Mongrel

By Hanako Footman

Footnote Press (2024)
ISBN-13: 978-1804440438

Review by Shehrazade Zafar-Arif

Hanako Footman’s debut novel, Mongrel, follows parallel stories of three Japanese women: Mei, biracial and living in Surrey with her white father and stepmother, grieving her Japanese mother as she navigates her identity and sexuality. Yuki, who leaves the Japanese countryside to pursue a musical career in London, where she becomes romantically entangled with her older teacher. Haruka, who runs away from her grandparents’ home to become a hostess in a seedy Tokyo club after her mother’s mysterious death. 

The book starts out slow and a little meandering, and I found my attention wandering, until the three storylines start to merge and you realise how the characters are connected. This happens subtly, with vague hints and throwaway comments, which makes the twist feel earned rather than melodramatic. This revelation immediately quickens the pace of the book, paving the way for new questions and mysteries, and made me far more invested in the story and the characters.

That’s not to say that the characters aren’t compelling on their own, even when we’re just receiving snapshots of their lives. Each woman’s voice feels unique, despite many of the similar themes explored by their perspectives around sex, sexual violence, racial identity, and a longing for one’s homeland. Their different backgrounds and lived experiences allow them to shed light on these issues from varying angles: Mei as a biracial woman raised in predominantly white Surrey, Yuki as a Japanese immigrant in London, and Haruka as a Japanese woman in Tokyo. I enjoyed reading all their points of view, and was never disappointed when one character’s chapter appeared over another’s, but I’ll confess I found Haruka the most interesting. This was partly because her setting was the most fascinating, from the lush descriptions of her grandparents’ farm to the metropolitan frenzy of Tokyo, but also because she, compared to Mei and Yuki, seemed to have the most agency in her story. She is loud, unapologetic, and delightfully hedonistic, with a caustic charm that made her chapters fresh and entertaining, even when they were exploring dark themes.

What also made the merging storylines so enjoyable was the opportunity to see the protagonists from each other’s perspectives. When Haruka and Mei meet, we see their thoughts overlapping simultaneously with each other’s, each woman marvelling at how the other is prettier than her, finding beauty in each other’s insecurities. After being embedded in each character’s internal landscapes for so long, it was refreshing to see them in a new light. In contrast, however, the minor characters often felt flat and were largely unlikeable, except for Haruka’s grandparents, who made up some of the most emotional and endearing moments of the novel. 

Footman’s writing is lush and lyrical, with descriptions soaked in specificity and detail, particularly when portraying the Japanese countryside or describing Japanese food. These details make the world of the novel immersive to readers who aren’t familiar with Japan and deeply evocative to those who are. In contrast to the wistful beauty of these depictions, Footman does not hold back when it comes to the ugliness in the novel, with descriptions of sex and the body that are jarring and visceral, and which make the scenes of sexual assault all the more harrowing. While uncomfortable to read, they serve as an unflinching examination of the three women’s complex relationships with sex, with their bodies, and with womanhood.

One noteworthy technical feature is the lack of dialogue tags - instead, dialogue is represented through italics, in an almost poem-like fashion. Initially, this took me out of the story somewhat, and made reading the dialogue a bit jarring to follow. However, it feels appropriate in a novel with vastly less dialogue, where the majority of the story is internal, and we spend more time in the characters’ thoughts and feelings than in the external world. As such, there is a strong sense of feeling throughout the story - when the characters feel something, they feel it a thousand times over, feel it in their body, and this feeling spills over into the language. This raw, dense writing fits well with the novel’s intensity of topics and themes, but it sometimes tips into overly sentimental prose and rambling internal monologues that tend to arrest the progression of the plot.

Another clever device used by Footman, to integrate Japanese folklore into the novel, is the imbedding of three Japanese folktales into the story, with each one having clear allegorical parallels to the three women’s lives. They’re woven seamlessly into the story, an allusion to the book of Japanese fairy tales Mei owns but cannot read, as if we the readers are witnessing her own interpretation of them. 

At its heart, the story is a compelling exploration of Japanese identity both within Japan and outside it, and more broadly of the immigrant experience. Mei’s struggles with her identity as a hafu, half white and half Japanese, and her regrets about how much she has tried to assimilate into English culture, symbolised by her infatuation with her white best friend Fran, would resonate with many biracial or second generation immigrant readers. All three women face the intense scrutiny of the male gaze, particularly the exoticization and fetishization of Japanese women as objects of desire. In contrast but also in parallel, we see a great deal of internalised racism and self-hatred through references to women trying to stretch their eyes or envying Mei’s paler hair and Westernised features.

If I had to pick one word to describe the tone of the novel, it would be longing. Throughout there is a great, painful sense of longing: for home, whether it’s Mei’s rose-tinted memories of the Japan of her childhood or Yuki’s fear of forgetting her homeland, so much so that she doesn’t want to eat the food her mother has packed for her because it’s her last link to Japan. This longing is represented, in large part, by a longing for one’s mother, which is a sentiment that drives both Haruka and Mei in their choices and the way they view their lives. The figure of the mother is one that haunts the novel even when she’s not on the page.

It’s because of this preoccupation with grief and longing that I could forgive the book’s occasional meandering and oversentimentality. Both were symptomatic of its complex, raw subject matter and the struggling psyches of its characters, as was the beautifully layered, nested structure of plot and perspectives, stories within stories, interwoven to reveal the unexpected but delightful connections between characters that culminated in a startlingly hopeful message in an otherwise bleak story.