Literature for Humans

Can AI write literature? That question assumes literature is just language production, when the truth is that it emerges from lived experience, culture, memory, desire and ideology - and in a space formed by the relationship between writer and readers.

The dynamic and interactive nature of literature was a theme explored by renowned Japanese writer Mieko Kawakami during a recent talk in Sydney at the University of New South Wales.

Ms Kawakami's work has earned her critical and popular acclaim as the most talented and distinctive Japanese novelist since Haruki Murakami, despite the two writers' opposing positions across the generational and gender divides.

Ms Kawakami was in Australia and New Zealand to promote her latest novel 'Sisters in Yellow' - a sprawling 400-page saga about a group of destitue young women scratching out a living via petty crime in post-bubble economy Tokyo in the 1990s

The new work, marketed by her publisher as a sort of Japanese 'Breaking Bad', has divided critics. While the novel is acknowledged as ambitious, politically engaged, and emotionally intense, there are also criticisms over the execution, length, pacing and partial character development.

Both in style, as a 'crime noir' novel. and in scale, as a tale set across decades, 'Sisters in Yellow' appears to mark a departure from Ms Kawakami's earlier, more intimate, internal and focused novels like 'Breasts and Eggs', 'Heaven' and 'All the Lovers in the Night'.

Mieko Kawakami at UNSW in Sydney

But at her Sydney event, Ms Kawakami was dismissive of rigid labels for literature.

"I actually never read crime or mystery novels," she said, "so I was really surprised to hear that kind of feedback. When it comes to defining literature, the answers are infinite. There are probably as many answers as there are readers."

"If there is one thing that defines literature it is this power dynamic of the authors writing whatever they want to write about and the readers taking from it whatever pleases them."

As to her own motivations in writing 'Sisters in Yellow', Ms Kawakami said she wanted to unpack what was behind the ideas of 'sisterhood' and female solidarity in a patriarchal world

But she is cool about suggestions that she is primarily a feminist author, a label that has followed her around since the phenomenal early success of 'Breasts and Eggs'.

"Yes, I tend to write a lot about women, but what I really want to explore in these books is human beings. Look, I am a feminist in that I wish that women could enjoy more rights and not be discriminated against because of their gender. But I think people are forgetting that women are humans. I'm only writing about humans."

"Sisters in Yellow' is narrated by the central character, Hana Ito, who at 40 is looking back at her wayward youth in the late 1990s. The trigger for Hana’s recollections is a news report about her old friend, Kimiko Yoshikawa (20 years her senior), being arrested for kidnapping, blackmail, and assault.

It turns out that Kimiko had been a sort of maternal figure for the teenage Hana, whose own mother (a bar hostess who bounced from one loser boyfriend to another) was never there for her. Kimiko, also with a background in hostess bars, just turns up one day and starts cooking and cleaning for Hana. And where Kimiko leads, Hana willingly follows.

Hana, Kimiko and eventually another two homeless teenage girls set up their own bar together, 'Lemon', and it is there that they enjoy a couple of happy years of girlish bonding and independence supplying drinks to drunken salarymen. (It's the Lemon reference and Hana's Feng Shui-influenced beliefs about the money power of the colour yellow that gives the novel its title.)

When the bar mysteriously burns down, Hana, Kimiko and the two other girls move into an old abandoned house together. It turns out Kimiko has a connection with the Japanese mob, and through this character, the girls get involved in a credit card racket. It gets messier from there.

Asked whether Hana, who becomes increasingly mercenary about money as the story progresses, ever actually succeeded in her desire for happiness, Ms Kawakami was philosophical.

"People talk about how they want to be happy, but that's an interesting thing to want, isn't it?" she said through an interpreter. "Despite the fact that people often talk about wanting to be happy, I don't know if they actually know what that means for them."

"Was it happiness that Hana was pursuing?" she mused. "I actually don't know what she wanted now that I think about it. But this is the kind of question that literature can ask."

On the subject of absent mothers and happiness, the author spoke openly about her own beloved mother whom she helped nurse through her final years of illness before her death two years ago.

"I think supporting my mother through her sickness was probably one of the hardest things that I've ever experienced," Ms Kawakami said. "It's a shame to admit, but I still cry every day."

"(But) those times that we spent together are the dots that make up my memories. And when I look back on them, they're almost like a star constellation in the sky. And that for me is the happiness. It doesn't wait for me. It's usually behind me."

In other words, happiness, like meaning in literature, often is formed from memory and has a life beyond the page and beyond the moment.

It sounds AI-proof to me.

'Sisters in Yellow' is published by Pan Macmillan Australia.