Gifted — Suzumi Suzuki

[Transit Books; 2024]

Tr. from the Japanese by Allison Markin Powell

In his mid-twentieth century phenomenological treatise, The Poetics of Space, a tour around the intimate spaces of architecture and how these spaces map against the inner sanctums of our mind, philosopher Gaston Bachelard dwells on the door. “Outside and inside are both intimate spaces; they are always ready to be reversed, to exchange their hostility. If there exists a borderline surface between such an inside and outside, this surface is painful on both sides.” In Suzumi Suzuki’s debut novel Gifted, painful surfaces abound on both sides of two doors that we come to know intimately. The novel follows the day-to-day of an unnamed Tokyo woman, working as a sex worker — a hostess, specifically — in a bar in Tokyo’s entertainment district, Kabukicho. By night, she works hard. She takes hours to put make-up on, moisturizes to get her skin supple, and tapes her tattoos before heading out to take up her work with her clients, where she drinks champagne or wine, and then survives in part by drinking sake or cheap shochu with her colleagues at karaoke after work ends.

By day, however, her life folds out into an expanse of grief and ennui. Her days drip with precise detail. Her abusive mother is dying, and while she lives with the narrator in the latter’s flat for nine days, she eventually needs to be hospitalized. Shortly after that, the narrator quits her job at the bar. The novel opens with her confessing to her daily ritual — a tic, really — of her opening the door to her home. The first door, a heavy door on the third floor, opens with a metallic creak, and requires the narrator to put her weight behind it. And then:

While that door slowly closes, I put the key in the lock for the door to my own apartment, turn it to the left, and hear a click as the latch releases. These are the two sounds I hear every night when I come home. If the interval between the creaking of the hinges and the turning of the pins in the old lock cylinder is too long or too short, there will be no sense of security.

This sequence with the two doors, repeated in varying permutations across the novel, marks some of the most profound dramatic moments in the book, indicative of the unbearable minutiae that the narrator observes in order to make her life more coherent. At times, it reads like a breathless impatience for the release of an orgasm: “Upon hearing the longed-for sound of the door after heaving my weight against it, I quickly put the key I’m already holding into the lock of my apartment and turn it, and once this second anticipated sound has been confirmed, I slip inside the door.”

On a particularly exhausting return from the hospital after visiting her dying mother, she breaks the careful tempo that she finds so much comfort in by running towards the doors: “Then, without waiting for the sensation of the usual rhythm, I put the key that’s in my hand in the lock and turn it, and amid the clearly broken tempo of these two sounds, with the force of my body, I practically fall through the doorway.” Sometimes it’s a soundtrack, like a familiar song: “The abbreviated interval between the creak of the door and the key turning in the lock still echoed in my ears as I cast a glance around the desolate table, pulled off my low-heeled booties [. . .]” At other points, the door acquires a tender life of its own, closing “with painstaking yet deliberate slowness so as not to make a sound,” ultimately emitting a “gentle, elegant noise.” Her relationship with the two doors is one of the most intimate, revealing but stable relationships she has in the novel. And by the end, this relationship has changed.

In one of the most moving sequences in a novel about profound grief and abuse, she breaks the cycle. She stands before the second door, both her hands full, “patiently and deliberately” — for she is patient and deliberate now, not the door — watching the door close and listening for the sound of it closing, instead of rushing to close the rhythm between the door first closing and the lock of the second door clicking. “So much that I didn’t hear before, when I dwelled in the rhythm between the creak and the turn of the key,” she muses. “Not that there was anything particularly unpleasant in that interval.”

Painfully, this revelation does not extend into other aspects of her life. Intervals accumulate as the narrator waits — for a conversation to end, for dawn to break, for a text message from a friend in a conversation where they discuss a third, deceased sex worker friend, Eri. While she waits, she deepens herself into thinner, sadder rituals: she rinses her hands with exact pumps of soap and then dries them in a bath towel, repeatedly; she washes bowls; she picks up her phone and puts it back down; she takes off her make-up in elaborate ways.

Perhaps it is unsurprising that Suzuki, who herself once worked as an adult video actress and is a sociologist, exerts such masterful control over the realm of language of the domestic, to the point of furniture acquiring ethnographic interiority. There are no tropes of the trauma plot to be found in miniature world of Gifted, nor any untroubling acquiesces to resolving traumatic relationships, and the novel is a far remove from the cozy South East Asian fiction trend in recent publishing — where fiction, often described as ‘wholesome,’ functions as unblemished self-medication. In this novel, terror is a perpetual gleam, waging war on the grieving, laboring sex-worker body. There are only glimpses, and shadows, and the long resounding creaks of the inanimate that bear witness to the life of the lonely.

