The Eye of the Abuser and Haruko Ichikawa

  This piece focuses on sexual abuse (both real and fictionalized), incest and pedophilia, and how the framing in fiction can change depending on viewpoint.  Please proceed with care.  It features a detailed summary of Haruko Ichikawa's short story "Star Lover," which utilizes scanlations for its information.  I apologize ahead of time.  I do not currently have a copy of the book or original scans of the japanese text to review myself.

Land of the Lustrous is a beautiful piece of trans-humanist fiction that delves into the struggle of change, the doors of trauma in making the attempt, and the truth of the world around its characters.  What has always stood out to me most, from the moment I began to watch and read the series, was its depiction of immortality.

I spoke with a friend about it, as we would watch.  He disliked it and I loved it.  When we talked about what we liked in immortality, he would speak of the wisdom and terrible age – the disconnect from being human.  After so long, it is not easy or possible to remain the person you once were.  For him, Land of the Lustrous had characters too childish to speak to the truth of what immortality was meant to be.  They were flawed, impatient, even childish after hundreds and thousands of years.

To me, that was the best example one could give of the curse of immortality.  It isn’t living forever.  It was the fact that you could never grow up – that these gems had been shaped into a particular image by their protector that they were not allowed to change from without destroying some aspect of what he had created.

“If you’re shaped to be one thing all your life,” I found myself saying, “You’re not given the option to be an adult or a child.”

I realized I had a personal investment in the series’ depiction of immortality.  The two of us acknowledged the sensation of being too old in a body that didn’t carry the same age as what we felt, but we responded in different ways.  For him, it was a matter of being too mature for too long.  For me, it was a matter of never being given the chance to gain any maturity, trapped in the image my abuser had created for me.

It was only when I acknowledged my experiences as abuse that I began to realize they had or were affecting me.  Before that, they were relationships.  Romantic.  Familial.  Sexual.  In that same way, Phos’ changes are what open the door to admitting their own trauma – to realizing the problem with how Adamant seems to see them.

 

 

I had my first boyfriend at around 13 years old.  I don’t remember the date closely.  He was a family friend.  Because of that, he knew I wasn’t on good terms with my family.  When I was scared to go home, scared to stay there, he offered me a moment of protection.  He was fun.  We’d play video games together.  Talk about anime.  I’d never had any friends I could do that with before.  He was always affectionate.  And he would joke, about the two of us.  Together.

One day, I confessed to him, and asked if I could kiss his cheek.

We would date for the next four years.  He would propose to me. 

In some ways, he saved me from my family.

 

 

Some abusers see themselves as saviours.  Necessary to the life of their victim.  It’s simple when it’s a child.  It is easy when the victim isn’t even human.

They could be a gem.

They could be a plant.

In 2009, Haruko Ichikawa published two volumes of one shots.  Each one stood as an individual chapter, all unrelated.  The stories are best described as centered around the relationships between humans and non-humans.

Volume 1 begins with a one shot called “Star Lover.”

The premise is strange.  A boy is staying with his uncle as his mother travels abroad.  He meets someone his uncle refers to as his daughter.  However, this young girl is not quite human – neither is the boy.  His uncle informs him the girl is what grew from his severed finger, a few years back.  That they’re both human constructs made from plant cells and his proof goes all the way to video documentation.

However, the story is not preoccupied with the scientific theory behind making fully sapient creatures from the cells of plants.  It lingers on a boy who looks at a girl who grew from his own hand, and thinks, ‘She used to be a part of me.’ 

Her name is Tsutsuji.

She’s mature.  She wakes up early to take care of her slacker father.  When the boy points out how different the two of them are, she says, “Maybe it’s how I grew up.”

The three of them go to the park, to play, and have fun.  Tsutsuji talks about growing up with her father.  She talks about how nice it is to spend gentle days together with someone who could be called her brother.  To be a family, to be given mulled wine for the two of them to drink together in the winter.

Mulled wine, she says, “tastes like the stars burning.”

The boy thinks over Tsutsuji, someone who grew from his finger, doing all these things. 

“They were all once my finger,” he says.

“They were mine.”

Tsutsuji goes upstairs, and in a conversation with an unknown figure, says they have to be quiet.

The three of them go to the beach.

The two of them are not allowed to touch the ocean due to their bodies.  But they can look, and appreciate.  When her shoe breaks, Tsutsuji gives up on looking for seashells.  No matter how they may heal, the two of them are still delicate.  It’s just two of them in the world.

Tsutsuji wants to be like a sister to him.  She speaks of roles that they have to play – she talks about choosing them.  And with the boy, Tsutsuji wants a normal nice brother who will always play with her.

The boy refuses because “he wants to be one with her” again.

