Because this piece would have been so much better had I been able to successfully publish this piece on Easter, please just pretend this came out Easter Sunday.

Not too long ago, I was given some recommendations by a friend of mine on some books to read. I’ve been trying to branch out beyond my usual SF/F and YA roots to other genres (and not only because I spent four months reading a single fantasy book last year). While she recommended four books, I picked the two that I had heard the most about previously: Earthlings by Sayaka Murata, and Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica I managed to read both books in about three days, not just because they’re short books (although admittedly they are), but because they are both excellent and engaging reads. And it just so happens that both of these books have pretty important throughlines about cannibalism.

Earthlings

Earthlings is the story of Natsuki, both as a young girl and later as a grown woman. Natsuki struggles to connect with the people around her and to live up to the expectations of society. She escapes the pain and drudgery of everyday life through magic spells she is taught by her best friend, and alien who takes the form of a stuffed animal. The only other person she can relate to is her cousin Yuu, an outsider in his own way who she gets to see yearly at a family reunion.

But as with so many of these stories, Natsuki’s childhood is cut short by trauma, and she is forced to grapple with the ways that this changes her. Decades later, she is living a quiet life with her husband, doing her best to conform to society without drawing attention to herself. But she can’t escape thinking about her childhood, and both she and her husband feel called by the Japanese countryside, made more powerful by Natsuki’s memories. They leave, and Natsuki finds herself reunited with Yuu. But will he remember the promises that they made to each other as children?

Earthlings was a fascinating but difficult read. And before moving forward, I think it is important to mention that this book mentions child sexual abuse. Sorry for anyone who thinks that’s a spoiler, but with statistics being what they are, I would rather spoil something than risk retraumatizing someone. Especially when sexual trauma is extremely important both substantively and thematically to this story.

Natsuki is an outsider. And while she wants to become “more normal,” she struggles to even understand how to understand the perspective of society, what she calls “the Factory.” She deals with this through escapism, and a belief in magical realism that allows her to shut off realizing just how horrific her experiences have been. And Natsuki’s belief is infectious. Both her cousin Yuu and husband Tomoya have their own experiences with trauma, and Natsuki’s unshakeable belief in the super and preternatural draw them in, providing them with an out from the otherwise harsh reality they inhabit.

However, none of this is healthy for them. There comes a point where the trio entirely break from reality, and they pass all bounds of morality and decency. There’s a lot that can be said about this, and frankly would take a much more plot specific and time intensive discussion than I want to dig into here. But I can touch on the different ideas that it made me think about.

Things like, what can be excused by childhood trauma, and what things go too far? How can that line even begin to be determined? What sorts of nonconformity am I personally okay with and why? What makes certain taboos valid? Are any taboos valid? Is there any sort of nobility in pushing back against cultural norms? Which cultural norms are necessary for society to exist? Why does the reason behind an action change how I see the action? When is it okay to deviate from family? When is it necessary to deviate from family? When are we allowed to forget a trauma, to us to or others? When are we able to move past being wronged?

This book dredged up a lot of uncomfortable emotions for me, and I think that’s intended. It also made me think a lot about the societal context that this book is written in (which will also be the case with our next book). Japan does not have the same culture of individualism that we do. There is a lot more social pressure to conform with societal expectations, and there are different, novel ways that society can punish those who break the mold. I’m not going to pretend that I’m some sort of expert on Japanese culture, but I do know that Natsuki and Tomoya would be classified as Hikikimori in Japan. The way they act, even when they are trying to conform, is treated as a legitimate social contagion in Japan, and society can punish them for being different.

I think in America, we’re so used to our wide open spaces that we can forget how different the rest of the world can be. Here, we have a population density of 98 people per square mile. In Japan, there are about 875 people per square mile. This makes society inherently more knit together, making it harder to escape society’s gaze upon you, or to quietly mind your own business. Even still, I find something discomforting about the siren call of the wilderness. There is often an idea in literature that to escape society, the only viable option is wilderness. Natsuki and Tomoya flee the suburbs (well, what passes as the suburbs in Japan), and experience seeming freedom in the country before shit hits the fan. But I found myself fantasizing about if they’d just tried the inverse. What if they had fled to the city to escape their families rather than the country? Could tragedy have been averted?