Feminized labour in the novel is erased structurally, as well as communally. In stray references to the types of work that a body undertakes—sexual, emotional, physical or creative—what emerges is a generational tussle over ownership of the body of the narrator. She gets tattoos to mask the marks left from her mother’s attempt to burn her, which we learn about early on in the novel. “Once you have one tattoo, it doesn’t matter how many more you get — it has no further impact on the value of your body,” she observes. Her mother’s attempt to burn her with a cigarette is described in greater detail later on in the novel, and the details become a way to further stop time and halt us at the brink of knowledge about — and so, intimacy with — her mother. The details drag the memory out, interrupt the present and suspend the moment even though it is a moment of recollection. Even later, towards the end of the novel, the narrator lets us in, that when her mother had pressed the cigarette into her, “she’d had a terribly desperate look on her fact, as if she were in a panic and oblivious to anything else.” These haunting factoids about one of the defining moments of her life, largely shrouded still, are drip-fed, ironically “limited” in the way the narrator describes her poet mother’s writing, as ignoring the disorder of her life with a small child who did not like it when her mother wrote:

But the world my mother wanted to depict was not a life of tatami rooms, but rather one of herbs she planted in the space that jutted out from the window, exposed to the elements and too small to be called a balcony, and of what stretched out beyond those, in the shadows that fell when evening arrived and obscured the unexceptional cityscape — it was only those very limited things that she seemed to love.

Two artists, both engaged in sexual and creative labours that require the body to function simultaneously as ornament and tool, undermining each other’s art even as they wield their bodies as weapons against the gendered exploitations of the world, and each other. There is no resolution in the act of harm that the narrator’s mother engaged in, and the narrator’s dismissal of her mother’s creative labours — using the same, attentive “limited” language that she claims to reject — is one of the few forms of resistance she has.

The door, as Bachelard imagines, straddles her two lives but her life on either side is painful, relentlessly asking for emotional improvisations through unpleasant situations with work and her mother. Her domestic life seems pared back, minimal and precise — neat, even. Small changes in the placement of a novel on her table, for instance, mark dramatic changes, provide her with a contained but fragile sense of security. Yet her life on the other side of the door, facing the world, is unendurable. In contrast to the sanitized control the narrator exerts over her body at home, the outside world demands that she exist by relinquishing control. Surfaces outside the flat are bodily and queasy, affective in their repulsive textures. They burn, wobble and ooze: memories of her skin being fissured by her mother’s cigarette as a child; a harusame noodle salad she buys feels limp at the sight of her mother’s emaciated arms and disgusting hospital food; her lips are sticky with dried lip balm; she considers buying fruit with gelatin; the doctors extract phlegm from her mother’s throat. The only description of sex the narrator has — with a shimei host, but after she leaves sex work behind—is marked by amnesia about whether either of them orgasmed, and worries about vomiting on his “clean, navy-blue sheets.” But the sex feels good and her period arrives shortly after, heavy and cramping.

The translation, rendered in unsparing yet spare prose by translator Allison Markin Powell, is adept at conveying this contrasting dynamic of seeping surfaces and restrained interior life; interior here meaning both domestic and internal. But where the excess of the affects is described in cold, straightforward language, the defining emotional and psychic elements of the narrator’s life are told in occasional, discrete slivers. This lands an unexpected, explosive force, launching the image or thought onto an elevated emotional register and leaves its shadow for pages after even as her life carries on mundanely between creaks and clinks. Of her sex work colleagues, for instance, she notes: “In this world, there are people who matter and people who don’t, and what that group of us all had in common was that, as far as the world was concerned, none of us mattered very much.” Of Eri, her friend who took her own life, she wonders “what happens to dental implants when you’re cremated. For that matter, I don’t know if your original teeth burn up either.” This moment lurches back, ringing, pages later when the narrator confronts the fact of her dying mother after hearing a middle-aged grocery shopkeeper being addressed as mother by a loud young man:

But I had not been raised to call people who were not my mother Mother. The word, connoting the parent who had once held dominion over my body, carries too much meaning. My mother, born in the early months of the year, would likely die before she turned fifty-four. I will have to cremate my fifty-three-year-old mother, whose skin and hair show the tragic ravages of an old woman. Her skin and blood and flesh will surely vanish in the flames, but her bones will remain — along with her teeth, I imagine.

In this world of unstable surfaces, including her own skin, does control exist, or merely its illusion? How, between the various contestations of the site of her body, can it exist? She provides the labour of sex at work, yields and attends to the demands of sex as pleasurable outside work, and becomes the perpetual land of struggle against her abusive and dying mother. This is the tussle that the narrator finds herself looped into, day in and day out, and for respite, she calibrates with utmost precision the only series of actions over which she can exert her complete will: the door.

It is tempting to read the door purely as metaphor. The propulsive strength of the novel — a novel which is otherwise unrelenting, withholding and largely emotionally temperate—lies in its refusal to consign the door to a metaphorical state of her life. The heft of the narrator’s will over the two doors, and her indulgent wariness in their predictable clunks, is as powerful and tangible as some of the other glimpses into her discreet past. It moved me, impossibly, making me want her to simply get through the daily indignities and unsatisfactions of her work life and hospital visits and arrive at the close of day so she could go back to the doors.