Rei Hayakawa, a deeply lonely, bulimic freelance writer with a drinking problem, wanders through a convenience store. She's swaddled in her coat and scarf, her thoughts – of alienation, of hunger, of the need for gin and white wine – drifting in via stream-of-consciousness. A trucker walks in, deliberately grazes her behind with his hand, and Rei's cell phone, set on vibrate, goes off over her heart. Rei gets into Okabe's truck with him – and stays. Suddenly she finds herself embarking on a road journey across the wintry landscape of Japan aboard this stranger's longhaul truck. But can the physical relationship that develops between them offer Rei what she needs, and can she ever free herself from the dangerously self-destructive tendencies that afflict her? Though both parties are initially guarded and distant, they ultimately begin to trust and confide in one another. What begins as a carnal pick-up becomes something more meaningful and transforming.

Vibrator explores the duality between the intimacy of the truck cab and each character's yearning for the independence and freedom of the open road, between being haunted by one's history and the fear of forging a new one.

Akasaka gives Rei a vibrant complexity. She constantly hears voices – her own dark thoughts, schoolyard taunts, her mother's cruelty – but also has a deep capacity for joy, a warm curiosity. The couple grapple together, fighting, probing, speaking little but saying volumes, droning on, and sleeping together in scenes that are astonishing in their emotional impact.

The book is unflinchingly, almost mercilessly, clear-eyed in its assessment of emotional transformation. But it also holds out redemption – in the impossible golden light of an early morning, in halting words over noodles, and in the warm hum of a truck cab looking out over the wide open road.

Mari Akasaka lives in Toyko, Japan. Winner of the Noma Literature Prize for best new writer in 2000, she is the author of three novels, of which Vibrator was made into a film in 2003. She spent much of her adolescence in the United States.

Michael Emmerich is the translator of ten books from Japanese, including Yasunari Kawabata's First Snow on Fuji; Banana Yoshimoto's Asleep, Goodbye Tsugumi, and Hard Boiled/Hardluck; and Genichiro Takahashi's Sayonara, Gangsters.

I kept cursing quietly to myself as I wandered up and down the merchandise-lined aisles of Family Mart, doing nothing. Did it please me to think I’d become a bigger name—was that why I liked being referred to as a "journalist" now, when in the past I’d just been a "reporter"? Did I think in the long run it would be good for me to step into the limelight now? I used to go around ringing the doorbells of people who had suffered some kind of tragedy—I’d stand there asking the relatives, "Can you tell me how it feels?"—that’s the kind of work I was doing , but then I started dealing with issues like high-school prostitutes (call them what you like, they’re still prostitutes) and AIDS and junkies and the homeless and aid for the homeless and juvenile drug dealers and organ transplants and brain death, the pros and cons of cloning. And when I started dealing with that stuff, approaching it all from my own particular perspective, my name started attracting the attention of a particular crowd. Yeah, and then one day it happened, it crashed down over me like thunder, like the revelations I used to have when I was drinking, and I thought: This is it, girl, this is the major break you’ve been waiting for! I had been invited to participate in a panel discussion by a well-known women’s magazine.

The topic under discussion was "What Makes Teenage Boys Snap?" Young males, particularly guys in junior high school, had been committing murders and other violent crimes fairly regularly in the wake of a brutal killing and other attacks carried out by a fourteen-year-old from Kobe—crimes that gave the distinct impression that they were intended to convey some kind of message. For a women’s fashion magazine to be putting together a special issue on a subject like this, either the topic had to be really hot or the magazine had to be really short on ideas for feature articles. This magazine usually used photographers known for doing a good job with people. Since I was sort of involved with mass media myself, I knew that. The thing is, there are photographers who work well with objects, and photographers who work well with people, and the magazine uses them accordingly. So the guys who take pictures of people are the guys who take good pictures of people. Right. But even so, three days before the panel, I had already decided that I needed to look as good as possible in the photos. I would definitely have to give up vomiting, that was for sure, because it shows in your skin. But as soon as I started thinking like that, the stress of being strictly forbidden to vomit kept me awake at night, so I took to drinking cocktails of sleeping pills and booze and my face became all puffy.

