“Cities · Space” Writing Event | The Space of the Everyday: Light Novels’ “Slow-Life” Turn and Its Essence

I’ll never see candy bullets again.¹

“Slow life” is a simple, clear expression. It plainly describes a form of social behavior in terms of time: living at a slower pace. Set against modern capitalism’s sleepless, unceasing, 24/7 “working life,” it suggests the possibility of escaping neoliberal society’s control over the individual and drawing a clear line again between increasingly indistinct “working time” and “time for rest.” Interestingly, however, “slow life” as a personal lifestyle choice and works depicting “slow life” represent two different groups of people. The first group puts the idea into practice; the second lacks the conditions for doing so, and ultimately experiences this “slow life” imaginatively, by consuming products of the culture industry. This essay takes the currently popular category of “slow-life” fiction as its starting point, attempting to analyze its essence and significance.

“Slow life” (surō raifu, スローライフ) has become a popular tag on the fiction-posting website Shōsetsuka ni Narō. In fact, countless works have the characteristics of slow-life fiction without using the tag. Clearly, Japanese light novels are undergoing what we might provisionally call a “slow-life” turn. Most such works share a plot: the protagonist initially leads a busy life → some turn of events makes a relaxed, leisurely everyday life possible → the protagonist peacefully lives that relaxed, leisurely everyday life.

Slow-life fiction is an excellent fit for the web-novel writing trend currently popular in the Japanese light-novel world:

1. Depicting “slow life” requires an accumulation of everyday details, often down to the most trivial. Web novels, which impose no restrictions on literary style, have become the best medium for writing slow-life stories.
2. From the industry’s perspective, the mainstream still consists of traditional, mission-driven works of the “non-everyday” kind and works of the “everyday,” or slice-of-life, kind with a theme or central conflict. There is no convincing market case for works without a clearly defined theme that simply show the protagonist living at leisure.
3. What counts as slow living differs from person to person; it is highly individual. Writing web fiction is likewise a highly individual activity. Writers need only depict the slow life they want to win support from people with similar ideas.

Under these circumstances, it is hardly surprising that slow life has become popular on web-fiction submission sites. Its temporal significance is easy enough to understand, but “slow life” clearly has a spatial significance too. This is inseparable from the fact that most slow-life web fiction is set in other worlds. How could slow life be achieved in a city in the real world? This is clearly a crucial question. In fact, the protagonists of many slow-life works come from the real world. Generally, their working lives are so painful that, through some chance turn of events, they are reincarnated in another world and begin their slow lives. (In the popular I’ve Been Killing Slimes for 300 Years and Maxed Out My Level, for example, the protagonist dies from overwork and is reincarnated as an immortal witch. She leads a peaceful everyday life of killing slimes each day, taking walks, shopping, and cooking, and is traumatized by “overtime.”) Those “native to the other world” also have, to varying degrees, their own “exhausting everyday lives.” Most are “important characters,” such as Heroes or Demon Lords, burdened with a mission. For various reasons, however, they no longer want to carry that burden and choose instead to retreat to the countryside and live a peaceful everyday life. (In Banished from the Hero’s Party, I Decided to Live a Quiet Life in the Countryside, the protagonist is expelled because the Hero’s party does not recognize his worth, and begins a peaceful everyday life on the frontier, growing vegetables and making medicines.)

We can readily see that this paradigm shift from the “original life” to “slow life” necessarily takes place through a change of space. Either the protagonist, a worker in the real world, leaves this “space of labor” and gains an everyday life through some supernatural power; or a character native to the other world leaves the “place of destiny” for a space unconnected with any mission—the frontier, for instance—and begins an everyday life there.

These works posit an “other world” that is, in fact, unconvincing: its purpose is to provide a “space for the everyday.”

“Everyday life” is a vague concept, but we can at least understand it, as Jonathan Crary puts it, as a kind of “remainder.”

“In the late 1940s and 1950s, the idea of everyday life was a way of describing what was left over, or what remained in the face of economic modernization and the increasing subdivision of social activity. The everyday was the vague constellation of spaces and times outside what was organized and institutionalized around work, conformity, and consumerism.”²

By Jonathan Crary.

“The everyday” has always been one of the themes of Japanese ACG culture—anime, comics, games, and related media—but even works we would normally classify as “pure slice-of-life” lack the characteristics of today’s slow-life fiction. The defining feature of slow-life works is that they all tell the story of a protagonist who once lost the everyday and regains a grasp on it. In works such as K-ON!, “the everyday” does indeed run throughout, but for the characters this “everyday” simply is their life. In slow-life fiction, by contrast, reader and protagonist come into alignment: symbolically, the protagonist–reader recovers the “everyday life” they have lost.

