This novel about a young woman who wakes up to find that her big toe has become a penis was a major bestseller in Japan, and it’s easy to see why. The book is titillating, disturbing without being disgusting, and reads like a self-help guide on the subjects of sex and love.
The Apprenticeship of Big Toe P, by Rieko Matsuura. Translated by Michael Emmerich, Kodansha International, 447 pages, $24.95
Reviewed by Tommy Wallach
“He stretched himself. He rose. He stood upright in complete nakedness before us, and while the trumpets pealed Truth! Truth! Truth! we have no choice left but confess—he was a woman.”
With this short paragraph, Virginia Woolf introduced us to perhaps the most famous transgendered person in all of English literature: Orlando. “Orlando” is a fantastical reinterpretation of the life of Vita-Sackville West, Woolf’s friend and lover, told in the style of a swashbuckling romance. Midway through the book, the lothario Orlando falls into a coma and wakes up as a woman. In spite of the many ordeals she experiences in her reincarnation as a member of the fairer sex (including almost killing a man who is distracted by her shapely ankles), Orlando concludes, like Tiresias before her, that being a woman is a hell of a lot better than being a man.
The protagonist of Rieko Matsuura’s “The Apprenticeship of Big Toe P,” first published in Japan in 1993, comes to much the same conclusion, though by a far more didactic route. Kazumi is an ordinary twenty-two year old girl with a boring boyfriend and a passionate dedication to heterosexuality, until the morning she wakes up to discover the big toe of her right foot has become a penis. Her boyfriend breaks up with her, disgusted, and Kazumi immediately takes up with Shunji, the blind, piano-playing synaesthete next door. Soon after, the two of them join a traveling performance art troupe called The Flower Show.
Every member of The Flower Show has some kind of sexual deformity. Tomatsu’s penis actually belongs to his headless Siamese twin. Yukie has a set of teeth in her vagina. Aiko develops a painful skin rash whenever aroused. Kazumi travels with this band of outsiders on a few tours, dabbling in everything from lesbianism to threesomes to public sex. The bildungsroman concludes, disappointingly, with her return to a typical dyad with Shunji.
“The Apprenticeship of Big Toe P” was a major bestseller in Japan, and it’s easy to see why. The book is titillating, disturbing without being disgusting, and reads like a self-help guide on the subjects of sex and love. Though the majority of these advice nuggets are old news, a few merit the considerable page space Matsuura devotes to them: “But when I started teasing one part of Eiko’s body, I lost sight of the whole…before long, I began to feel that this whole process, trying one little trick after another in an effort to get a good response from the woman I loved, was no more than a kind of game.” Her argument that sex, friendship, and romance can’t ever be fully separated is thought-provoking, if not entirely convincing.
Matsuura has written many times about the various manifestations of love. Her book “Natural Woman” is a series of three novellas on the subject of lesbianism. More recently, she wrote “A Dog’s Body.” about the 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 at its best when Matsuura gives her philosophical interest in the subject of love free reign. For example, though Kazumi does eventually end up in a monogamous heterosexual relationship, her homosexual breakthrough is painted as a logical epiphany, rather than a romantic one:
“How much did it mean, though, to say that Eiko and I were the same sex? We both had XX chromosomes, we both had female genitals, and out bodies weren’t different the way men’s and women’s were. But those commonalities seemed utterly insignificant compared to the fact that she and I were completely different individuals living different lives, with two separate physical bodies, and different sensibilities and ways of thinking. I put my hand on Eiko’s breast, and sure enough, it was different from mine in volume and shape…Eiko didn’t seem any more similar to me as a human being than Masao or Shunji.
Once I grew comfortable with the idea that it made no sense to set up distinctions based solely on how the sexes were paried in a couple—between homosexual love and heterosexual love—and that I had been rejecting same-sex love for no reason I could have articulated, everything became extremely, elegantly clear.”
Though some might argue that Matsuura is arguing against a biological basis for homosexuality, her thesis is actually far more revolutionary. She seems to believe that all of us are inherently pansexual, and only cultural mores keep us from exploring the boundaries of our ability to love.
Author Rieko Matsuura: Caught between story and message
Still, there’s a reason that gender studies textbooks are kept separate from fiction books on the shelves. Matsuura doesn’t seem to have ever gotten the whole “show, don’t tell” memo, and is constantly pausing the action so that Kazumi can expatiate for three or four pages on her emotional state. Here, we see her grappling with a recent sex dream about a woman: “It came as a blow, however, to have to accept that in my dream I quite enjoyed what Eiko and I were doing. That morning in Hakone, I was disgusted with myself for masturbating while fantasizing about Eiko’s hand; I swore I would never again indulge in such perverted pleasures. And yet now, less than a week later, I had been swept up in a similarly sick dream.”
In the hands of a creative translator, these musings could at least have been invested with a bit of personality, but Michael Emmerich fails to rise to the task. The very first page sets the stage for another four hundred and forty-six full of clichés (“mad dash”), useless adverbs (“timidly,” “neatly,” “slightly,” and “shyly” in three lines), and distracting grammatical lapses. Worse than bland, Emmerich’s dialogue is woefully inappropriate, considering the characters’ ages and the situations they find themselves in.
“What Tomatsu did last night was really the pits…” Kazumi says to Eiko, Tomatsu’s girlfriend, referring to the fact that Tomatsu raped Eiko onstage with Kazumi’s toe-penis. Ignoring the wild absurdity of the situation, I’m not sure I’ve heard anyone say “the pits” in my entire life, and certainly no one still living.
“Apprenticeship” may not be a bad book, but it’s not a very good novel. Matsuura’s imagination is limitless, but she’s yet to learn how to channel her best ideas into a plot. In the same way that Kazumi is caught between male and female, Matsuura is caught between story and message. “I know that this thing of mine isn’t a man’s penis,” Kazumi says. “It’s mine, for god’s sake! But men like you invest the penis with all kinds of ideas of ‘male dignity’ and your own personal narcissism, even though when you get right down to it the penis is just another bodily organ.” Sure, it’s a lesson that needs to be taught, but that doesn’t make it a story that needs to be told.
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