I read Ao Omae’s full-length English-language debut, “People Who Talk to Stuffed Animals Are Nice,” while catching up with friends during a trip to the United States. It was impeccable timing: My younger 20-something friends were going through intense changes in their lives — periods of self-discovery. They were grappling with issues that I found on every page of Omae’s book. His characters struggled alongside my friends, exploring new forms of sexuality and self-expression as they attempted to find their place in an isolating and increasingly online social landscape.
Omae’s collection of four stories, translated by Emily Balistrieri, dives into often overlooked perspectives on human relationships. For younger readers, these perspectives will strike home; for older ones, they give insight into the types of struggles the current generation coming of age has with sexuality, family dynamics and growing up.
From the 10-page “Bath Towel Visuals” to the nearly 100-page titular story, each of Omae’s entries explore the subtleties of the discomfort and pain of a young generation in Japan. Omae himself turned 30 last year and emerged onto the Japanese literary scene after placing first in the Granta Japan with Waseda Bungaku short story contest in 2016. While he is regarded domestically as a writer who tells stories focused on gender and sexuality, “People Who Talk” reveals his concern with and critique of outdated views and nuances of such topics. Each story explores young people with “alternative” sexualities and gender identities in a refreshingly thoughtful manner. Every character moves beyond labels and exists at a nexus of contradictory desires and expectations.
All four stories in this collection are character deep dives. In “Realizing Fun Things Through Water,” a semi-asexual narrator drifts apart from her partner after her sister, a professional fake-news writer, goes missing. Nanamori, the lead in “People Who Talk to Stuffed Animals Are Nice,” struggles with his lack of attraction to women even as he begins to develop deep-rooted feelings for a fellow member of the stuffed animals club. The narrator of “Bath Towel Visuals” realizes her close friend is both sexist and emotionally unstable. “Hello, Thank You, Everything’s Fine” revolves around the narrator’s shut-in brother inviting imaginary friends over.
The titular entry is the masterwork of the collection: Omae deeply explores Nanamori’s development in a full-fledged coming-of-age story while also confronting a number of urgent and intriguing social issues. In an email to The Japan Times, Omae says that the story was born out of his editor asking him to write about a boy who was hurt by misogyny. “This theme is immediately relevant to the times we live in. I took care to not overdramatize or fictionalize the story,” the author adds.
Nanamori’s quasi-asexuality faces off against societal expectations and his own desire for connection and companionship. He feels alienated from his masculinity by seeing the violence and misogyny inherent to — and commonly accepted within — heterosexual, stereotypically male desires. Nanamori's overwhelming empathy and consideration for others makes him kind, but it also causes him to suffer and prevents him from developing relationships.
“He always found himself thinking sex was like violence,” Omae writes of Nanamori in the story. “He felt as though he was complicit in the conversations the boys in high school had — Who’s the cutest girl in our class? Who do you wanna do it with? When he imagined the sex he had never had, what came to mind was how women were only judged by their looks. He hated that.”
Omae also explores the social and psychological effects of social media on young people. Characters in multiple stories compulsively doomscroll and constantly feel devastated by tragedies they come across on the internet.
These depictions are notable because they not only provide representation for complex, multilayered feelings about sex, gender identity and friendship. They also come with critique — Omae’s characters are often just as much the source of their own suffering as society itself.
“It’s no wonder that people feel isolated in the modern world,” Omae says. “To overcome loneliness, I think what matters most is understanding that your place in the world isn’t absolute. When you recognize that you have different choices, and that other people also have all sorts of possibilities, then it may be possible to feel a little more at ease.”
The close first-person style is rendered in sharp, direct English by Balistrieri. Each story throws us into the fray of a character’s world with minimal exposition. Omae lingers on characters’ internal monologues and debates; no thought comes easily. Conclusions are rarely reached.
And while Omae seems to lean toward these internal debates as being ultimately productive, his perspective is in some ways pessimistic. At times, his protagonists’ internal growth are at odds with the fruitless nature of external and online discourse. Omae paints antagonistic, backward-thinking side characters as being unwilling and incapable of understanding his protagonists’ more complicated perspectives. “I hope that people who read my work think about how there might be people like my characters in their lives,” Omae comments.
This collection highlights the need for more stories written by young Japanese millennial and Generation Z writers. Omae’s characters should prove to be an important contribution to literature — and Japan’s evolving understanding of the complexity of sexuality and human relationships.
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