As Kazumi Mano awoke one morning from a troubled dream, she found her big toe transformed into a monstrous penis. So it starts — Kafkaesque but oh so Japanese. First published in 1993 as "Oyayubi P no Shugyo Jidai," Rieko Matsuura's "The Apprenticeship of Big Toe P" is a novel about sexual transgression, love and friendship.
A best-seller 16 years ago, "The Apprenticeship," lithely translated by Michael Emmerich, is neither de Sade nor de Beauvoir. Well-written sex scenes (it won Matsuura the Women's Literature Prize) vie for narrative space with subtly humorous set pieces. Despite its subject matter, the book is not shocking. Is this because in 2009, readers, anaesthetized to transgression, are blase about the mediatization of pornography?
In a novel in which a woman's "apprenticeship" is in the various combinations of male and female sexual intercourse, why is the most outrageous scene the torture and death of a kitten?