Bugs and Songs and Stars and Sisters

~spoilers for both collections, and a cw for discussion of CSA, incest, grooming~

The Haruko Ichikawa Collections (separately titled Mushi to Uta, or Insects and Songs, and 25-ji no Vacances, or 25 Hour Vacation) are distinctive through their contained stories’ recursion and iteration. “Star Lover,” “Kusaku Siblings,” and “25 Hour Vacation,” for instance, all take place in similar dramatic boundaries: a male relative, a female relative, some relationship between the two where one becomes a muse of a kind, the disfiguration and dismemberment of their bodies, some kind of sad, tragic longing or absence needing to be addressed. In those iterations, however, they reveal entirely different projects. Threading a line between the heady, softly philosophical speculative fiction angle of her work and the romantic and horrific that always exists therein, Ichikawa’s two collections demonstrate a consciousness for constructing and deconstructing our relationships, the familial in particular. This focus on the familial, though, is an angle to her work that has been misunderstood pretty severely, and my interest here is less to respond directly to that wilful misreading, but to explain how they function in tandem.

Ichikawa starts the collection on the most overtly horrific note, though even here it remains subdued and fully trusts a reader to draw their own conclusions. “Star Lover” depicts a very literalized grooming, a pair of homunculi grown by a sad, lonely, obsessive man. One of those kids was raised as a present to his friends and knew him as his nephew; the other was raised as his daughter, a daughter whom he has groomed into a “sexual partner.” Child in the day, “lover” at night. Both kids are plants, pruned emotionally and psychosexually as one would prune front lawn greenery, and they are born from one another; from the boy’s trimmings comes the girl, and then, in the end, from her arm comes a new life meant for to fulfill the boy’s. And in this he recognizes a possession of her that does not exist; that is mine, that is me. It’s played coyly but there is a brief exchange between nephew and uncle, the younger calling the older a “pedophile,” and the older calling the younger a “narcissist.” Both are true. Both of their sexual desires stem from those places, and a violent objectophilia, the girl here objectified and made lesser than in either case. But having been grown by one, she prefers his company; it’s what she knows. It works as a very unwinking fable, content to present itself without commentary. It’s heavy, but it leans neither on the luridity inherent to the premise, nor on empty moralizing; it’s compact, and its ostensibly bittersweet ending is truly all bitter, cycles of misogyny and abuse being grown and tended to in real time.

This focus comes again in the third story, “Kusaku Siblings,” which inverts the premise of “Star Lover’’ somewhat. Again, a boy finds a muse in a being that takes a filial role; instead of sapling homunculi, here she is cosmic refuse. The boy here is a sports star in the making whose injury ruins his budding high school career. Instead of opting for surgery he takes it lying down, reflecting on his dissatisfaction with the pressures placed on him. A small creature is found in his yard, and as he cases it and can’t seem to latch on to it for too long, it evolves, adapts, into a creature resembling a little girl. she becomes the family he has never had. There is no sexual curiosity here or romantic implication; the drama here all stems from the absence felt by his lack of family, his lack of grounding, his lack of meaningful relationships and self driven value. Her sacrifice at the end recalls the end of “star lover” but changes the context; he demands nothing of her and her gift is given freely, her impermanence like the comet she says she fell from soaring over head. Likewise, the way she merges with his body is an inverse of “Star Lover;” where the part seeks to reconnect with the whole there in the first story (a narcissistic drive as its called there), here it’s a unison on filial terms.

“25 Hour Vacation,” the last I want to talk about in depth, further iterates along those terms, kind of splitting the difference in tone and severity. The premise here doesn’t work in a way that provides a succinct explanation, but it follows the relationship between a brother and sister who have always been close and have always been “different.” At a young age, an injury to the eye distinguished the boy from his peers as a monster, his sclera blackened with blood. The sister, however, sees this as something that makes him unique and exciting, in some ways, her fondness for oddities the basis for her way of seeing the world. As he comes of age, his sister has found some prestige, if only tenuous success, as a marine biologist. Her own “monstrousness” as they call it stems from a more recent event tied to that profession; she uses herself as a biology experiment, ingesting mysterious deep sea organisms and finding her insides have been consumed, hollowed out, and made gem-like. She no longer truly resembles herself, inside, even if on the outside she’s the same woman she’s always been. The relationship here is defined in terms of their ambiguous closeness (her peers remark on meeting him how much they seem like a couple) and their own feelings of difference. When confronted with the reality of his sister’s feelings towards him, the brother is left more confused than anything. “No way. No matter how much of an oddball,” he says. The gender dynamics are reversed from previous stories between the collections; the muse is the brother, in a sense, and it’s the sister who looks on, curious, longing, ashamed. It’s obviously more complicated and frictional than “Kusaku Siblings,” but it’s not the sedate horror story of “Star Lover.” The taboo remains a part of the narrative but it’s unconsummated, maybe even one-sided, and neither person burns up in the end. There is a sacrifice of a kind; the sister’s body, mirroring the aquatic life she’s become, has produced a pearl, one that might resemble a normal eye for her brother, but one that is only retrieved after she’s lost both legs to the brittleness of their reconstruction. But the terms are different from before; there’s none of the passive aggression of “Star Lover,” and there isn’t even really the tragic loss of “Kusaku Siblings.” If there’s any tragedy it remains in what is left unsaid and unspeakable. What she asks of him in return is to break her into powder. The rest they let lie.

Outside of these particular stories similar fascinations with the boundaries of familial structure, and further prototyping of ideas that would show in The Land of the Lustrous, crop up often. “Insects and Songs” (maybe my favorite individual story here) sees an experimental entomologist worried for the survival of insects as a species attempting to evolve them himself, making a family of bug-human hybrids, only to watch as their inevitably slight life spans catch up with him, never seeing them sustained for too long. His loss is as much the tragedy as the fragility of their lives. Meanwhile, “Violight” (maybe my least favorite short!) and “The Funeral of the Moon,” both trade in stories of short connections and disintegrating bodies, becoming prototypes of different characters featured more prominently The Land of the Lustrous (Padpardscha specifically in the latter’s case, and more loosely Phos and Cinnabar’s own volatile physical existences in the former’s). But the heart of the work is where the thematic considerations of individual stories most frequently overlap, and how they differ in those moments. None of them come to the same conclusions, and the taboo is the point.