With「本心」, Keiichiro Hirano (平野 啓一郎) has written a big, old-fashioned novel of ideas. It is set in the 2040s in a Japan in which a tenuous daily life is dominated by AI, and “voluntary death” has been legalized. Through the efforts of Sakuya, his main character, to create a virtual reality version of his mother, Hirano plays with his theory of “dividualism,” the idea that we are different depending on who we are with and the environment we are in. These unique selves make up who we are, without a single “true” self at our core. But this novel is not simply scaffolding for Hirano’s theories or social concerns—it is also a mystery and a bildungsroman.
And it is also a quest, as Sakuya tries to track down people from his mother’s past, including an elderly author who could be his father, to try and identify his mother’s 本心 (true self), as well as figure out why she had wanted to die a “voluntary death.” She had wanted Sakuya’s blessing and he couldn’t provide that, and in the end, she was killed indirectly by a drone used by a supermarket for grocery delivery. Crows had attacked the drone (a worsening problem), the drone crashed to the ground, and his mother fell into a ditch from the shock (the government has no budget for road repairs). This is representative of the indirect way Hirano describes this future Japan—tantalizing little hints that I collected together to form a scary picture. Society had fallen into a state of learned helplessness when it came to climate change. Every typhoon season, the wealthy fled the country, leaving everyone else to seek refuge at evacuation centers or just burrow in like scared animals, with more and more homes collapsing with every storm. People use virtual reality to escape all of this misery, but time in virtual spaces also provokes discontent and desires that can’t be satisfied.
Sakuya himself works as a real avatar, essentially renting his body out to other people (the client can wear a headset so that they can see everything that Sakuya sees through his camera-equipped goggles). He makes deliveries, and carries out tasks that others can’t or won’t (his workload increases when contagious diseases are going around). Sometimes he feels he’s providing an important service, like when he is hired by a man to be an avatar for his elderly father to visit all the childhood haunts the old man can no longer get to. Overall, however, his job is dangerous and puts him at the mercy of his clients. One day, after a malicious client has sent him chasing around the city on a dangerously hot day searching for the perfect melon, Sakuya stops by a convenient store for water and finds himself defending the young employee from a bully yelling at her to “go back to her own country” if she can’t speak proper Japanese. A video of this incident ends up on the Internet, and changes his life. It leads to his introduction to Iffy, a reclusive and wealthy avatar designer who turns out to be a paralyzed young man in a wheelchair. But ultimately it also gives Sakuya some clarity about what he might want to do with his life, so that the reader is left with a little hope at the end of the novel. (Hirano is very interested in the problem of the children of migrants who grow up without being truly literate in either their “native” language or the language of the country in which they now live, preventing them from communicating well with people around them, and he sees this problem in Japan as well.)
Whatever the implications of Hirano’s theory about our multiple selves might be, Sakuya seems to have a core that he has stayed true to throughout his life. He drops out of middle school after a long and fruitless protest against the expulsion of one of his classmates when the school finds out that she is working as a prostitute to support her family. He invites his mother’s young co-worker to come and live with him when her apartment is destroyed in a typhoon, and when Iffy falls in love with her, he acts as honest middleman even though he is beginning to have feelings for her as well. He stands by his co-worker, who is caught up in a plot to deliver a bomb and blow up government ministers. Sakuya is occasionally naïve—which is actually refreshing in a future in which marriage is seen as just a way to improve your financial outlook—but always acts with integrity, which makes the future Hirano depicts look less uniformly dispiriting.
There are also beautiful, poetic sections in「本心」, as when he describes visiting a waterfall that was meaningful to his mother, or the unworldly experience of being in a virtual space, or the split-identity feeling of having someone control his actions when he works as a real-life avatar. In one very long section of the book, Hirano combines both horror and poetry in his description of Sakuya’s experience with Enki, a virtual reality experience that takes the user through 30 billion years of the universe’s history, starting with the Big Bang. Using his headset, Sakuya floats in the endless black for 100 light years, until he breaks through the atmosphere like a meteorite and falls into the ocean. He sees the strange animals of the Cambria period, the shadows of flying dinosaurs, homo erectus on the savanna. As soon as humans begin to spread across the earth, the landscape changes in a flash. In dizzying series of images, he witnesses the aurora borealis in the far north, an infant after birth, trench warfare, brothels, rock concerts, 9-11, children playing in parks, nuclear warfare, anime, an afternoon at the seashore, a pile of garbage. Then he is in the future, standing in the burning Amazon, then a tiny island submerged in the Pacific, talking to robots indistinguishable from humans. Humanity has gone extinct, and he watches buildings, submerged in greenery, collapsing with a boom. As he floats in space again, Sakuya feels nostalgia for all the people that no longer existed. And it left him asking what his thoughts even meant in the scope of 30 billion years; what did it matter if he lived honestly or committed crimes? And yet he came away with the sense that his fragile existence was a miracle. I still don’t know if this virtual experience was horrifying or beautiful, but it left me feeling that this world can really break your heart.
The “voluntary death” system that Hirano explores in 「本心」was another disquieting part of the book. The phrase has to be enclosed in quotation marks because there are legitimate doubts as to whether it can ever be truly voluntary. Sakuya is convinced that it can’t have been his mother’s 本心 to die in this way because her generation had been treated as a burden for the future from the time they came of age, and as they reached old age they felt the brunt of society’s hatred. Books, the medical establishment and the government all glorified “voluntary death,” creating a situation in which it was impossible to truly choose for oneself.
This graph shows the poverty rate for elderly women in Japan. The lowest line represents women with spouses, the red line just above represents men in general, the purple line represents women whose spouse has died, and the red line at the top represents women who have never married or are divorced. Source: Asahi Shinbun
And unfortunately, Hirano seems to be a bit of a fortune teller. The Asahi Shimbun’s podcast recently broadcast an interview with the author of an article reporting on the results of a study showing that about half of all single women in Japan aged 65 or older (2.9 million women) would be living below the poverty line in about forty years. These women belong to Japan’s “lost generation” (Sakuya’s mother would have been part of this generation)—people who entered the work force between 1993 and 2005, after the economic bubble collapsed, and struggled to find jobs. Due to Japan’s unique employment system, in which college students are recruited simultaneously straight from university, failure to find a job during this single hiring season can set you back for the rest of your life. This was exacerbated by deregulation during the Koizumi administration that allowed companies to hire people on short-term contracts. Women were more likely than men to end up in these temporary jobs, which don’t qualify them for the employee pension insurance plan. And rather than call for a reform to Japan’s employment system itself, which still assumes that women will be supported by husbands with higher salaries, women wrote into the Asahi Shimbun saying that they hoped Japan would have introduced an assisted suicide system by the time they reach old age (you can read the article summarizing the comments here, and listen to the podcast [in Japanese] here: Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 [fittingly, the third episode is called “How to Prevent a Dystopian Future for Aging Japan”]).
Sometimes we can read dystopian novels as if they were thrillers, just another creative work of imagination; the plot of「本心」 cannot be comfortably ignored in this way. Read it for the poetry of the writing, to open your mind, and to think about some big philosophical ideas, but don’t dismiss it as fiction.
College students at a job fair at the Tokyo International Exhibition Center. Source: Chris McGrath/Getty Images
This novel has not yet been translated into English, but two of Hirano’s previous novels are available in English: At the End of the Matinee, translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter, and A Man, translated by Eli K.P. William.
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