The Passage on My About Page: Art as the Fake in HIKIKOMORI NOTE (MMM_Memento Mori Machina)

The quote on my About page is from HIKIKOMORI NOTE (『ひきこもりの手記』) by MMM_Memento Mori Machina, from the second part. I translated it and cut it down myself. I want to write about why I put it there, and what I left out.

In the original it’s two numbered fragments, 297 and then 296. The numbers go down. The numbered sections I’ve been rereading all run backward like that, which I noticed the first time through and still don’t know what to do with. It’s a countdown, obviously. I just don’t know to what.

The first fragment opens with a title, 芸術虚構論, something like “a theory of art as fiction.” It says the phrase “real art” contradicts itself, because art isn’t the real thing but the fake. A real landscape isn’t art, a painting of one is. A real body isn’t art, a sculpture is. Real daily life isn’t art, a play about it is. Real love isn’t art, a movie about love is. And the gap that opens up between the real and the fake is what becomes expression, and what makes art art.

The second fragment is one long sentence describing the artist. Born out of lies and dying inside them, fed false milk by a false father, taught false words by a false mother, in disguise at school, masked at work, in costume at home, and it keeps going like that until the part I used as my last line: the artist is one who loves the dream more than the waking world.

What I cut, or couldn’t keep:

Some of that sentence is wordplay that doesn’t survive English. 父 (father) and 乳 (milk) are both read chichi, so “a false father’s false milk” is the same sound said twice. The original also says 技術は擬術, “technique is 擬術,” where 擬 means imitation. It’s a made-up word, something like fake-nique. I turned it into “whose craft is crafty,” which is a different joke. For 擬造 I used “forgery” because it had the right weight. Every one of these is a small fake of the original. By the passage’s own logic, that’s allowed.

That’s the part that made me laugh when I finished. If art is the fake and the real thing isn’t art, then my English version is one step further from the real than the Japanese, so by this theory it’s more art. I don’t actually believe that. I just like that the passage makes me say it.

Why the About page. When I set up this blog I tried to write a normal bio and hated every version. Where I’m from, what I study, what I like. It all read like a costume, and this passage basically says that everything is a costume, so I stopped fighting it and used the passage instead.

I should say this once, plainly, since I’m going to be doing it for a while. I think of this blog as an experiment, and as something I’m making, not just a place where I leave notes. A diary is already a version of yourself arranged for someone to read. If the passage is right that the fake is where art happens, then this is where I’m trying to make some.

It also connects to the thing that’s been bothering me since my first post. Here the fake is put above the real and the dream above waking life, directly, in the voice of whoever is writing this notebook. It goes the same direction as the Witch putting the body above the spirit. Viscera calls that pattern an inversion of order. I called it liberation. And I can see that “the fake over the real” doesn’t fit in the liberation box at all. Nobody gets set free by being told they’re a forgery.

I’m not ready to give up the word yet. But I’ve started keeping a list of the places where it doesn’t fit, and it’s getting longer.