Snakes and Earrings by Hitomi Kanehara

By Miu Toyota

 

Hitomi Kanehara is one of the famous Japanese novelists. In 2003, her first novel, Hebi ni piasu (Snakes and Earrings) won the Subaru Literary Prize, and in January of the following year the Akutagawa Prize. Amazingly, she was just only twenty years old at that time. She became the youngest recipients of the Akutagawa Prize in history. Coupled with sensational story of this novel, she became a famous novelist quickly. 1.18 million copies of ‘Snakes and Earnings’ were sold.

 

She was brought up by her father who is a well-known translator. She loved reading books since she was a child. However she developed a phobia about school, so she absented almost all classes in junior and senior high years. Her novel was influenced by her life or her thinking.

 

Snakes and Earrings

This book is about relationship among three young people Lui, Ama and Shiba. One day, Lui, young girl and main character of this story, met Ama in night club. She was attracted to Ama’s sp;it tongue, achieved through surgery to make it look like a snake’s tongue.

She slept with him and started living with him. Because Lui also wants to split her tongue, Ama introduces her to Shiba, the owner of a piercing parlor. Lui begins by piercing her tongue and orders a tattoo for her arm: a design including a dragon and the two kirin, legendary Chinese animals, that decorate Shiba's arm. She then sleeps with Shiba, keeping it a secret from Ama.

The pure-hearted Ama really loves Lui. One day he fights a young gangster who is bothering her and ends up beating the man to death. Five months later, Lui completes a grand tattoo on her back. She begins to feel Ama's affections as a heavy burden. Soon afterward, Ama disappears after going to work and is later found as a dead body. Shiba is asking Lui to marry him, and although she begins to suspect that he was Ama's murderer, she moves in with him.

 

(Retrieved from: ‘Books from Japan’

http://www.booksfromjapan.jp/publications/item/405-snakes-and-earrings )

 

 

Today I introduced a Japanese novel. I just choose one novel which you can read in English. I like reading books (in Japanese), and I try to read books which won novel Prize. When I read ‘Snakes and Earrings’, I was surprised because her novel was unimaginable interesting compared with other novels written by new novelists. But after this novel, she tried to write many uncommon topics such as drugs, prostitution, psychological problems, homosexuality and paedophilia. Sometimes people hate her novels but I think that young woman can empathize with the character which she wrote.