Just what you want, a transgressive first novel

Thanks to my interest in all things Japanese, I picked up a copy of Hillary Raphael's 2004 novel I [Love] Lord Buddha at a book sale recently. According to a Wikipedia entry last edited in October 2018, "Raphael (born April 12, 1976) is an American novelist, fashion and children's book writer. She holds an MFA in Fiction from Hunter College in New York City." At Hunter she won the MFA Thesis Prize for the novel, which was published by now defunct Creation Books.

"Although Raphael wrote cult transgressive fiction under her own name, she has made a complete pivot," says Wikipedia. Since 2014 she writes and illustrates children's books under the name Shoshana Banana. Her debut title Family Ties was named one of the Best Jewish Children's Books of 2015 by Tablet Magazine. Her second children's book, Picture a Chinchilla, incorporates vintage textiles. [Her third}  Levi & Aya was published in 2016."

In a 2005 interview to promote I [Love] Lord Buddha, Raphael said, "I have been, professionally: a model, dancer, hostess, journalist, grant writer, bartender, diplomat, waitress, dance critic, CEO’s personnel assistant, backpacker, fashion trend scouter, kept woman, and editor, over the years. I’m originally from New York, but have been resident in Tokyo, Phnom Penh, Rome and Mexico City for long stretches and have travelled throughout the world, from the Sahara to the Himalaya, the Negev to the Alps." She was, at the time, 29 years old.

Asked whether she thought the Japanese male’s motivation for attending a hostess bar—the world of I [Love] Lord Buddha—is the same as a foreign man's, she said, "Lingerie and hostess bars have always been an accepted part of Japanese culture, however I think their current incarnation is more standardized and business-like than it has been in the past—you could say the industry has standardized—and therefore reveals itself in a fresh way even to the Japanese. As for Nihonjin vs. Gaijin clients: the difference boils down to expectation paradigms. Japanese go to hostess bars because they want the service provided there. Foreigners go because they are fence-sitting vis-à-vis the idea of seeing a whore, and would like some risk-averse, easy-ingress prostitution. They are confused. A high-end hostess does not waste her time with foreigners unless they are obviously special."

I [Love] Lord Buddha is, to quote the back jacket, "set in the late-90s Tokyo; it recounts the history of the Neo-Geisha Organization, a sex-and-death cult with an anti-consumerist, pro-hedonist, sub-Buddhist ideology." I quote the back jacket because Raphael does not make it easy for the reader. The 187-page paperback consists of 92 chapters. She does not use capitals to start sentences or for most proper nouns (tokyo, japanese) but uses all caps for the main character HIYOKO. Chapters may be in the first or third person, narrative or haiku, apparent non-fiction or transcribed interviews.

Raphael writes the book from the inside; i.e., with the knowledge that an American woman would gain by working in Tokyo's water trade—promoting drinks and entertaining men in hostess bars. (For another view of that life, read People Who Eat Darkness by Richard Lloyd Perry.) Hiyoko (or HIYOKO) (formerly Heather Peterson) is a charismatic hostess who recruits other foreign bar hostesses into a cult-like organization and (I believe) initiates a mass suicide to make a point. Not every woman follows Hiyoko. Here is Angelique, an older hostess who think Hiyako is a fraud,  at work:

angelique crosses her legs in a practiced fashion, and looking over yamada's head, makes eye contact with herself in the beige-tinted mirror of the club. she likes to judge herself objectively in moments like these, when she's fully dressed and made-up for work, natural, busy, and taking a light drag on her lite cigarette, and holding the smoke in her lungs, she carefully considered her face. "i'm well preserved," she concludes, "for my age". yamada gently shoves an ashtray toward her, she starts slightly, trying to delicately ash her cigarette, which is burning down to the filter. "anjyariku-chyan, are you dreaming?" "indeed, about you!"

I [Love] Lord Buddha is not an easy read but it does have its pleasures, although I'm not sure I agree with the back jacket that the novel "paves the way for a new literature of undiluted aesthetics and ecstasy." I'm not even sure what that means. I was happy to see that Raphael did use capitals in her 2008 novel Ximena.