Vibrator by Mari Akasaka

Review by Elizabeth Wadell
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Alcoholism, Bulimia, Consumerism, Depression: Mari Akasaka’s short novel Vibrator reads like a virtual primer of 21st-century decadence and malaise. An immediate hit when it was published in Japan in 2000, it touches all the bases (women’s magazines, consumer culture, high school prostitution, gangs, and drugs are all analyzed), yet it is definitely more than just a portrait of youth anomie. Vibrator is disturbing because it refuses to truly indict anything, fascinating because it manages to be both repellant and intelligent. Ultimately, it feels timeless, or rather outside time, like a truck moving along a snowy highway at night, surrounded by falling snowflakes and with only the vibrating hum of a motor to break the silence and mark the passage of time.

Vibrator is narrated in an intense first-person by Rei Hayakawa, a self-loathing 31-year-old Tokyo journalist with an alcohol problem, an eating disorder, and too many crazy voices in her head. Late one night she wanders the aisle of her local convenience store, picking up the night’s supply of alcohol (white wine and gin). Yet when she turns the corner and sees Okabe, a 26-year-old trucker and ex-thug in overalls and yellow boots, she wordlessly follows him out to his long-haul truck, thus starting their eventual journey up and down a cold, snowy Japan.

It isn’t easy to spend 155 pages inside Rei’s head. Nothing is neutral here; everything is filtered through her self-hatred. She is locked inside her depression, unable to cross the gulf separating herself from the outer world, unable to let her voice out or even to empathize with others. At the same time, she feels isolated from herself and obsesses constantly over what exactly I is. She insists at one point that “I’m made of other people’s feelings” and at another declares that she was afraid that she would become “stuck to the background,” unable to find her own perimeter. Her words are not her own; as a schoolgirl,

My uniform looked no different from before, but underneath there was a place like a hole, and that hole was me. I’d draw people’s words into that hole and then cut them up and paste them back together.

Rei’s own identity is split among many alienated parts that refuse to work in concert. When she leaves the convenience store, she is literally paralyzed: “[W]hen I attempted to make my feet move, my fingers might start twitching or something—the commands and the actions were getting muddled.” This clearly parallels the many competing voices in her head that constantly vie for her attention and seem ready to spin her identity apart. Absolutely everything must be second-guessed, question, analyzed, and dissected all the way down to the cellular level.

After listening to the relentless chatter of these voices that dart around Rei’s head, the sparse moments of dialogue are a welcome break. At least here the different aspects of Rei are momentarily united for as long as takes to utter something; as she says, “When I’m having a conversation with someone, the voices become still, sedated.” For the reader, the spoken words seem more silence than sound in the way they cut through the voices. Rei’s speech is relatively shallow, rarely touching on what she’s thinking; we experience both Rei’s relief that communication, however shallow, can occur and the fact of how elusive communication really is.

We only know Okabe through the brief moments of dialogue and Rei’s impressions, which are clearly suspect. Nonetheless, it seems safe to say that he has accepted his life in the way she has not. A high school dropout and former gang member who had been imprisoned for blackmail, he is also a married man and father. He accepts, even relishes, his split lives on the road and at home, as long as the two selves remain apart.

Okabe is not only perfectly comfortable within his own body but also with how his body fits with the world. While Rei is trapped inside her skin, Okabe’s body and sense of self expand to include the entire truck. Rei strokes the fuzzy seat when she cannot touch him, and admires his seemingly effortless control of the giant vehicle. He is “an independent,” working for no one, but firmly placed within a network of stops, always with a new destination on his agenda. Whereas Rei’s body is a fragile nothing, Okabe has a definite place in the world.

The name Vibrator at first suggests sex¹, but the title really refers to the truck’s constant vibrations, as Okabe leaves the engine on, night and day, driving or parked, to warm them in the cold March snow. Here in the cab of the truck, these vibrations just might jolt Rei back to life. She says, “In the midst of the vibrations, I could make out my heartbeat.”

Why do these two isolated people connect? Perhaps the answer comes from the most powerful metaphor in the book, the CB radio. As Okabe explains to Rei, the radio receives signals almost randomly. Sometimes the most powerful signals come from people that “aren’t that close. It’s just that their signals are really strong.” When Okabe receives a signal from far-off Hokkaido, he exclaims, “Man—that’s not something you get too often!” If it’s a miracle that communication occurs at all, it doesn’t matter how inane the truckers’ words actually are. There’s no reason why Rei and Okabe are together. They just happened to get each other’s signals and formed a fragile connection in this place and time. Two people reaching out in a lonely world catching each other’s signals, waves, vibrations. For them, that’s enough.

Vibrator starts as a critique of contemporary consumer culture and the violence and isolation in breeds; after Rei and Okabe connect, however, the story moves from social critique toward a more personal, poignant tale. Throughout, the ugliness of being inside Rei’s head keeps us at a distance while simultaneously drawing us into her own sensations. Full of subtle connections, Vibrator is an interesting, intellectual book, but not necessarily pleasant to read; in short, it is the kind of small book that flawlessly accomplishes its limited vision.

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¹Indeed, masturbation plays a big role in the sex scenes, and the characters’ obvious isolation suggests that perhaps their intercourse is really masturbatory rather than a real communion.

Elizabeth Wadell is a contributing editor to The Quarterly Conversation. Read her interview with Vibrator translator
Michael Emmerich from Issue 1.

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