Inui Rokuro’s Automatic Eve, translated by Matt Treyvaud, is a strange but — I found — captivating book. it’s described by Molly Tanzer’s blurb as “think Blade Runner, but set in the Floating World of Edo Japan”, which is both accurate and misleading. it’s set in a fictional version of not-Japan, ruled de facto by a shogunate that dominates the imperial family, and it centers on the title character, an impossibly perfect automaton named Eve. what the back cover blurb’s description of the plot does not adequately convey is the structure of the novel, which is both the thing I find most captivating and also a bit of a problem.
captivating: the book is presented as a series of five short stories. initially, in fact, it seems more like a linked short story collection than a novel: each of the first three stories has a different protagonist, though each protagonist encounters Eve and her guardian, “Kyuzo Kugimiya” (more on names later). only at the climax of the third story does it begin to become apparent that in fact these seemingly disparate incidents are connected by more than just Eve’s presence, and the fourth and fifth stories ultimately bring the whole plot to a climactic — and very bloody — end. I wasn’t totally sure what to make of this structure initially, but once I realized what was going on I loved it. Inui does a great job of throwing the reader off-course initially, and when the web of connections becomes clear it really worked for me. looking at others’ reviews, though, it seems like this isn’t the case for everyone, so your mileage may vary. (I feel a little bad spoiling this, but it seems likely to me that people will enjoy the book more if they go in with accurately calibrated expectations.)
the labyrinth of political machinations is well handled, although there are a few question marks for me, like why the shogunate is so interested in the imperial tomb that becomes the focus of the end of the novel. nonetheless, the mix of abortive revolution, conspiracies to restore the empress (latest in a line of ruling empresses, with only women able to inherit the throne, an interesting conceit) to her “rightful” status, the very personal stories of Eve and the other automata who appear in the novel, and the tantalizing legacy of the Age of Myth woven through all of the above make for a compelling narrative — I found it to be very much a page-turner despite being in a bit of a reading slump at the moment.
the problem with the structure is related to another problem: all but one of the shifting perspectives in the novel is a man’s. first and foremost, this means that this is a story about Eve, but not, in fact, really Eve’s story; she has very little agency, particularly because she’s reliant on Kyuzo and others to maintain her systems, but neither is the novel especially interested in exploring the implications of her lack of agency in this social context. the result is, in some ways, just a bunch of men looking at a mysterious, sexy woman.
and in fact this is true of most of the women in the novel, which is to say, of most of the sex workers in the novel, because with only one exception all of the female human characters in the novel are sex workers. the spatial center of the novel is a somewhat upscale brothel called the Thirteen Floors: the first three stories all turn and return to it, always through the eyes of male clients. as with Eve, the women who actually in the brothel — some of whom we’re told spend their entire lives, or at least their entire adult lives, without physically leaving it; at least some of them are indentured or otherwise unfree — are both narratively and for the most part literally voiceless. the narrative in the first section focuses on a sex worker who has a client buy her contract and “free” her, though this does not turn out as either of them expect (the twist was unexpected, not in a bad way, but the story it’s framed in is messy). it’s clear that Inui is a Straight Guy™ — while the novel doesn’t, like, go out of its way to be sexist, it also, for the most part, doesn’t seem particularly interested in its female characters except as (sometimes literal) objects. this is striking because the framing of the novel’s political conflict as one between the nominally reigning empresses (women) and the actually ruling shoguns (men) seems like it should be more interested in, or have more to say about, gender.
the one sort of exception is a character introduced in the fourth story as a fourteen-year-old girl tasked with caring for the empress. not least because there is just a hint of lesbians, Kasuga is a fun perspective — for about 10 pages out of just over 314. then we’re once again seeing her from outside. still, she’s there — a tantalizing hint of the more gender-balanced novel that could have been.
translation-wise I thought this was pretty solid overall! I’ve read some truly awful translations published by Haikasoru — Tyran Grillo’s translations of books 4-6 of Legend of the Galactic Heroes — but Treyvaud is competent and at times even artful. my one real complaint language-wise is about names: given that the cover identifies the author as “Rokuro Inui” (Western European name order), I think that the names are probably meant to be read as being in Western order. in the name “Kihachi Umekawa”, “Umekawa” (梅川, Plum River, a local river) is clearly a surname, which seems to confirm this. but the various focal characters are referred to differently by the narration: “Jinnai Tasaka” and “Kyuzo Kugimiya”’s perspectives refer to themselves as “Jinnai” and “Kyuzo”, suggesting that these are their given names, but “Geiemon Tentoku”’s perspective refers to him as “Tentoku”, suggesting that that is his given name? I’m not sure if this is an inconsistency in the original or the translation, but either way it was a bit confusing.
more to the point, I just feel like we should be past the point where we need to “translate” surname-first names into Western European surname-last order. then again, I’ve seen Chen Qiufan’s Waste Tide alphabetized under Q on bookstore shelves, so maybe I’m underestimating anglophone ignorance of other cultures.
the biggest problem here, though, is really the gender politics. if you can look beyond that, I think the structure of the novel is fascinating and worth a look — but I won’t lie and say it’s not a mess, so I also would very much understand not being able to look beyond it.
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