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Snakes and Earrings (蛇にピアス, Hebi ni Piasu) is a Japanese novel by Hitomi Kanehara, and was adapted into a film in 2008 by Yukio Ninagawa.
The story revolves around a character known as Lui, a pretty and young woman who engages herself in the underground nightlife.
At a party, she met Ama ( - Amadeus ) a young punk looking with red hair and his forked tongue.
Amazed by his bodymodification, and the big-hearted personality of him they start to see themselves often, and they went to Ama's friend tattoo & piercings parlor which they met Shiba ( - Shiva ) a shaved pierced young man. The encounters of these two will change Lui's life whose her curiosity was piqued.
Background
The author, Hitomi Kanehara lost interest in academic topics and began to skip school in order to socialize with friends. Her father is a professor of sociology at Hosei University , known as Mizuhito Kanehara, brought her along on a year-long research trip to San Francisco, where she occasionally attended an American school. During her stay in the United States, with her father's permission, she began reading stories by Ryū Murakami and Amy Yamada that contained strong violent and sexual themes.
Kanehara returned to Japan and attended middle school, but became anorexic and engaged in self-harm. Against the wishes of her mother Chieko, Kanehara dropped out of her first year of high school, left home, and began to write stories, including Snakes and Earrings, that drew on her own experiences with cutting, suicidal thoughts, body modification, and living with different boyfriends.
She has described Snakes and Earrings as the story she "had to write". Her father continued to support her writing, arranged for her to participate in a fiction workshop for sophomores at his university, and edited the Snakes and Earrings manuscript before it was submitted for literary prizes.
Major themes
Academic analysis of Snakes and Earrings has focused on themes of subcultural resistance, gender roles, and commodification. Cultural studies scholar Mark Driscoll, writing in Cultural Critique, argued that while the book's graphic descriptions of tattooing, self-harm, and violent sexual activities revealed subcultures unfamiliar to many readers, Kanehara's portrayal of her characters as "consumerist, closed-off, and unwilling or unable to communicate with people outside their tribe" reinforced popular stereotypes about Japanese youth, particularly the part-time workers called freeters. David Holloway, writing in Japanese Language and Literature, came to a similar conclusion, noting that despite the depiction of Lui as a fringe character rejecting society's rules, she ends up assuming a domestic role consistent with expectations of Japanese women in mainstream society. In Japan Forum, Rachel DiNitto argued that expecting the subcultural elements of the book to express resistance to mainstream Japanese culture actually reflected a Western literary bias. Instead, she proposed that Kanehara's novel expresses resistance through Lui's experience of her own physical body in a society emphasizing commodification and virtuality. Reuben Welsh offered a similar interpretation, pointing to a specific episode in the book in which Lui crushes and eats the teeth that Ama gave to her as an "act of osmosis" that "can be taken as an example of finding something lasting and valuable amidst the transient commodity culture". Both DiNitto and Holloway have also suggested that Snakes and Earrings resembles works of Japanese literature published in the years immediately following World War II, such as Tamura Taijiro's Gate of Flesh, in which characters regain control over their own bodies after coercion and defeat, then use their bodies as sites of protest.
back home
film
Snakes and Earrings (蛇にピアス, Hebi ni Piasu) is a Japanese novel by Hitomi Kanehara, and was adapted into a film in 2008 by Yukio Ninagawa.
The story revolves around a character known as Lui, a pretty and young woman who engages herself in the underground nightlife.
At a party, she met Ama ( - Amadeus ) a young punk looking with red hair and his forked tongue.
Amazed by his bodymodification, and the big-hearted personality of him they start to see themselves often, and they went to Ama's friend tattoo & piercings parlor which they met Shiba ( - Shiva ) a shaved pierced young man. The encounters of these two will change Lui's life whose her curiosity was piqued.
Background
The author, Hitomi Kanehara lost interest in academic topics and began to skip school in order to socialize with friends. Her father is a professor of sociology at Hosei University , known as Mizuhito Kanehara, brought her along on a year-long research trip to San Francisco, where she occasionally attended an American school. During her stay in the United States, with her father's permission, she began reading stories by Ryū Murakami and Amy Yamada that contained strong violent and sexual themes.
Kanehara returned to Japan and attended middle school, but became anorexic and engaged in self-harm. Against the wishes of her mother Chieko, Kanehara dropped out of her first year of high school, left home, and began to write stories, including Snakes and Earrings, that drew on her own experiences with cutting, suicidal thoughts, body modification, and living with different boyfriends.
She has described Snakes and Earrings as the story she "had to write". Her father continued to support her writing, arranged for her to participate in a fiction workshop for sophomores at his university, and edited the Snakes and Earrings manuscript before it was submitted for literary prizes.
Major themes
Academic analysis of Snakes and Earrings has focused on themes of subcultural resistance, gender roles, and commodification. Cultural studies scholar Mark Driscoll, writing in Cultural Critique, argued that while the book's graphic descriptions of tattooing, self-harm, and violent sexual activities revealed subcultures unfamiliar to many readers, Kanehara's portrayal of her characters as "consumerist, closed-off, and unwilling or unable to communicate with people outside their tribe" reinforced popular stereotypes about Japanese youth, particularly the part-time workers called freeters. David Holloway, writing in Japanese Language and Literature, came to a similar conclusion, noting that despite the depiction of Lui as a fringe character rejecting society's rules, she ends up assuming a domestic role consistent with expectations of Japanese women in mainstream society. In Japan Forum, Rachel DiNitto argued that expecting the subcultural elements of the book to express resistance to mainstream Japanese culture actually reflected a Western literary bias. Instead, she proposed that Kanehara's novel expresses resistance through Lui's experience of her own physical body in a society emphasizing commodification and virtuality. Reuben Welsh offered a similar interpretation, pointing to a specific episode in the book in which Lui crushes and eats the teeth that Ama gave to her as an "act of osmosis" that "can be taken as an example of finding something lasting and valuable amidst the transient commodity culture". Both DiNitto and Holloway have also suggested that Snakes and Earrings resembles works of Japanese literature published in the years immediately following World War II, such as Tamura Taijiro's Gate of Flesh, in which characters regain control over their own bodies after coercion and defeat, then use their bodies as sites of protest.
Extracts :
"All I wanted was to be part of an underground world where the sun doesn't shine."
"They are a proof of a symbol of my love."
"The constant pain make me irritable and made me wish that everybody would just die."
"I was a person who could see no future for myself, a person who cared about no one." (Lui)
"I couldn't believe how grotesque I was. I guess this is what happens when you lose the will to live."
"I collapsed to the ground and broke down in tears. Screw you. Go to hell, you fuckers. I wish I had a greater vocabulary to fully express the extent of my pain and hatred. But I don't. I'm just pathetic. That's all I am."
"All I wanted was to be part of an underground world where the sun doesn't shine."
"They are a proof of a symbol of my love."
"The constant pain make me irritable and made me wish that everybody would just die."
"I was a person who could see no future for myself, a person who cared about no one." (Lui)
"I couldn't believe how grotesque I was. I guess this is what happens when you lose the will to live."
"I collapsed to the ground and broke down in tears. Screw you. Go to hell, you fuckers. I wish I had a greater vocabulary to fully express the extent of my pain and hatred. But I don't. I'm just pathetic. That's all I am."
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