Twinkle, Twinkle
Kaori Ekuni
"Must be like embracing water," is the way an incredulous father-in-law attempts to describe the awkward marriage of his gay son to a straight woman in the opening chapter of Kaori Ekuni's delicately quirky Twinkle Twinkle. While the unlikely partnership of Mutsuki—a reserved, steadfast young doctor—and Shoko—a mercurial, alcoholic Italian-Japanese translator—proves to have much more substance than Mutsuki's father assumes, his elegant turn of phrase is a rather apt description of the experience American readers are likely to have with this novel.
Simultaneously seductive and elusive, Twinkle Twinkle is the urbane literary equivalent of well-made sushi: in bright bites of cool, gem-like prose, Ekuni serves up a array of subtly nuanced emotion. Readers looking for overt heartstring-tugging in the great tradition of American love melodramas should turn elsewhere for their sturm und drang und runaway brides und teary reunions around tumors the size of an eggplant; the sly charms of this book require a more poetic palate.
A spare 170 pages, Twinkle Twinkle is a lightly plotted affair among deftly drawn characters. Mutsuki—whose love for slim, sexy medical student Kon is overwhelmed by his sense of obligation to rigid Japanese social structures (and his mother's persistent matchmaking efforts)—agrees to marry Shoko, whose history of alcoholism and emotional instability have pushed her to the fringes of acceptable marriage-material. On the surface, their coupling up looks like mutual coddling and closeting, and their first-person narration, which alternates from chapter-to-chapter is spoken in almost identical voices.
What's provocative about this pairing, however, is that once Mutsuki and Shoko have superficially committed to the status quo, they become exquisitely sensitive to each others' individual needs. Mutsuki accepts Shoko's passionate eccentricities like no one she's ever met; he seems nonplussed, even amused, when she sings to the paintings that hang in their apartment or rattles on with odd aesthetic opinions on subjects from Evian bottles to cream puffs. And he is calmly attentive and soothing in the wake of her frequent outbursts of anger and tears, always non-judgemental and genuinely forgiving. Meanwhile, Shoko nudges Mustuki to be less secretive and withheld about his gay friends, encouraging him not to cut off his acquaintances or to live a double life. Feeling a tender mixture of grief and strength, she ultimately attempts to pave a way for him to reconnect with the med student, Kon. In donning the shared mask of social acceptability, Shoko and Mutsuki gain the ability to nurture each other toward self-acceptance. Their marriage of convenience evolves into a partnership of compassion.
This personal evolution proves more anguished for Shoko, who, due to a past of willful self-centeredness and iconoclasm, has no Kon of her own waiting in the wings. Even as she coaxes Mutsuki forward, she clings to him, and along with her awakening sense of empathy comes an unexpected flipside: jealousy. Panicking over the possibility of losing her husband, Shoko frantically considers giving in to parental pressure to have a baby with Mutsuki.
Author Ekuni tells her story in calm plainspoken prose flecked with deadpan oddball moments, as if the deeply felt Japanese domesticity of Banana Yoshimoto's novels (Kitchen, Goodbye Tsugami) was bumping into Haruki Murakami's overt surrealism: "Here, try this... It tastes like blood," Shoko says to a houseplant as she waters it with tomato juice (She then mixes herself a cocktail of tomato juice, vodka, and Kahlua); after proposing that they put a new pet fish in the bathtub to let it swim laps, Shoko hollers, "Mutsukiiii... You want to try some of this fish food? It's pretty gross and dry and stinky, but you can kind of feel what it's like to be a goldfish."
In a book that's full of intentionally off-kilter moments, it's a shame to stumble over occasional, awkward lost-in-translation moments, such as repeated mentions of Kon's sex appeal being epitomized by the fact that he "smells like coke." Translator Emi Shimokawa doesn't provide any context that would let the reader know whether these are references to soda, cocaine, or coal.
On the whole, though, Ekuni herself does a lovely, luminous job of translating elusive feelings into written language. As the debates over same-sex marriage rage in the U.S., Twinkle Twinkle is a reminder of the way in which love can transcend sexuality. This reader's favorite line in the book is a sentiment shared by Shoko, but spoken by Kon:
"It's not really 'men' I like anyway. It's Mutsuki."
