphasize it.) Otherside Picnic, a series in the “yuri” tradition of Japanese writing about women, begins as a loose adaptation of the 1970s Soviet science fiction novel Roadside Picnic before developing its own identity. This identity consists, in large part, in an intricate portrayal of the lives of two college-aged women, Sorawo and Toriko, as they explore a dangerous parallel universe and gradually fall in love. The series is good to the point that I almost hesitate to gush about it for fear of implausibility. Sorawo and Toriko are astonishing creations, both as individual characters and as a budding relationship. They have traumatic backgrounds that do not feel prurient and flaws that do not feel calculated for maximum relatability; Sorawo in particular is such an accomplished binge drinker that she is developing cirrhosis in her early twenties. The Otherside—dangerous, terrifying, and inhabited by folkloric monsters that it generates by actively reading Sorawo’s mind—nevertheless exerts a bizarre pull on the characters, a pull that the reader comes to feel as well and that works as a semi-allegorical commentary on several different aspects of LGBT life.

            Miyazawa has spoken several times at events in Japan about the writing process for Otherside Picnic. His comments on this are in some cases deeply bizarre, even when the subject matter is not. An extended and fairly conventional Eliotic point about objective correlatives, for example, might include phrases like “yuri of absence” and end with Miyazawa expressing an “Ash Wednesday”-esque desire to become a pile of bleached bones scattered in the desert. He has attained notoriety for this in some online spaces that are only peripherally aware of the series itself. If one reads the interviews in full, however, what emerges is someone very concerned with representational issues and committed to doing right by the types of people (i.e. gay people and in particular gay women) about whom he is writing. He lists off common pitfalls and outdated presentations, muses on the differences between Japanese and American gay fiction, and cites the 2010s NBC Hannibal series as an inspiration for deciding to write gay fiction himself. The quality of the series is clearly due to consideration, not happenstance.

            One point of frustration that I have with Otherside Picnic is that, as the title of this essay implies, much of what makes it such an astonishing achievement on the representational level consists in employing writing techniques that should be obvious but are not. Miyazawa’s stated principles for male writers approaching lesbian subjects, such as accounting for the fact that the characters have sexual desires and avoiding the temptation to insert oneself as a voyeuristic third party, should be defaults when it comes to romance writing, not accomplishments. Otherside Picnic would still be an extraordinarily good series for many other reasons in a world in which all the usual pitfalls were widely acknowledged. It would still work with genre in interesting and considered ways—the series is a romance, a science fiction story, a horror story, a comedy, and at points a campus novel or a technological thriller. The Otherside as a setting would still be a better extended metaphor for LGBT realization and LGBT community than any other I have seen in years (one is reminded at points of Fingersmith’s Briar Court). Sorawo and Toriko’s relationship would still be a touching exploration of how to build bonds with others after early experiences seeing people mostly as potential threats. Yet there is no good reason why the state of literature should be such that it impresses us when the leads in a love story openly want to have sex with each other, when a piece of fiction lacks an obvious preoccupation with the author’s own erotic tastes, or when these types of protagonists are old enough to drink. Otherside Picnic doing these things so well says wonderful things about Miyazawa Iori, but a fortiori says very bad things about many other writers.

            I think this can be extended to other representational questions too, not just ones relating to sexuality. Miss Saigon is not as jarringly racist a musical as it is because there’s some secret knowledge about Southeast Asian people that is missing; it is jarringly racist because basic principles of human psychology and social relationships aren’t being applied to the Southeast Asian characters. The 1950s Disney Peter Pan is not racist against Native Americans insofar as it does not provide an intimate portrait of real Blackfoot life; it is racist insofar as it presents the Blackfoot characters as grotesques whose skin color is the result of constant blushing and who only learn things by asking the white man “how?” To be sure, little is being done in lesbian fiction (or even in the yuri genre, which isn’t necessarily the same thing, although Otherside Picnic is both) that is anywhere near as offensive as these two examples. Even works of the past that were aggressively bad representationally, like 1950s pulp in the US or certain early-2000s anime and manga series in Japan, have their semi-ironic defenders. But that should not exculpate the other examples; indeed, the fact that more people take genuine offense to Miss Saigon and Peter Pan makes those cases even more galling.