Why I’m Keeping This Diary: On MMM_Memento Mori Machina

I’ve wanted to write about MMM_Memento Mori Machina in English for a long time, and I kept not doing it, mostly because I didn’t know who I’d be writing for. Almost nobody I talk to has heard the name. I’m starting anyway. This is going to be a reading diary. I’ll get things wrong here, and I’d like the wrong readings to stay up next to the later ones.

The first thing I read was HIKIKOMORI NOTE (『ひきこもりの手記』). It’s the notebook of someone recording their own life, including killings they’ve committed, and between the entries they work out theories about free will, perception, the world, sex, love. There’s no English translation. I read it in Japanese, slowly, with the dictionary open for the harder passages. When I finished I tried to start something else and gave up after a few pages. Then I tried another book and gave up again. I spent most of that week rereading parts of it instead.

Then FISH DREAM (『魚の夢』), also in Japanese. It’s much longer, set mostly in a psychiatric hospital, and full of people who each have a whole theory of the world they’re ready to explain to you. I’m still not really done with it. I keep going back to certain chapters.

I think MMM is the most dangerous underground writer in Japanese literature, and one of the rarest writers anywhere. I’d rather show why than keep saying it.

What finally made me start this blog was an essay on Viscera that went up a few days ago. It reads across MMM’s books and calls the thought that runs through them a “sex cosmology.” That’s Viscera’s term, not MMM’s.

The essay starts with two sentences from HIKIKOMORI NOTE that I’d highlighted myself:

When I say love, I mean the principle of the world. When I say sex, I mean the primal force of life.

And later it builds toward this one:

Life is a sexual organ, and the world is the dream that the sexual organ is dreaming.

My translations. The word the Japanese uses, 性器, is just the anatomical term. I went back and forth on how to render it and ended up with the flattest option, because everything else made it sound either cute or porny, and the original is neither.

The essay goes through the other places this idea shows up. In FISH DREAM there’s a character called the Witch who says the spirit is the steam that rises off the flesh, its sweat, and never the other way around. In HIKIKOMORI NOTE the brain is called the body’s slave. Life is something closed and open at the same time; it eats, excretes, joins with other things, splits, multiplies. Sex is the name for that whole movement, not just for sex.

When I first read those passages I took them as a kind of sex-positive manifesto. That’s the vocabulary I grew up with: your body isn’t shameful, desire isn’t something to apologize for. MMM seemed to be saying the same thing at the scale of the universe, which I thought was kind of amazing.

Viscera says pretty directly that it’s not about sexual liberation, or not simply. The essay’s point is that MMM keeps reversing an order, where mind and reason and morality are supposed to be on top and the body and desire and animality are supposed to be at the bottom.

I can follow that. I’m not sure I feel it yet. Reading the books, it still mostly feels like liberation to me. Maybe for me those are the same thing. I don’t know yet.

One thing does bother me, though. If it’s just about freeing desire, why do the books keep preferring the fake to the real, and the dream to waking up? Usually when someone wants to free you they want you to wake up. These books don’t seem to want that at all.

A few things I want to come back to.

Dogra Magura (『ドグラ・マグラ』), Yumeno Kyūsaku’s novel from 1935. It’s also set in a psychiatric ward, and it also has a dream happening inside the body, the dream of the fetus. I have no evidence for a connection. It’s just the book I keep thinking about when I read MMM.

Who MMM is. Viscera mentions that Torii Honemaru (鳥居骨丸) once wrote in a public diary that flowers are pretty and flowers are sexual organs, and notes how close that is to MMM, without saying they’re the same person. I have a guess about this. I’ll write it up separately.

JŌKAI THEORY (『剰壊理論』), which was published under Torii Honemaru’s name and is available in English on mmm0609.com, the MMM site. It’s the easiest way in if you don’t read Japanese.

Next time I’ll probably write about the Witch.