Imperfect Girl: Alone with the past, together within a locked-room

Essentially, people live in one of two ways. Either they live in awareness of their own worthlessness, or they live in awareness of the worthlessness of the world. Two ways. Either you allow your value to be absorbed by the world, or you chisel away at the world’s value and make it your own.

Decapitation — Kubikiri Cycle, Nisio, Isin’s debut novel

It took me ten years to write this review.

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They weren’t novels by an author. They were novels by an aspiring author. Okay then, you might ask me, what’s the difference between an author and an aspiring author? Well, an author is a creator of tales. The way I see it, that’s what separates the two. An author creates tales. But an aspiring author lies and nothing more.

Imperfect Girl

Massive spoilers for Imperfect Girl below

Imperfect Girl (Shoujo Fujuubun) is a Japanese mystery novel written by Nisio, Isin and published by Kodansha Novels in 2011. It was subsequently adapted into a three volume manga by Mitsuru Hattori which was serialised in Kodansha’s Weekly Young Magazine between 2015 and 2016. This adapted version was then translated and released into English markets by Vertical Comics, a subsidiary of Kodansha USA, between 2017 and 2018. Insomuch as this is a “review”, it is predominantly of that English manga version, so please read that before continuing.

It tells the story of Kakimoto, a university student and aspiring mystery author who has repeatedly had his novel submissions rejected. His only talents are writing quickly, and putting together self-indulgently complex mystery plots. As Kakimoto slumbers through life, convinced that he will never amount of anything, he encounters the little girl known as U U — who later names herself as Yuu Yuugure. The experiences he gains after becoming deeply intimate with the particulars of her life leads to Kakimoto eventually becoming a successful, published author.

The story is told in the style of autobiographical fiction, or perhaps heightened memoir, with various concrete details of Kakimoto’s life mirroring Nisio’s own time in university before he achieved publication — even as the events shown around Yuu’s life are clearly fictional. And it is one of the most gripping and affecting pieces of fiction I have ever encountered.

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Children abuse weaklings and liars. They ostracise the heterodox… When I was in high school, I felt like I was surrounded by aliens. When we took exams, nobody shot for a perfect grade, they shot for the average. If we ran a marathon, they would say, ‘Hey, let’s all run together!’ Tests where no answer is outright wrong. It’s egalitarian, for better or for worse. No wonder they’re teaching that pi equals three… It’s the tragedy of 0.14. When you’re thoroughly egalitarian, the outliers who are excluded even then get to taste true isolation. Genius comes of heterodoxy. But not all outcasts are geniuses.

Decapitation — Kubikiri Cycle, Nisio, Isin’s debut novel

So long as you don’t cause trouble for others, supposedly, you’ll be allowed to behave however you want. But of course, as far as society’s concerned, if you’re an outsider who’s unable to blend in some people consider that enough to count as “causing trouble.” I’m constantly trying to show that I understand this fact, so please, won’t you please pardon me for that? If I ever tried to blend in, if I ever did something as overambitious as trying to get along with everyone… I’d only end up causing even more trouble. That’s something every outsider knows.

Imperfect Girl

A past alone

At some point in her life, Yuu Yuugure found that she was completely and utterly alone. It was according to no one’s intentions in particular. Though, if we were assigning blame, I suppose it would land mostly at the feet of her parents. There was not one single moment where Yuu’s life went off the rails, but it had eventually gotten to the point where she was told by her parents to live by a rule as cruel as “never let anyone know who you really are.” That was the canary in the coalmine in a lot of ways; it was a white flag flying out from the trenches. At her parents’ surrender, Yuu was told that she must live in this world without ever letting another person understand her. Even if she could manage the minimum in social decency, she had been commanded to struggle on in life completely on her own.

Imperfect Girl is not a story about heroes or heroines. It has nothing but contempt for the scolding attitude of what it might call “normal” stories, of the kind where good people learn to be better people by virtue of their goodness. Yuu doesn’t have the strength to take the fate of the world on her shoulders or save the galaxy. At the end of the day, she can’t even keep following her one signpost in life — the rules her parents left her. Our story begins because Yuu breaks the most essential of these rules: Yuu lets Kakimoto know who she really is. Once again, it was according to no one’s intentions in particular. It was a secret Yuu intended to keep to herself for the rest of her life. However, Imperfect Girl used this incident to affirm a surprising truth: Maybe those who are too weak to live on their own are still strong enough to save each other. Perhaps when Yuu accidentally stopped being alone, it was enough to save her.