She pretends she did not hear him and runs back to her father.

Tsutsuji throws her broken shoes at her father.  When he asks what’s wrong, she says, “Nothing.”

She’s upset.  She falls on her father.  Tsutsuji wants nothing more than to be a family.  For things to be normal.  And she takes the blame upon herself.  She decides she has to be honest to him.  She has no time to “feel homesick over his body.”  Not when she is her father’s daughter, and his mother, and his lover.

Tsutsuji can say many things, as young as she is.  As happy as her days are, they are filled with a worry that will not be fully verbalized.

With the misery the boy’s words bring her.  With the ambivalent way her father treats the boy’s entreaty.  With the truth to a relationship never explicitly shown.

Grooming is a poisonous thing.

 

 

 

I dated a man for the first time around 13 years old.

He had babysat me since I was 10.

We would have sex when I was 14.

He’d tell me how nice it was that I still had such a flat chest at 15.

The marriage proposal comes at 16.

I would break up with him at 17.

He would stalk me until 20.

At 18, it was a joke that I’d been dating a pedophile for a large chunk of my young life.

At 20, I started to realize otherwise.

 

 

Tsutsuji decides to help the boy.  As her father sits at the table, casually eating breakfast, she goes outside.  Tsutsuji doesn’t want to hurt the boy.  She doesn’t want to disappoint her father.  Not when she is essentially what the boy gave to his uncle years ago, to love him alone.

She does the only thing she can think to please him.

Her father is waiting behind her to catch her when she faints from cutting off her own arm.

The boy calls his uncle a pedophile, but goes no further.  Because he’s a narcissist.  Because he has dehumanized a living young girl just as much as his uncle has.

His uncle mentions that pruning is sometimes necessary.

A month passes.  The boy says he can’t take care of the arm she cut off.  He plans to ask Tsutsuji to raise it till it’s a person, though he knows she will joke and say no.  But she will probably never truly say no to him.  She’s a part of him.

He comes home to a child who looks more like a toddler, and exactly like Tsutsuji.

Tsutsuji’s wound got infected.

Enough to cover most of her body, apparently.

She doesn’t remember the boy.  She doesn’t remember seeing the ocean, or the beach.  She doesn’t remember how he would play violin for her and her father.

Tsutsuji has fallen back in time.

Her father figure and her brother figure pay it no heed.  She’ll grow up again soon.  Things will return to what they once were.

And as it is a story from the perspective of Tsutsuji’s abusers, it is calm as it is quietly, terribly evil.

Tsutsuji is a character with her own feelings and thoughts.  But she is also a child who has been taught she is not human.  She is a child who has been taught that this is her life together with her father.  She is a child with a father who depends on her as though she was his own mother.

As a child who has been groomed from the moment she gained awareness, she is not able to recognize predatory behavior.  Even the boy’s behavior, speaking of being unable to act as her brother, causes her more distress because she knows she cannot make him happy.

Even when the boy calls his uncle a pedophile, he is too caught up in his own wants to help Tsutsuji.  She isn’t her own person.  She’s his.  She is a detached part of himself, and he wants that.  He cannot stop his uncle, because it would mean disrupting their easy life.  It doesn’t interfere with his life.  There is no reason to stop.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.  It's a popular saying.  "Beauty doesn't exist on its own.  It is created by its beholders."  By that logic, the beholder is exhibiting a form of power over what they find beautiful.  The eye of the beholder is the fuel behind Helen of Troy.  It is what criminalizes her for the sin of what others see her to be.  Those with the power will speak of the power of the beheld.  A power that is granted.

The eye of the abuser works in the same way.  They can view a situation in whatever way most benefits them.  Though the boy entering Tsutsuji's life had the choice, he ultimately becomes another abuser in her life, however inadvertently.  His uncle only views Tsutsuji's pain in the way that normalizes his own behavior.  He does not have to accept culpability for his actions.  Not when Tsutsuji reverts to a toddler under his hands.

My abusers got away with this for years.

No matter how often I could joke about such matters.

"Star Lover" is tragic.  It's a short horror story.  It breaks my heart.  In that way, I love it.  Rarely do I see depictions of sexual abuse in the very moments that they are happening.  To see this experience framed as though a time capsule, a closed pool centered around Tsutsuji's self-destructive decisions, is awful.  It shows this without any of the voyeurism I expect from most authors.  More than anything, it is almost singularly focused on Tsutsuji's choices, and how the abused are rarely given the interiority that takes their pain seriously by those who abuse them.

Some stories about abuse are about how evil it is.

But others can be like this.  Stories about abuse can be about what happened, and the days we accepted our world for what it was.  We can acknowledge the evils of abusers.  Fiction can allow us the window into how insidious it can be.