Abstract

“People Who Talk to Stuffed Animals Are Nice” (98 pages)
#gender #feminism #love #anxiety

Mugito hasn’t been coming to classes lately, and Nanamori is worried. The two friends are both members of the plushie club at their university, but he hasn’t seen her there, either. The club is officially about collecting and crafting stuffed animals, but in reality, members turn to the plushies for emotional support. The rule is that you put on headphones when someone is talking to an animal. Nanamori doesn’t talk to them, but Mugito does, and he wonders if she can really hear their voices.
Nanamori has never had a girlfriend. In high school, a girl burst into tears when he couldn’t return her feelings, which left him anxious about hurting someone. Still, he wants to try this thing everyone else does. Eager to protect his friendship with Mugito, he asks another club member, Shiraki, out. She agrees, and more than anything, he’s happy he hasn’t made her uncomfortable; still, it doesn’t last long because it’s obvious he’s not into her in that way. She also makes anti-feminist comments that stress Nanamori out. He can’t understand why she would simply accept a misogynistic status quo.
The plushie club decides to create some stuffed animals for the school festival. Shiraki makes one called Cotton Ball and Nanamori makes one called Ghosty. Shiraki says she’s in another club with an atmosphere that isn’t as warm and safe as the plushie club, but she won’t quit even though she has to put up with stupid comments from the guys; she doesn’t want to get too comfortable, since the real world isn’t safe.
A few weeks later, Nanamori goes to Mugito’s house to deliver notes from their shared classes. When he arrives at her place, Mugito tells him how she witnessed a pervert touching a woman on a train, and it frightened her so viscerally, in a way hearing about incidents indirectly never did. She could no longer handle being around people. That was when she started hearing the stuffed animals’ voices.
Nanamori tries talking to Ghosty. He worries that he only identifies with Mugito’s pain in order to absolve himself of responsibility as a man, whose presence alone could scare someone.
When he goes home for his Coming of Age ceremony, his parents’ old-fashioned gender roles upset him. He’s not sure he can call his dad out, but he leads by example, helping his mom with the housework, and his dad takes notice of her thanking him.
When he goes out with old classmates after the ceremony, he realizes that he feels separated from his former friends. They haven’t changed. One rudely assumes Nanamori is gay because he evades questions about girlfriends, and it makes Nanamori physically ill.
When he returns to Kyoto, he’s so disturbed by everything that he can’t go to class. He can’t go anywhere. When Mugito comes to check on him, he’s finally able to let out everything he’s been feeling. They agree they want to be partners in a way that doesn’t have to be defined by romance, necessarily.
Nanamori returns to school. A new boy comes to the club room one day, clearly upset. Nanamori invites him in and says he’ll listen to whatever the boy is feeling, or if that is too much, he’s welcome to talk to a stuffed animal. Shiraki thinks Mugito and Nanamori are too kind for their own good; she doesn’t talk to stuffed animals.

“Realizing the Fun Things Through Water” (24 pages)
#marriage #fakenews

Hatsuoka’s soon-to-be mother-in-law sends her a case of “hyper-organization water” and tells her that talking to it—only about happy things—is good for it, and will increase its cancer-preventing properties. Despite knowing that’s bullshit, she talks to it anyways and finds that the more she talks, the more good things she remembers.
Hatsuoka is somewhat reluctant to get married. She doesn’t want to quit her part-time job or move in with her husband. She wants to wait for her sister to return to the house they lived in together before the girl’s disappearance. The pressure of becoming family and changing expectations also frustrates her.
Her sister, Hinata, was a writer of fake news by trade. It was hard for her to hold a normal job, so despite feeling guilty about misinforming people, she tried to at least write well. At the end of the story, Hatsuoka hears from her for the first time in two years.

“Bath Towel Footage” (14 pages)
#standupcomedy #politicalcorrectness #ghosting

A woman who has a nostalgic urge to become a ghost under large bath towels goes to see her brother’s comedy duo show and is creeped out by a joke about feminism. Everyone else laughs, but she finds it repulsive. When she tells her boyfriend, he laughs, which makes her so upset that she puts money on the table and leaves the café they were at while he’s in the bathroom. He sends 995 LINE messages in one night that begin with worry, but gradually escalate to anger and threats, so she decides to cut him off. Later her brother brings the guy to their family home, and she pretends to be asleep when he expresses how worried he was about her. She’s moved, but doesn’t want to have complicated feelings about the kind of person who would treat her the way he did…

“Hello, Thank You, I’m Okay” (31 pages)
#hikikomori #friendship

Marumi is the only person allowed in her hikikomori brother’s room in their house on top of a precipitous cliff. When he suddenly announces to her and their parents that he wants to have a birthday party with friends, they all wonder who these friends are; he can’t have made them online because they don’t get service. Their dad is out picking up the cake when the friends arrive…except they’re invisible. Marumi and their mom do their best to go along with it, but when their dad returns, he’s having none of it.
Marumi’s brother starts wrapping himself in tape and says he’s going to go where his friends are. One day he vanishes, but a new brother appears in his place. Marumi is alarmed, but accepts his presence as a sort of tape being. Marumi has this daydream that if a large group of people were to stand on the balcony, the house would tip off the cliff. On her birthday, she invites her classmates over and just that catastrophe is about to happen. Her parents rush back into the house to balance it out, Marumi can tell her brother and his friends are trying to help. The tape brother can’t hold his body together well any longer, but Marumi gets him to run after her parents with her.

Author’s Information

Born 1992 in Hyogo Prefecture. Hailed in Japan as a rising star of gender-conscious literature since the 2020 publication of the　collection detailed below, he debuted in 2016 with a short story that was eventually included in the 2018 collection Kaitengusa (Tumbleweed). In 2019, he released a collection of flash fiction called Watashi to wani to imōto no heya (A room for a crocodile, my sister, and me), and his 2017 digital-only collection is Nokemonodomono. Akutagawa-winner Ryohei Machiya has called him “a shooting star pinging rapidly between the poles of beauty and pain.”