Suppressing the urge to vomit, clutching her own heart─
Forcing those reluctant legs to keep moving, lashing at her own fear-ridden soul─
With that heart much too fragile for living─
Enduring the anguish of the depths of hell─
She’d come up to where I was? Casting all things aside… For me.

Decapitation — Kubikiri Cycle, Nisio, Isin’s debut novel

Kakimoto is a very weak person. Even as he gives off the appearance of strength through stubbornness and arrogance at times, this is all the result of a fundamental weakness. Although it isn’t much, it takes a small amount of strength of will to simply stop in place and accomplish nothing. The weakness that Kakimoto displays is so severe he can’t even overcome the inertia of his life; so he keeps repeating the same mistakes, unable to break out of a cycle of failure.

Although Kakimoto never suffered the kind of trauma that Yuu has, he is still deeply alone. He long ago drove off all real human connections with his own eccentricities and stubbornness. So, he continues to write soulless novels at an outrageous speed, thinking (hoping) that it is just a matter of time before he is recognised as the genius he wants to believe that he is. However, so long as he continues to insist on being alone, he will never be a novelist. Novels are written for others to read, but Kakimoto’s “imitations of novels” are only written for the sake of demonstrating his own abilities to himself.

In reality, Kakimoto doesn’t have the power to save anyone, not even a little girl. At every turn during his imprisonment he is driven by fear, and desires to simply run away. However, his weakness doesn’t even let him do that much. Driven by inertia, he sits still in the closet, remarking that he should at least get some material for his novels from this incident. He never does find any “material”. All he finds is a girl who has been abandoned by the selfishness of her parents, with no one left to save her. Kakimoto never once finds the strength to believe he could save her, but he does realise that he is weak enough that he can’t struggle through life on his own. So, he offers the same courtesy to Yuu, and affirms her right to live on.

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Any mystery novel fan would be able to solve it easily. But you know, when you encounter such a trick in real life, it proves to be pretty perplexing. I guess the answers get a little drowned out by the smell of blood, the taste of death.

Decapitation — Kubikiri Cycle, Nisio, Isin’s debut novel

I must have known on an intuitive level. I think I knew it, but I had shied away from confronting it head-on. I probably knew from the moment I went up to the second floor. No, actually… I likely knew from the very beginning. As soon as U brought me here at knifepoint…

Imperfect Girl

A locked-room together

Sometimes when mystery novel fans use genre jargon that seems self-explanatory at first glance, it can actually be surprisingly confusing or esoteric. For example, “locked-room mystery” and “impossible crime mystery” are often used interchangeably, as though they were synonyms. This sounds bizarre, since logically speaking a locked-room mystery is a very concrete sounding idea: A mystery involving a room where the door is locked. It may seem odd to ever talk about it as if it could mean anything more than that.

Of course, it does end up meaning more than that to genre enthusiasts. The idea of a locked-room has come to encapsulate the very essence of an inciting incident for a detective story. Any crime that requires the presence of a super sleuth to solve it takes on the symbolic meaning of a locked-room. Put another way, a locked-room isn’t so much a physical phenomenon so much as the abstract idea of an incident that seems so impossible that a super sleuth is needed in the story.

If I were to extend the idea a touch further, a locked-room represents the moment the static world before the mystery is submerged into chaos. The lives of the characters, that previously did not warrant being called a “story”, is suddenly interrupted by a traumatic incident. Not just any trauma, but usually death and murder. To make matters worse, the impossibility, the “locked-room” element, means that there is no path open to them to confront their trauma and move on. The world is frozen in place; so a super sleuth, an outside force, is needed to restore the world to order and demystify their trauma.

By this kind of logic, it is simple to see why Imperfect Girl is an abstract kind of locked-room story. The moment Kakimoto witnesses Yuu’s incomprehensible order of actions following the lethal traffic incident that took Akemi’s, that is her friend’s, life, he was caught up in a trauma that froze both him and Yuu in place. Yuu had broken her sacred rulebook, and Kakimoto was unable to process the “impossible” mystery that he had witnessed. As a result, they end up trapped together — locked — in Yuu’s house.

