Harlequin Butterfly

By EnJoe Toh
Translated by David Boyd

Pushkin Press (2024)
ISBN-13: 978-1782279778

Review by Conor Hodges

Enigmatic baby-food entrepreneur turned publisher of hyper-specific books A. A. Abrams spends his life predominantly in transit, flying to and fro in economy class waving around a net that catches ideas. Flights are the perfect place, Abrams explains, to capitalise on our idle mid-flight thoughts that, with nowhere else to go, fly around like imaginary butterflies ripe for the catching. But why can Abrams, himself a version of another businesswoman-philanthropist also called A. A. Abrams, see these imaginary butterflies, and where did he get the net? And what does A. A. stand for? All roads, as it turns out, lead to Vladimir Nabokov.

In just over 100 pages, EnJoe Toh’s Akutagawa Prize-winning Harlequin Butterfly takes us on a Möbius strip-shaped journey about language, creation, writing and imagination. Characters read prohibitively titled works such as Untold Tales for Those with Three Arms and all search for one another in a futile doom loop towards the end of the beginning.

For those acquainted with EnJoe’s previous work, Self-Reference ENGINE, Harlequin Butterfly’s deceptively sparse plot that collapses and spirals in on itself will be familiar territory. But for those that aren’t, it can be tempting to chalk everything up to a Lynchian fever dream where getting lost is the whole point, and attempting an understanding is futile. Indeed, when it was announced as the winner of the Akutagawa Prize in 2012, this was a common criticism, and it was met by some in Japan with confusion as to how something so unintelligible could win such a mainstream literary prize.

Upon finishing my first reading, I sympathised completely with this view, feeling at a loss and unable to weave together the disparate threads that had seemingly been left unconnected. Had I not been writing this review, I probably would have left it there. However, on my second reading, armed with a slightly better understanding of the plot of this book and – crucially – that of an entirely different novel altogether, Harlequin Butterfly unlocked itself for me, showing me the way out of the woods and rendering almost all of my notes from the first time around essentially useless. Much like in Nabokov’s Lolita and Pale Fire, two books that clearly influenced EnJoe, I was able to follow the breadcrumbs that had been waiting for me the entire time.

The novel ostensibly revolves around A. A. Abrams’s search for the elusive polyglot author Tomoyuki Tomoyuki, who writes a prodigious amount of material in the language of whatever country he stays in, leaving behind reams and reams of pages in hotel rooms. Tomoyuki Tomoyuki appears to collect all material around him – adverts, kitchen cupboards, labels – and eventually synthesises them into a unified voice. After Abrams’s death before the “beginning” (a word I use tentatively) of our novel, agents working for her Abrams Institute endlessly continue her search for the author, submitting seemingly completely unrelated reports for remuneration and attempting to find Tomoyuki Tomoyuki by travelling and writing copiously, essentially invoking him through mimicry. EnJoe’s untraceable author and Abrams’s fixation on the creator rather than the creation is a striking symbol of readers’ desires to unearth the author hidden underneath layers of characters and metaphor in their work, even if it was never their intention to be found.

This strange cat-and-mouse between the characters is complicated, however, by the frequent change of perspectives. Our first “I”, a person sitting next to A. A. Abrams on the plane while he explains his imaginary-butterfly catching, is revealed to be a character in a piece by Tomoyuki Tomoyuki, translated by our second “I”, an agent for the Abrams Institute. Our third “I” Tomoyuki Tomoyuki himself, at once a weaver of textiles, a writer and a female butterfly that lays its egg into the mind of another version of himself that hatches into an idea for the piece that is eventually translated by the agent, is potentially the source of everything we read, the secret that everyone is trying to work towards, the beginning and the end of the endless loop.

But what explains the plot’s central conceit, that Tomoyuki Tomoyuki is able to acquire languages at superhuman speeds? Perhaps, EnJoe seems to suggest, that art and creation are the gateway. As Tomoyuki Tomoyuki himself offers, writing is ‘a pivot. A set phrase. A sequence of words to get you from here to there. This one takes the form of a door’. Perhaps all Tomoyuki Tomoyuki is doing is traversing the world through the portals opened by his own creative voice.

There is a strong Borgesian motif here. The writer who forgets everything he writes as soon as he’s written it but can immediately replicate languages upon hearing them immediately recalled the unfortunate man in Borges’s Fictions who remembers every memory perfectly, and every instance of remembering the memory creates a new memory for him to remember, and so on. Labyrinths also abound in the novel: the Moroccan city of Fez, where we first get a glimpse into Tomoyuki Tomoyuki’s process as an author, is described as ‘a maze to disappear in’ in a beautiful description that may act as a cipher for understanding the book as a whole.

The most important influence on EnJoe and the catalyst for everything that happens in Harlequin Butterfly is the looming presence of Vladimir Nabokov, both in his fictional form as an old time-bending, chess-playing lepidopterist in the novel and as a very real writer in our world. His greatest influence on the story comes from his final novel, Look at the Harlequins!, and the fictional harlequin butterfly – the Latin binomial of which is Arlequinus Arlequinus, from which Abrams gets his name – that Nabokov drew for his wife Vera at the front of her copy of the book.

Taking the form of a “fictional autobiography”, Look at the Harlequins! is narrated by a fictional version of Nabokov, Vadim Vadimovic, another double-named protagonist. Each character is an embodiment of one of his other novels, and the result is an incredibly self-referential work that draws upon the Nabokov mythos and, despite ostensibly being about the author’s life, enhances his mystery. Harlequin Butterfly, both in name and subject matter, is a direct response to this work, and Nabokov’s powerful influence on the novel is reflected by his character’s ability to rewrite the beginning and claim the discovery of the imaginary butterflies as his own.

With Nabokov and Borges as strong influences, it is only natural that EnJoe chooses to fixate so heavily on language in this novel. While Borges wrote almost exclusively in Spanish, he famously remarked in an interview with William F. Buckley that he found English a ‘far finer language’ than Spanish because of its blend of Germanic and Latin words and the fact that ‘you can .do almost anything with verbs and prepositions’. Nabokov, too, began the task of writing in English after emigrating to the US, eventually mastering it and producing some of the most acclaimed works of the twentieth century. Tomoyuki Tomoyuki’s ability, then, may be understood as an expression of the universality of human communication. He even says as much, remarking that ‘people say the same things all over the world’. Adding an extra metatextual layer to this is reading the novel through David Boyd’s excellent translation, only further highlighting the universal value that stories told through language can have.

While reading Harlequin Butterfly, I often thought of a line from Nabokov’s Lectures on Literature:

I have tried to teach you to read books for the sake of their form, their visions, their art. I have tried to teach you to feel a shiver of artistic satisfaction, to share not the emotions of the people in the book but the emotions of its author – the joys and difficulties of creation.

I can feel EnJoe’s brain working in the margins of the novel, and the sheer creative power it took to produce this intricate, confusing, strange little puzzle of a story. As Tomoyuki Tomoyuki says, ‘The chain of creation goes on and on. Its form is constantly changing, cycling through the stages of transformation, setting new life in motion’. EnJoe has certainly made clear his ability to create and transform conventional narrative with this novel, and I am excited to read whatever works of his find their way to being translated into English.