The Witch in FISH DREAM, and the Word I Keep Using (MMM_Memento Mori Machina)

I said I’d write about the Witch. I reread her chapter this week, the third chapter of Part One of FISH DREAM (『魚の夢』) by MMM_Memento Mori Machina, and it took me a lot longer than I expected, partly because I kept stopping.

Before she even shows up, the narrator is lying awake in a psychiatric ward thinking about the word GOTHIC. There’s a definition I copied into my notes: gothic is the other way of being that we keep pressed down. The narrator says they’re drawn to “a monster made of I-don’t-know-what, all mashed together,” and that they’re sick of well-behaved books. I underlined that twice. I’ve never seen my own reading habits described that accurately by a sleepless fictional patient.

Then the narrator starts thinking about the Witch, and says something that hit me much harder the second time. Everyone who meets her tries to explain what kind of person she is, and every explanation misses. The more people explain her, the blurrier she gets. The ones who think they understand her have just zoomed in on the part they were able to understand.

I read that and thought about my last post.

After that the narrator gets up, can’t sleep, wanders the ward at night, and ends up watching two people having sex in a room lit red. I’m not going to describe it. It’s graphic, and it’s meant to be. At the end of the chapter the woman bends backward, her face upside down, and looks straight at the narrator, and it’s the Witch.

What I want to write about is what she says in the middle of it. She tells the man that spiritual love, conceptual love, metaphysical love are all fake, all vanity, and only bodily love is pure. That’s where the line Viscera quoted comes from:

Spirit is the steam of the flesh, the secretion of the flesh, the sweat of meat, and never its opposite. Sweat exists for the meat. The meat does not exist for the sweat.

Before this reread, that line lived in my head next to the sex-positive stuff. Out of context it sounds like an argument for bodies. In context it’s part of a very long speech in which she tells him he has to love her without limit and expect nothing back, love her spit and her contempt, put her above his family and his work, and worship her. It’s a domination speech. And near the end she says this, which I’ve been staring at for two days:

You have been freed from yourself.

A little after that, she tells him he’s been freed from all his other work, from thinking, from choosing. That there are no options left.

So the word I’ve been using, liberation, is actually in the book. It just points somewhere I didn’t expect. She isn’t freeing his desire. She’s freeing him from himself, by taking choice away completely. That’s not the liberation I grew up with. In the version I know, being free means having more choices, not none.

I don’t want to overcorrect. This is one character, and the narrator spends pages insisting nobody can sum her up, so I’d be a hypocrite to file her under “the domination chapter.” Viscera also warns against treating her ideas as the author’s creed. But I notice the same shape as last time. The body goes on top, the spirit goes under it, and here the self goes under too.

Two small things.

She calls him 私の鼠ちゃん, “my little mouse.” I like mice. I did not enjoy finding out that I thought this was cute.

And the narrator is someone in a ward who can’t sleep and walks into a scene they never chose to be in. I didn’t choose this chapter either, exactly. I just kept reading.

Next I want to go back to HIKIKOMORI NOTE and the passage on my About page.