Vibrator Issue #34

By Mari Akasaka (Soft Skull Press, 160 pages, $13.95)

By Jen Girdish
Published: March 1st, 2008 | 12:00am

Taking over the wheel of her lover’s longhaul truck on a trip back to Tokyo, the heroine of Mari Akasaka’s third novel notes, “I felt only the vibrations.” The same could be said for the novel itself, having an elegantly raw resonance. Vibrator, first published in Japan and having nothing to do with sex toys, is about a road-trip love affair between Rei Hayakawa, a bulimic middle-class journalist, and Okabe Takatoshi, an ex–Yakuza thug-turned-truck driver.

Rei notices Okabe at a Tokyo convenience store while she is buying wine and decides to pick up Okabe instead. They drive across a snowy landscape as Rei records Okabe’s stories of growing up in gangs and they carnally explore each other over the hum of the truck. First published in Japan, Vibrator was made into a critically acclaimed film in 2003.

As we see Rei rejecting the conformity of middle-class Japan, what’s unusual are the similarities that could be drawn between her reactions to living in a compartmentalized society and ours. The loneliness in Rei’s choice of alternative lifestyle is completely translatable. Vibrator is about finding connections anywhere we can.

The point of disconnect is not the emotional translation — it’s the language. At times, we wonder if there’s more to the story that might be buried beneath the translation, with its frustrating word choices. The voice can be too formal and stilted for Rei’s (possible) mental instability, some of the sex scenes are clunky, and the similes flop (such as “Being here is like being in this man’s womb.”) As much as we’d like to be there with Rei, the reader can’t help wondering what Akasaka was really saying unfiltered by a language barrier.