I recognize that fleeing to the city is almost as much of a trope as fleeing to the country, and there are just as many stories about how this journey can go wrong as well. But it should surprise none of you that I am more captured by the idea of fleeing deeper into society to find your own people rather than fleeing society entirely to form your own. At the end of the day, I found this book fascinating, even if it at multiple times made me feel sick. There’s a spacy quality to the writing that I find to be a hallmark of Japanese magical realism, and I enjoyed Murata’s take on this style infinitely more interesting than Murakami. It’s a good read, a quick read, and if you can stomach it, and extremely worthwhile read.

4⭐

Tender is the Flesh

Tender is the Flesh is in many ways an interesting pair to Earthlings. It follows the second-in-command of a slaughterhouse, Marcos, as he goes about his life and has a crisis of self. The catch is that this is happening in a dystopian future where animals have become toxic to humans and in response we have resorted to cannibalism. The books goes into painstaking detail about the mechanics of what this would look like, and the ways such an action warps society. Our protagonist is himself conflicted on this choice, and tells himself that he needs to take this job to care for his ailing father.

Partway through the story, Marcos is gifted a prize female by a business associate. Marcos begins to interact with her, who he names Jasmine, in ways that are forbidden in this society, leading to increasing internal and external tension as Marcos grapples with this position.

This was a book that I adored, but also left me feeling conflicted. My main issue is that I often found that this book was dancing around such interesting topics, but failed to engage with them in a way that I found satisfying. However, I can also recognize that by leaving things ambiguous, it gives space for the reader to grapple with some of these questions and come to their own conclusion.

One of Marcos’s main jobs is to travel to the different business partners of the slaughterhouse to discuss how their work interacts. In doing so, he visits a breeding facility, a tannery, a game preserve, a butcher’s shop, an “animal testing” facility, federal inspectors, and the slaughterhouse itself. The author clearly did her research into these industries before writing this book, because she writes with an intense specificity and accuracy that are impossible to ignore.

Many comments on goodreads and even elsewhere complain that this book is a heavy handed way to approach veganism and environmentalism. “If we considered for a moment that these beautiful creatures were like us, if we put ourselves in their shoes, we would realize the barbarism inherent to the industry.” Sure, that’s one possible interpretation of the work, and I won’t try to argue that there aren’t strains of that argument in the book, but to minimize the themes to focus on that is missing the forest for a tree.

I’ve thought a lot about my own relationship to meat. I’m a foodie, I enjoy trying different types of cuisine, and above all else I’m a hypocrite. I know the benefits to the environment if I stopped eating meat or if I even just cut back. I know that it is better to buy from a local butcher or farmer’s market than to go to the supermarket. I know that it is important to engage in whole animal practices, both with food and other animal products to make the most of each life given in this industry. And this book is in many ways trying to grapple with the hypocrisy of people who know better and don’t change anyways.

I think it is also important to note that this book is from Argentina. Argentina is both one of the largest producers and consumers of meat in the world. It is a way of life there almost more than it is here in the states, and while I don’t want to risk overgeneralizing, people there tend to now at least a bit more about the process. The way that this book uses that knowledge to tie paint a story that touches on class, race, gender, machismo, marginalization, and more is extremely interesting

Marcos knows that he lives in a dying society. The shift to cannibalism was so intense that it drove his father insane, but by the end of the book the reader is left thinking that Marcos’s father may have been the most sane person in the book. A society that subsists on the dehumanization of others is doomed to fail, and this book in many ways is equally about how to deal with trauma as Earthlings was. But Tender is the Flesh is not just dealing with trauma on an individual level (although there are certainly individual traumas as well), but with a societal trauma. A society that can no longer have pets, that has to fear any animal that isn’t another human. A society that is afraid to bury their dead because people might just choose to exhume and eat your grandma. A society that has to have a curfew, because a certain segment of people believe that the best meat is the meat that had a name. This belief system is shown to be an intrinsic rot, with Marcos’s generation as the in-between, torn between the human and inhuman. Marcos’s niece and nephew are showcased as sociopathic beings incapable of empathy, not because they are uniquely bad, but because no one raised in this society could end up any way other than twisted. Yet even so, Marcos cannot help but desperately desire a child of his own.

