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The Apprenticeship of Big Toe P
Rieko Matsuura
Translated by Michael Emmerich
Hardcover 432 pages
152 x 226mm
ISBN : 978-4-7700-3116-7 / 4-7700-3116-5
Publish : Jun, 2009
Price : $24.95 |
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[ About the Book ]
Kazumi kicked away the kotatsu quilt with her black-socked foot and thrust her leg out in front of me. I need hardly mention that removing other people's socks is not my thing.
"Are you serious?"
"Just take a look, please. Hurry."
Unable to resist her urgency, I grudgingly inserted my two index fingers into the top of her sock and pulled.
I stared, entranced.
THE BIG TOE OF HER RIGHT FOOT WAS A PENIS.
from the Prologue
The acclaimed, best-selling novel, finally available in English!
Every decade or so a novel appears that leaves its mark on an entire generation. For Japan in the 1990s, that novel was Rieko Matsuura's The Apprenticeship of Big Toe P. An astonishing, gripping read, this now legendary book was both a critical success and an instant sensation that flew off the shelves. Selling more than 300,000 copies in hardcover, it rocketed its cult author to stardom almost overnight.
The Apprenticeship of Big Toe P tells the story of Kazumi Mano, a naive twenty-two-year-old who wakes up one afternoon to discover that her big toe has turned into a penis. Her life as an ordinary girl is over, and a rigorous "apprenticeship" has begun. Kazumi flees her homophobic fiance after he tries to castrate her, and hooks up with a blind pianist with whom she falls in love. Together they join a troupe of sexually deformed and emotionally twisted men and women who tour the country performing what amounts to sexual freak shows. In the course of her bizarre journey, Kazumi is forced to reconsider what she had always passively accepted: her body, her sexuality, and her life.
By turns provocative, intelligent, humorous, heart-breaking, and grotesque, The Apprenticeship of Big Toe P is like no other novel you will read. Matsuura is a master of sensual storytelling, and this is her chef d'oeuvre.
Reviews
"With pleasure as her scalpel, Rieko Matsuura opens up a world all her own, that no one else can ever hope to imitate. She has one enduring theme. And that theme is love." - Natsuo Kirino, author of Out
"Matsuura's cult classic is finally available to readers of English, and we've been missing a treasure. This adventure fable explores sex, gender and the erotic with seditious lucidity and a soaring imagination that examines the whole ab-surd concoction from unexpected angles. It is enchanting, hilarious, and genuinely poignant." - Katherine Dunn, author of Geek Love
"Matsuura's imagination is limitless." —The World
- In reference to the title, The Apprenticeship of Big Toe P, what do you think is Kazumi Mano's "apprenticeship"?
- Describe how Matsuura uses humor to touch on some very serious issues — such as gender identity and sexual awareness — in the book.
- What is Kazumi's greatest downfall in the book?
- How do Kazumi and her lover fit in with the others in the sexual freak shows in which they participate? How don't they fit in?
- What does Kazumi learn about her own relationships? What does she learn about her own sexual identity?
- Does Kazumi's own sexual identity change at all throughout her journey?
- Do you think there's a difference between the American and Japanese perception of masculinity and femininity?
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Interview with RIEKO MATSUURA
Q. What inspired you to write such a daring book as The Apprenticeship of My Big Toe P?
All through my teens and twenties, I was always thinking about sex. I was very unhappy with the male-centered depictions of sex and ways of thinking about sexual love that you encountered all over the place, so I started trying to figure out a way to get beyond that kind of thing. Then one day, I had a dream that the big toe on my right foot had turned into a penis, just like the one the main character has in The Apprenticeship of Big Toe P. I can only describe it as a revelation. That idea, having a penis appear—not where a woman's genitals are, making her into a picture-perfect hermaphrodite—but as something extra, and down on a marginal part of her body, on her toe . . . I had the feeling that if I used that image, I could both have some fun at the expense of ordinary views of men and women, and of sex, and get beyond them. That said, it took a very long time after I had that dream for me to reach the point where I could actually begin writing.
Q. Discuss how the male and female gender roles converge in the book.
I believe that each person ought to be able to envision their own gender as they like, doing what feels right to them, and to their partner. The dream I explored in The Apprenticeship of Big Toe P is one in which both women and men manage to free themselves from established views of what men and women are supposed to be, and what sexual love is supposed to be, and they all feel a lot better as a result. Basically, that means getting away from the notion that genital sex is the best thing out there, and giving more attention and care to our skin, and our hearts—making ourselves feel good in all kinds of different ways. The Apprenticeship of Big Toe P isn't a simple-minded criticism of men, or even of phallocentrism. It's a novel meant to help men, too, by helping them get away from genital-centered views of sex, and have better sex as a result.
Q. Explain the symbolism of the toe as a penis
The toe-penis is essentially a clitoris. It doesn't ejaculate, it has no reproductive function, and because it's located on a toe it's hard to insert it actively into a woman's vagina. Basically, it's a passive organ. The clitoris actually springs from the same cells as the penis in the fetus, interestingly enough, but unlike the penis it's impossible for it to be used in an aggressive or domineering way. And that's what the toe-penis is like: it's a kind of gentler, more subdued penis. An organ intended solely for pleasure. So ultimately, I guess you could say that the toe-penis stands as a symbol for engaged, intimate sex that makes use of the whole body, without privileging any one organ.
Q. How did you use humor to convey insight into a serious topic like gender identity?
It seems to me that whenever a writer is trying to overcome some kind of literary tradition and produce something new, some element of parody with respect to the tradition is bound to creep in, both in terms of writing technique and in terms of the plot. Especially with something like sex—the people who are actually doing it are totally serious, of course, so it's easy to find ways to make it funny if you bring in some external perspective, someone who's not involved. In the case of The Apprenticeship of Big Toe P, I brought in a character who is totally clueless about everything, including sex, and gender, and tried to use her to create a pleasant, enjoyable kind of humor, not just irony.
Q. Do you think there have been changes in attitudes toward gender identity in the last decade?
I think that people with a progressive attitude toward sex and gender have had the same sort of consciousness and sensibility concerning these issues for more than three decades. People with a kind of moderate degree of interest in questions of sex and gender have definitely become much more knowledgeable since the 1990s, though I can't say anything about their sensibilities. Japanese people of this type tend to be fairly liberal, I think. And then, naturally, there are people who have conservative attitudes toward these things. They aren't in the majority, but they're the most outspoken, and they think they're the standard. No matter how times change, no matter how much people try and educate them, they'll always occupy a certain percentage of the population.
About the Author
Rieko Matsuura was born in Matsuyama, Japan, in 1958, and graduated from Aoyama Gakuin University with a BA in French literature. She debuted as a writer in 1978, while still in college, with "The Day of the Funeral", a short story that won that year's Bungakukai Prize for New Writers. Since then, she has published six works of fiction and three essay collections - among them Natural Woman (1987), a series of three related novell as exploring lesbian love; The Apprenticeship of Big Toe P (1993), a bestseller that won the Women's Literature Prize, Japan's most prestigious literary award for women writers; and A Dog's Body (2007), about the intimate but nonsexual relationship between a woman with "species identity disorder" who turns into a dog, and her friend-turned-owner.
The Apprenticeship of Big Toe P is Matsuura's first novel to be translated into English.
THE TRANSLATOR
Michael Emmerich has translated eleven books from Japanese by authors including Banana Yoshimoto, Yasunari Kawabata, and Gen'ichiro Takahashi. He teaches Japanese literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
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