Red Door Magazine 23

I receive the reply, “Oh, there’s not nearly enough
supplies out here to wear that stuff on every call.”
I decide not to voice the hundreds of responses that
rushed to mind after hearing that.
At the end of “Naked,” the protagonist has broken up
with Little Ken and lain the groundwork to re-enter the
workforce, but first she helps her friend’s daughter
with an art project for school, which is back in session
the next week. The protagonist becomes somewhat
infantilized in the process, eventually spending the
night and having a little slumber party with the daughter.
The story ends with the protagonist reflecting on
the prospect of rejoining the workforce, and emotion
wells up within her:
I held my friend’s child tight against
me and began to cry. My initial
tears begat more and more, until
my weeping turned into wrenching
sobs. I could sense that the child had
woken up, startled by my outburst.
Mama, mama, she’s crying! The
child called out in a voice that edged
into a tearfulness matching mine. I
listened to the sound of her steps as
she fled to her mother for rescue.
Yamamoto’s great purpose throughout her collection
is less to make a statement about the pressures on
working women than to capture a particular feeling,
one of disassociation and detachment that’s also an
attachment—a clinging to drifting away that’s not
quite a death drive, but rather an agonized inhabitation
of a space that’s slowly growing more uninhabitable
yet seems preferable to the alternatives, at least
for the moment.
When my father tells me about being covered in
blood from a dead woman’s mouth, he’s telling me
about what it means to be in the world with others. To
have a body in this world is to be vulnerable, something
we don’t think about in those terms until we’re
forced to. It’s a complicated, contradictory set of feelings
that emerges from bodies and the skinship that
links them. I think about the vulnerability of the body
in times of mutual isolation—when bodies are kept
apart, and also when they are compelled back into
contact. I think about the loss of touch, of the prospect
of losing people close to me and realizing that
the last time I touched them would remain the last
time I’d touch them. I think about the power of skinship
and the undertow of the animal self beneath all
our higher functions and ambitions and compulsions.
In the end, the skinship between the protagonist of
“Naked” and her friend’s daughter hasthe power to
draw forth the grief that’s been suppressed throughout
the story, the grief over breaking her attachment
to her detachment, to her distance from the ambitions
and drive that used to define her. It’s also an
attachment to her detachment, to her distance from
the ambitions and drive that used to define her. It’s
also an attachment to her child self, akin to the animal
self she allowed herself to share with Little Ken until
she no longer could, just like she can no longer be a
child either. And this grief erupts bodily, making her
vulnerable and also monstrous, scaring the child and
also herself, an outpouring that stands in for the connection
that can no longer be made, that separates
the jagged contours of mourning from the comforts
of melancholy. The power of skinship is rendered as
the power of attachment itself, in its beauty and terror.
The power of attachment, and the terrible power of
its severance.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Brian Bergstrom is a lecturer in the East Asian Studies
Department at McGill University in Montréal. His articles
and translations have appeared in publications
including Granta, Aperture, Mechademia, positions:
asia critique, and Japan Forum. His translation of
We, the Children of Cats by Tomoyuki Hoshino (PM
Press) was longlisted for the 2013 Best Translated
Book Award, and his translation of the story “See” by
Erika Kobayashi won runner-up in Asymptote’s Close
Approximations translated fiction contest in 2017.
ISSUE # 23 - LANGUAGE
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