The world of Innocent World
is anything but innocent. Ami Sakurai’s novella is a story of a nihilistic
seventeen-year-old’s improbable and violent sexual life, and the emergence of
the main character into a grotesque adulthood. The protagonist is Ami,
suggesting a biographical theme to the story, but you wouldn’t wish this
biography on anyone. The story is set in Tokyo, where Ami lives with her
parents and her mentally handicapped brother, Takuyi. Ami works for the
Telephux escort service where she provides soulless sex for paying clients. She
leads a double life, as do her contemporaries, attending an exclusive school
and working for Telephux in the evenings. Her understandably protective
feelings for Takuyi lead the pair into a sexual relationship that they maintain
through various ruses on Ami’s part. As the pressure of maintaining their
relationship mounts, Ami searches her mother’s drawers for the bankbook that
will allow her access to money left to her by her grandfather. But what she
finds, while it explains certain childhood experiences, sends her life spinning
in a new direction, one that leads her to new depths. Teenage stories are often
about self-discovery, and Innocent World
is true to that formula. But it is what Ami discovers, and how she responds to
it that makes this novella disturbingly different.

 The story is powerfully told,
although it would be hard to say it’s well written. The manic world of
Saukurai’s Tokyo is well evoked and the first half is well enough crafted to
cover some of the unlikely and distasteful plot elements, but in the second
half it gets a bit silly, with dramatic events resolved in half a sentence, and
major characters wheeled in, exploited for whatever can be gained from them,
then summarily dismissed. And the emotional impact of traumatic events is
limited to what suits Sakurai’s convenience as an author. It’s always helpful
to be able to identify with, or at least sympathize with, at least one of the
characters of a story, even if that’s achieved vicariously through another
character. But Sakurai makes this hard work, as she seems in the end to have
fairly limited feeling even for the vulnerable Takuyi.

I’ve read that Innocent World
challenges traditional notions of female sexuality. That would be a pretty poor
excuse for this moral trainwreck of a novella, if it weren’t for the fact that
the main character at least contests her status as victim, even if not totally
successfully. At times the story seems little removed from a pornographic video
game, one in which the victims die, or at least suffer injury and indignity
only to pop up again the next time you log on. There may be some point in using
literature to capture images and ideas that are otherwise confined to the
Internet and DVD games. A book like this is going to polarize opinion, but
moral responses to Ami (the character’s) life, or to Ami (the writer’s) story,
shouldn’t detract from the fact that Innocent
World fails in literary terms. It is just not well enough written to carry
its message. 

©
2005 Tony O’Brien

Tony O’Brien is a short story writer and lecturer in mental health
nursing at The University of Auckland, New Zealand: a.obrien@auckland.ac.nz

Categories: Fiction