Alternate title: "Male Characters in Search of Female Characters who Can Force them to Get out of their Daily Routine and Finally Evolve"
Men Without Women is a familiar, easily identifiable, and oddly comforting book for the Murakami reader, privileging the emotional landscape of lonely Japanese men through scaffolding characterization, personal idiosyncrasy, and monkey-wrench narratives instead of dramatic Hollywood plot lines, food porn, or cultural didacticism.
Read MoreFew things push plot lines as well as vengeance in drama and leveling up in RPGs, which is why Dishonored 2, despite its many flaws, integrates plot, adventure, and history effortlessly into a unified field, centering its narrative on the propulsive quest of assassination and personal redemption. Much like Victorian morality in the nineteenth century, this game is a Manichean fantasy world of good and evil.
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The Western canon has no objective nomination process, which is why it is both axiomatic and controversial. Literature written by (and often for) white writers is still treated as classic, crucial, and central to our literary archive, codifying a clear but tacit anglonormativity. But why have APIA voices been erased from the so-called “Great Books” for so long, and how should APIA writers respond to this longstanding erasure?
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The Sympathizer forces readers of Asian American Pacific Islander (APIA) literary fiction to reconsider our own craft dogma and ask questions about the value of literary didacticism all over again: when is didactic literature useful, even necessary, and what purposes can it serve in our society as art, historiography, and also racial, cultural, and moral education?
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According to the rules of the feminist thriller novel Out, murder becomes its own infinite regress.
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Noctis (and His Boy Band) Save the World from Darkness by Killing Shit
Only in a Japanese RPG can a boy band save the world from the nefarious empire and its demonic biotechnological army. In Final Fantasy XV, four male friends led by its visual kei leader, Noctis (whose name means “night” in Latin), use the empire’s language of violence to decolonize the kingdom of darkness. Somewhere, Fanon’s ghost is drinking sake and smoking Peace cigarettes in celebration.
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Where literary and cultural analysis get a face lift
I got the great news recently that I'll be blogging for Ploughshares for 2017, focusing on APIA literature, gender constructions, and video games as literature, among other things.
After a concentrated two weeks where LB and I saw both our families back to back, I'm finally getting back in the groove with my writing, revising, and submissions. And today I've realized that I'm going all out.
Recently, a bunch of my friends have been getting agents, then two-book contracts, thereby fundamentally changing their literary careers in the span of literally one year. A boy can only dream . . . Of course, because I'm human, I've been waiting by the phone too for the same phone call, waiting for the same miracle to magically transform my writing career into a solid object, but so far, I've been mostly stood up by publishing industry (literary journals have been much kinder to me). Agents are happy to tell me how talented I am, but their rejections are always about the fit. Truthfully, it's hard not to feel bad about yourself, especially when you stroll through the local bookstore and you see straight up shit on the coop. But I'm an eternal optimist, obviously delusional, and also very stubborn, so I'm not giving up. Not when I'm so close.
This leads me to the whole point I was making before I digressed earlier. Now that I'm back in action, I'm going all out, man. I'm submitting queries for NINJAS to a bunch of new agents soon (I'm still waiting to hear from three agents who are reading full manuscripts, but the longer time passes, the less hopeful I get). If Kaya rejects AMNESIA (they're taking their sweetass time, by the way), I'll send a query for it to fifty agents the next week. I just sent out several novella manuscripts to Plougshares and the Massachusetts Review. I'm also sending one of my best (and fave) short stories to several literary journals. Lastly, I'm sending my memoir to a few indie presses that I think would be a good fit aesthetically, conceptually, and structurally. Instead of staggering my submissions as I was forced to do during the school year, I'm now going full force. And that's not even including a screenplay I'll start revising/continuing this weekend about two bike messengers in DTLA.
And it don't stop . . .