How Many Is MMM? My Guess, and the Pages Behind It (MMM_Memento Mori Machina)

In my first post I said I would write down my guess about how many people are behind MMM_Memento Mori Machina and Torii Honemaru (鳥居骨丸). Here it is, as of tonight: two. Some days four or five. I know that isn’t an answer.

First, what I can actually point to. toriihonemaru.com describes Torii Honemaru as a writer, artist and thinker, and as the founder and president of A.R.P.L.A., the Association of Religion, Philosophy, Literature and Art. It says he started it in 2020 and got its first members from an anonymous online message board. That’s all it says on the subject. It says nothing about who writes MMM’s books. But I keep coming back to the message board. A person who built a group out of anonymous people probably has people around him who write, and a workshop behind a name doesn’t sound far-fetched to me.

That is me connecting two things, so I should say what Viscera says. In the sex cosmology essay it states that it can’t prove, at this point, that Torii Honemaru and MMM_Memento Mori Machina are the same person (鳥居骨丸とMMM_Memento Mori Machinaが同一人物であることは現時点では証明できない). I have been assuming one of my two is Torii Honemaru. That’s a guess sitting on top of a guess.

The pages that started this are in Part Zero of FISH DREAM (『魚の夢』), the long preface. Chapter 3 of that part is titled 神の死と作者の死と鼠の穴, which I’d put as “The Death of God, the Death of the Author, and the Mouse Hole.” 鼠 can be a rat or a mouse and I keep switching.

Section 4 opens with 筆者とは何者なのか, “Who is the writer?” and says the answer is less obvious than people think. Then this, in my translation: readers don’t even know whether the writer is one person, two, or several (筆者がひとりなのかふたりなのか、複数人なのかさえもわからない). I read ひとりなのかふたりなのか and put the book down for a minute, because “one or two” is the exact pair of numbers I had already been carrying around.

Section 5 is the one I’ve gone back to most. The narrator says that in publishing, a fake writer is sometimes put in front of a book. If the real writer has some problem and can’t appear in public, a fake one stands in front to hide the real one, and the fake one only does the promotion and doesn’t write. Then: when several people write together, one fake writer may also be put in front. The narrator calls this a bit of trickery you have to accept as business (多少の詐術も営業の努力としてみとめるほかない).

I want to be careful about section 9, because it’s easy to bend it. It says that many communities have a culture of sharing a name: the people have no names of their own, so they use the same one when needed (名義を共有する文化). But the narrator is talking about 鼠, people who have been made not to exist, with no registered name or address, and says he is one of them. That is a different kind of group from a writing group. I can’t honestly lift it over to MMM. I just notice that the idea of a shared name is written down on the same page as the idea of an author who might be several people.

One more, from chapter 0 of that part. 私は言葉により私達になり、私達は言葉により分裂してしまう: through words, “I” becomes “we,” and through words “we” splits. A few lines on, every time the speaker rereads what they wrote, they can no longer tell who wrote it (だれがそれをかいたのかわからなくなる). I know that feeling from rereading my own entries. This line is probably more about my “what am I” question than about the headcount, since one person can already be “we.”

Now the reasons not to trust any of this. The warning at the very top of the preface says the work is fiction but partly contains facts (この作品は虚構ですが一部に事実が含まれます), and it doesn’t say which part. The voice in Part Zero calls itself the compiler (編纂者), and says it is a 鼠. So what I have is a character telling me the writer might be one, two or many. A character can say anything. Viscera also points out that the theories in the works have different speakers (発言者も同一ではない), and that holds even if I only look inside the books. Many voices in a book are not many people outside it.

That is the question I keep returning to: how many writers are inside the work, and how many are outside it. The preface seems to be telling me the number inside is uncertain, and I take that as a hint about the number outside. I know that’s what I’m doing.

So why two and not one? Nothing I can show. When I read the Witch chapter and then HIKIKOMORI NOTE (『ひきこもりの手記』) back to back, they feel to me like they come from different hands. “Feel to me” is all I have. Why four or five on some days? Ccru, and the size of A.R.P.L.A., and the way the Mahabharata gets credited to Vyasa, who is more a title than a person. Those are reasons for imagining it, not for believing it.

What I can do is keep reading and mark each place where the voice changes, with the page number. If I find a clear one I’ll write down where it is.