I have to look good for the camera.

Not too many options were available to me in terms of strategy. I decided to go with the image of the eccentric who doesn’t really like making appearances of this sort but is able to think on her feet once she’s in a heated discussion. My eyes were so swollen and they had such huge bags under them that I had no choice but to cover them with a pair of light purple sunglasses, so I made these the core around which I coordinated my entire outfit. My perm was starting to grow out, but I did a good job curling my hair and made it spiral like it had in the beginning, and I wore a hat to keep readers from being distracted by my skin. My hair had a lot of body, and the way it fanned out under the edge of my tight hat was just perfect, the balance was exactly right—even I was impressed. Listen, say what you like, this is a fashion magazine we’re talking about here.

You have to wonder what they had in mind when they selected the participants, though. A fifty-something university professor whose field was philosophy; some television personality who had just turned twenty; and me. These were the three faces that came together that day: one guy who’s able to look at the big picture, a girl who’s almost the same age as the kids in question, and one woman who believes in going to the scene. I could see what they were aiming for by bringing us together, but somehow it gave me a bad feeling. The editor was a pretty woman in her late twenties who didn’t seem very connected to everyday life; the photographer was a man in his twenties. He had a kid’s face and a moustache.

Every time the photographer snapped a picture of me while I was talking, I’d lose my concentration and be unable to say anything that had any meaning whatsoever. I felt as if his gaze could penetrate my skin. Stop doing that, stop looking through me that way—that far. Don’t look at my heart. Use a strobe to make my face seem smoother; my skin looks so terrible, the epidermis is totally desiccated, all this is going to show up just as it is in real life, just as rough. Don’t take my picture in natural light. Use a strobe, make me look good. Actually, my skin is so rough it might diffuse more light. Who knows, maybe it’ll make my skin tone appear more even. I heard the snap of the shutter. When I have to keep worrying about having my picture taken like this, it feels as if some large fraction of my nerves are being physically torn out of my body. I’m not imagining it—I stop being able to focus. All the little bumps on my skin break themselves down into smaller bumps; I start to feel the surface of my body is the entire world. So, as the differential becomes smaller and smaller, as the unit of measurement decreases, the integral, which is to say my surface area, increases—is that how is goes? Wow, I get it! All of a sudden I felt like slapping my knee: for the first time in my life, I understood differentials and integrals. A flash of slight sliced through my head. And then, just as I realized that this really wasn’t the right time to be thinking about such things—

"And what’s your view?"

The ball has been tossed back into my court. The camera turns my way. I get my face ready and hold it for a moment, then let it go and start talking.

"I think—"

Just an instant of motion, that’s really all it is—a blurred instant as far as I’m concerned—that’s what the camera responds to. No matter how hard I work to get the timing right, the finger that snaps the shutter responds only to the blur. The room has a nice feel to it—there’s a huge window and it’s bright, the afternoon is bright—so the cameraman refuses to shoot with anything but natural light. Hey, come on, I’m begging you here, would you please use a strobe, use a strobe to make the blemishes fade, and while you’re at it, do me a favor and make my consciousness fade, too.

Will you use a fucking flash!

The photographer went on shooting with natural light.


"Sometimes, when you're out shopping or something, you start to feel cornered, you know, even though you’re supposed to be having fun. Even after you buy something, the media still keep after you, keep trying to egg you on. 'Hey, it's time for a change! Product X will open up a whole new world of possibilities!' and so on. They keep after you until you start thinking that maybe this new product really is better. So the objects you buy start losing their appeal the moment you’ve bought them. Sometimes I just toss stuff aside when I get home without even bothering to open the bag. And ever since I was a teenager, every time people ask me how much something cost, I always tell them a price lower than it actually was. Because I just hate myself for having bought the thing. Where does this hatred come from? The ads and me, we’re only acting according to principals of the market, right, and it seems to me that in contemporary society, the principal principles are those of the market. That’s all I’m doing, just acting on the principles."

Shit. I’ve just blurted out a load of stuff that no one will follow unless they see it written down.