I am so curious what it would be like to read this book in Spanish, but that dream is a long way off. I desperately wanted this book to more explicitly tackle with some of these ideas, especially Marcos’s struggle with machismo, both in himself and in others. But even if this book doesn’t fully wrestle with the ideas, it in many way exhumes them, leaving the reader to wrestle with those ghosts.

4.5⭐

Both these books left me with a lot to think on and a lot to chew on, so I’m very grateful they were recommended (thanks Brantley!). I had hoped to write a bit more on how both these books flirt with cannibalism as communion and transcendence, but in a twisted way. Reading these books as a lapsed Catholic was intensely fascinating, especially with the proximity of these reads to Easter. But alas, the hour grows late and I’ve written well over the 2,500 words I told myself I was going to limit myself to. If any of you check these books out, I’d be happy to pick those conversations back up. And if you would like for me to break down something you enjoy, please, send me recommendations. I’m always looking for more to yap about.

Before I end things, I need to cover some logistics. First, I would like t apologize for the radio silence last week. While I know that none of you mind, as you act in the role of essentially alpha readers for this project, I still want to get to a point of consistency and to better plan for likely obstacles, like Easter. At the very least, I want to provide notice when there is not going to be a post. In that vein, I’m going to be taking May off.

That’s probably not entirely accurate. I’ll be surprised if I don’t at some point release my recommendations from April at some point during the month. But I am releasing myself from the burden of feeling as though I have to post something during May. Because May is going to be a very busy month for me, both in and out of work. I’m also hoping to better evaluate what I want this project to be. I’ve been trying to seek out a lot more critique yesterday, to see how critics I respect talk about film, books, comics, and all the type of media I talk about. And I know that I’m not at the level I want to be at.

To a certain extent, I know that means that I need to keep practicing and working on this. But it also means that I need to be taking more time for these projects. I can’t just throw a piece together over the course of a weekend, or worse, on the day of release. I want to do a better job of outlining, thinking through the specific points that I want to hit. I really like the first few long form pieces I wrote on this, even with the rough edges, and I want to keep chasing that style. That may mean moving away from a weekly format, or it may mean accepting shorter, tighter pieces. I’m still unsure if I want to take a more conversational or academic tone here. Although as you’ve all experienced, even when I’m trying to be conversational, I often sound like I’m trying to have a Socratic dialogue.

I also want to think more about how to talk about things that aren’t books, movies, or tv. I feel that I have a good depth of critical work to pull from to find styles that I respect and want to draw inspiration from. But I also want to write more about comics, podcasts, manga, and internet video, but there are fewer sources of inspiration to look to (if you do happen to know the Ebert of any of these mediums though, let me know). I want to brainstorm how to talk about these in a way that I have fun with and feel proud of. As you’ve all seen in my monthly roundups, podcasts and manga are consistently at the top of what I go through by volume, yet I still haven’t had any pieces (outside my 2024 recap series) focusing on either medium, and I want to change that.

I’m also trying to do better about balancing this and the instagram. I had hoped that the two would work better in concert, with this being a place for my long form thoughts and posting short thoughts there. But I so prefer this that it’s pretty easy for the instagram to fall to the wayside, even though that would be much easier to maintain if I committed to it. Who knows, maybe I’ll try to be more active there during my break here. I’ve never been that talented of a juggler though, and I should try to stick to one before I split my attention.

While I am looking forward to using May to brainstorm some of these things, the real reason I’m taking the month off is because I’m going to be very busy! I’m doing a half marathon in a week, and then I have a graduation, wedding, and other various and sundry obligations to attend to. It’s going to be a very busy month, so wish me luck y’all.

As I wrap this overly long message up, I just want to take a moment to thank you all. The last thing most of need is another email. I have plenty of newsletters filling mine up. But I appreciate that you as my friends are willing to be the ground floor for this exercise as I try to force myself to practice my writing. I’m still not where I’d like to be. Who knows if I’ll ever get there. But I appreciate that you all are willing to support and help me try. Thanks all.

I’ll see you in June. Until then, take care of yourselves.

Soma