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Harlequin Butterfly
by
EnJoe Toh
general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author
| Title: | Harlequin Butterfly |
| Author: | EnJoe Toh |
| Genre: | Novel |
| Written: | (2011) (Eng. 2024) |
| Length: | 105 pages |
| Original in: | Japanese |
| Availability: | Harlequin Butterfly - US |
| Harlequin Butterfly - UK | |
| Harlequin Butterfly - Canada | |
| from: Bookshop.org (US) |
- Japanese title: 道化師の蝶
- Translated by David Boyd
- Akutagawa Prize, 2011 (II)
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Our Assessment:
B : challenging and playful language- and storytelling-fun
See our review for fuller assessment.
| Source | Rating | Date | Reviewer |
|---|---|---|---|
| Asian Rev. of Books | . | 20/2/2024 | Alison Fincher |
| Straits Times | . | 22/6/2024 | Clement Yong |
From the Reviews:
- "Harlequin Butterfly isn’t a linear narrative. Roles shift. Items are forgotten and then remembered again. The setting changes from Asia, to North Africa, and eventually to America’s Pacific coast; the nationality, race, and spoken language of characters who pass through the narrative change with the setting. (...) The novel is perhaps most provocative as a meditation on language. (...) Harlequin Butterfly isn’t meaningless, though it is intentionally contradictory and at points incoherent. Boyd’s English translation nevertheless presents a satisfying and reflective read." - Alison Fincher, Asian Review of Books
- "A reader breezing through it is likely to be able to just about follow the scant plot, but at the back of the mind is always a niggling discomfort. Something seems to not quite fit, and when this is later solved, yet another piece of the puzzle comes undone. Whether this is enjoyable will depend on the reader’s patience and willingness to turn back the pages to investigate -- perhaps just the sort of Wittgensteinian language game that one can embark on on a long commute." - Clement Yong, The Straits Times
Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.
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The complete review's Review:
Harlequin Butterfly opens wondering: "What about a book that can be read only when travelling ?" -- a concept then put into practice (sort of ...) by an A.A.Abrams, who is introduced as: "a man who more or less lives on passenger planes".
After some business success he tried his hand at being an author, and: "His breakthrough title was: To Be Read Only on an Airplane" -- though it's success came not among the flying crowd ("Airport sales were actually abysmal") but rather among luxury-liner cruise passengers.
Seeing he was onto a good thing, he published a whole series of To Be Read Only ... titles.
He's also known for the butterfly net he goes around with -- "to go around capturing fresh ideas" (preferably in jumbo jets), as he explains.
So, anyway, the A.A.Abrams of the first of the novel's five chapters.
In the next Abrams is a woman (and deceased); readers are told she had been: "diagnosed with uterine cancer several years prior to her death", so there's no question about her sex (in that iteration of this very fact-fluid story), and that she had been: "a businesswoman who had broken into real estate".
The other significant writing figure is also introduced here -- the elusive polyglot writer Tomoyuki Tomoyuki (whereby: "it's extremely unlikely that Tomoyuki Tomoyuki is the author's real name").
He's produced a prodigious amount of writing -- 200,000 pages is the estimate -- and that in about thirty different languages.
Tomoyuki's own work is also marked by the paradox and inconstancy that is found throughout Harlequin Butterfly, as:
even in Tomoyuki Tomoyuki's seemingly autobiographical writings, we often encounter events that appear to have occurred after the death of the person understood to be writing the work. Age and gender also vary with remarkable frequency.A later chapter has the first-person narrator describe being employed by the A.A.Abrams Institute to search for Tomoyuki Tomoyuki -- one of several agents doing so. Among their tools: a net .....
Among the nods in the novel are ones to Nabokov -- Abrams bringing an imaginary butterfly to: "a lepidopterist who happened to be staying" at the Montreux Palace Hotel. And mathematician Giuseppe Peano's auxiliary language, Latino sine flexione -- "best understood as classical Latin disembarrassed of its inflections" -- also figures in the story, Tomoyuki utilizing it too.
Harlequin Butterfly is a novel about language and story-telling, theory put into varieties of practice in a knotty, shape-shifting disquisition. It presents -- in theory as well as practice -- a variety of what amount to thought experiments -- including:
Imagine a story -- one that's utterly meaningless, contradictory, incoherent. What if there's a language somewhere in the world that would render that story logically sound ? A language in which that story would become perfectly ordinary, all its strangeness concealed from view ?The fact that English-speaking readers come to this story in translation only makes the notion all the more intriguing as Harlequin Butterfly certainly can feel confounding; if not utterly meaningless, contradictory, and incoherent, it certainly teases with such elements, leading (or allowing) readers to wonder: does that lie in the language, or the story itself (or, of course, are they inextricably bound together and playing off each other ...) ?
Convoluted, involuted -- and, fortunately, also with a sense of humor --, Harlequin Butterfly is very playful fiction -- playing both linguistically and philosophically. It does not offer the easy satisfactions of straightforward narrative fiction, but it certainly offers others.
- M.A.Orthofer, 29 August 2024
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Harlequin Butterfly:
- Pushkin Press publicity page
- Kodansha publicity page
- Sample - translated by Sim Yee Chiang and Sayuri Okamoto
- See Index of Japanese literature
- Index of Akutagawa Prize-winning works under review
- Other books from Pushkin Press under review
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Japanese author EnJoe Toh (円城 塔) was born in 1972.
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© 2024 the complete review
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