Well, this is a gooey one.
Somewhere, deep in space, there is a something floating around. It’s a fleshy something, all full of blood and juices, and it’s alive, or maybe it’s a collection of living things. Within the fleshy something there are other somethings, far smaller. They have lives, and jobs, and they go about their duties rigorously. Some clean the external organs of vast, rumbling entities called ‘bosses’ or ‘CEOs’, others are detectives investigating the spontaneous dismemberment of strange corpses, while still others have to run away from girls all the time so they don’t get parasites (aka. ‘babies’) injected into their abdomens. These smaller somethings struggle with feelings of inadequacy, hopelessness and chronic depression. Do their lives have meaning? Once, maybe, these somethings were called ‘Human Beings’…but that was a long time ago. Things have changed since then.
So this is odd. It’s sorta science fiction, sorta fantasy, sorta a messy horror show as dreamed up by David Cronenberg after a night of eating too much stale cheese. The novel is really a series of novellas, each focusing in on a particular character/entity, and describing their daily routines. Sometimes those routines are interrupted by adventure and disaster, sometimes not.
This really is a unique work, but your enjoyment of it will depend a lot on your patience. Torishima’s prose is largely devoted to intimate descriptions of how these creatures FUNCTION, how their bodes work (or, in some, cases, don’t work) and the hows and wherefores of the world they live in. This means there are paragraphs after paragraphs about how a digestive system does its business, or how you can accidentally be ingested by the brain of a client, or how the social standing of a symbiotic species can be impacted by a romantic tryst, or or or…
Yes, so this book is choked with description, and much of it borders on incomprehensible. But, yeah, there’s nothing else like it. Torishima’s surreal illustrations help bring the world to life, and for those of you willing to wade through strange, foul-smelling substances in order to find a bit of treasure, this is well worth a look. Me like books.
Me Like Books 