Kakimoto was ensnared within four different locked-rooms: the mystery of why Yuu had acts so strangely, the closet door itself, the door to the house, and the mysterious disappearance of Yuu’s parents. In reality, these were all one collective locked-room: Kakimoto had encountered the various traumas of Yuu’s life, and kept waiting for a super sleuth to come along and save him from his own inertia. He needed to witness someone coming along and saving this young girl from her inertia, so that he could believe that the same thing would happen to himself.

Unfortunately, no super sleuth ever arrived from the outside world. Yuu was truly left alone to confront her trauma. The world was stuck in place, within its various layers of impossibility, until Kakimoto took on the resolve necessary to confront the truth, whatever it was. This wasn’t the resolve to become a hero that could save Yuu, just the willingness to exist together, and give each other the right to live on.

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How dare you barge into other people’s lives when you’re harboring such a monster inside yourself? You think that’s cute? You’re shameless. The world isn’t so forgiving. How grossly conceited you are. And that’s why─
You should just die.

Decapitation — Kubikiri Cycle, Nisio, Isin’s debut novel

Vague and unclear, half-assed and hazy, not choosing anything and letting myself go along with other people, I’ve led an uncertain and ambiguous life, that’s why…
…I don’t want to die…
Like that. I realized that I was alive. I learned at what moments I cried.

Cannibalization — Hitokui Magical, the climax of Nisio, Isin’s debut series

Their characters may have gone off the right path, they may have made mistakes, and they may have dropped out of society, but even they can live properly… no, maybe not “properly”… but they can live lives that are reasonably fun and interesting.

That’s right. So please, U. Listen to me. Your life has already been thrown into chaos. But, well… it’s not so bad that you need to deny yourself happiness.

Imperfect Girl

An imperfect girl; an imperfect life

To say that we are all flawed, all “imperfect”, is so platitudeness as to miss the point entirely. It is a kind of egalitarianism that exists solely to flatten individualism into a mush of collective identity. In reality, what happens is that we all experience times when our imperfections lead us to believe that no hope or redemption exists. It is not merely that people are flawed, it is that they are so flawed that they can become totally alone in a world that is so full of other people.

Kakimoto continued to write novels solely for himself for the longest time. He didn’t just feel like he was alone by chance, he felt that he deserved to be alone. Sometimes he accept the delusion that it was all because he was a misunderstood genius. So, he would escape into his novels, convinced that the inertia of writing for himself was the same as living. Yuu was also always alone, not merely by chance, but because she had been told that she must deliberately live that way. She had been told time and time again by her parents that she deserved to be kept locked away from the world, and eventually those same parents “went away” entirely, leaving Yuu frozen in place.

Yuu did not have the strength to live on her own. This was true physically, her home was falling into disrepair over time, and eventually she would have died if left alone. But perhaps more importantly, it was true psychologically; even if someone came along and provided food and other bare necessities for her, she had been told that she could never live a life that could seek meaning and happiness. She had become an automaton that follows a set of rules, without the right to live with a “soul”.

At some point, Yuu had become a kind of monster to the to the outside world. A formless repository of the negativity and neglect left behind by her parents. While Kakimoto was trapped in her closet, for the longest time he tried and failed to solve the mystery in front of him, like one of those soulless imitations of mystery novels he had written. Why was this dangerous monster keeping me locked away? he wondered.

However, once they stayed trapped together in a spiral of isolation for long enough, frozen in an escapable deadlock, that all changed. He was finally able to see Yuu for what she was: not a monster, but a little girl, an imperfect girl in need of someone to tell her that she was right to live on, even after her parents and Akemi died, and after she kidnapped a stranger.

At this realisation, Kakimoto did what he had been unable to do for days — and maybe his whole life previously. Slowly the walls that kept him fenced inside a “locked-room” came down. He was able to solve all the mysteries surrounding this little girl. And what he found wasn’t the soulless, complex tricks of his own imitations of novels, it was the heart and soul of reality. And so, for the first time in his life, he was able to look Yuu in the face and tell a real story, not a mere imitation. Also for the time in her life, Yuu heard the one thing that everyone deserves and needs to be told:

It is okay to live on, it is okay to be happy, it is okay to be yourself. Just do what you can, and you don’t have to be left all alone.