Why, then, does another world have this power? In fact, other worlds have no power to grant people “everyday life.” What is actually at work is that forces in the real world have deprived people of the everyday. To live, people have to work to reproduce themselves.³ But as capitalism develops further, the distinction between our “working time” and “leisure time” grows blurred. We have to sacrifice our time for rest—our personal lives, our everyday life—to struggle for “tomorrow.” Ultimately, only two choices remain: “work” and “time off (preparing for work).” This is also the rule governing the space of the modern city: individuals within it do not own the means of production—especially the means of production needed for their own reproduction. People frustrated by the city, or unable to keep going there, choose withdrawal: they retreat somewhere “non-urban.” Uno Tsunehiro proposes a path beyond decisionism in what he calls the “suburban-type intermediary community,” which he finds in his examination of Kudo Kankuro’s work.⁴ We can put the opposition simply: if the “city” represents the established division of labor, organization, consumerism, and the everyday turned into spectacle, then the “suburbs” represent a new space combining a high degree of mobility with the city-like capacity to draw people together into a “community.” These “suburbs” are not simply suburbs or rural areas in the literal sense: places that urban development has yet to turn into cities—though most works do use such settings. They can also be places where people on the margins who cannot accept “urban” values gather to live. Some possibility seems to lie hidden in such places. Many works of this kind exist beyond Kudo Kankuro’s, but readers are choosing them less and less. Stories set in the reality of the “city,” in which individuals establish a new community—a utopia—through mutual recognition, are hard for people already controlled by a community to accept.

But to call other-world slow-life fiction a total failure because realistically grounded works about “suburban-type intermediary communities”—in which individuals come together anew to reclaim everyday life and oppose spectacle and consumerism—have gradually given way to stories in which the everyday can be imagined only in another world, and obtained only through a deus ex machina, would perhaps be inappropriate.

Certainly, slow-life web novels are part of the culture industry. In a sense, they serve as a patch for the problems generated by the “city,” which endlessly drives workers to produce value and consume. But the crucial point is precisely this: unlike earlier works about “building utopia,” slow-life fiction centers on how someone who has lost everyday life comes to have it again. This is especially important. Restoring a grasp on “everyday life” in imagination, rather than once again striving for some “grand narrative,” fundamentally changes the place of the “work–rest” logic. This cultural phenomenon does not accomplish anything so grand as “awakening people.” Yet it can make conspicuous the jarring conflict between “everyday life” and the so-called “endless everyday” we are currently compelled to live in the “city.” What ultimately emerges is a battle like the one in slow-life fiction—the only battle in this category of ACG works: the battle to defend one’s everyday life. This is a battle at the level of ideas—that is, a battle at the cultural level. This is also why Japanese ACG works, especially light novels, rarely describe a space in detail, instead letting the protagonist’s grasp of that space govern how it is presented. In this mode of narration, the world always begins to change at the level of ideas. And this is the first step we must take if we are to find a way forward for our everyday lives.

Hongcha Pao Haitai: I like Teacher Wu’s essay. I love Teacher Wu.⁵

Still, when I first read this essay, I was a little puzzled. As Teacher Wu’s examples show, slow life in Narō-style light novels is often linked to the “frontier/suburbs,” far from the city, and to “the everyday.” But are the “suburbs” and “the everyday” really “slow”?

In discussing the “suburbs,” Teacher Wu mentions Uno Tsunehiro’s account of “suburban communities” in The Imagination of the 2000s. Within the criticism of the 2000s, the origins of this question of the “suburbs” can probably be traced back to Miura Atsushi’s notion of the spread of fast fūdo. The term is a playful coinage: fast fūdo (ファスト風土), with fūdo meaning a locality’s environment and way of life, sounds just like the Japanese borrowing of “fast food” (ファストフード). Miura uses it to describe how, as Japan’s regions undergo economic globalization and become consumer societies, their streetscapes are taken over by commercial facilities such as fast-food chains, large shopping malls, and convenience stores. The streets lose their particular history and culture, becoming anonymous, homogeneous spaces. Thus, when Uno discusses “suburban communities” in The Imagination of the 2000s, he pays close attention to Kudo Kankuro’s insistence on “place names.” But insisting on place names—the proper names of towns and neighborhoods—does not mean restoring these anonymous spaces to what they once were. It means acknowledging the anonymity of these spaces while exploring the possibility of a small community. And such a small community—in other words, the everyday—is precisely the “suburban intermediary community” Uno advocates.

The other question is that of “the everyday” itself. In otaku criticism, the term “the everyday” comes from the conjunction of Miyadai Shinji’s “endless everyday” with the question of the “suburbs” described above. Just as the 24-hour convenience store is one of the two most typical images in the everyday scenery of otaku culture—the other being the school—“the everyday” is built within this consumerist, anonymous space. The familiar body of “slice-of-life” works follows from this: against homogenized local streetscapes—Lucky Star’s Saitama or K-ON!’s Kyoto, for example—characters live out their endless school days, taking detours to convenience stores after class and meeting up at large shopping malls on weekends. Even the places we viewers visit on anime pilgrimages are facilities such as “school buildings,” “railroad crossings,” and “shopping malls on busy streets,” the sort of thing we seem to find in any town.

The “suburbs” and “the everyday,” then, seem not to be “slow life” as Teacher Wu describes them, but a kind of consumerist “fast food.” That does not mean his essay is wrong, however. Teacher Wu has still precisely grasped the essence of “slow life” as a cultural condition. As he says in the final paragraph, “slow life” is fundamentally a product of the culture industry and takes an affirmative stance toward the consumerist social environment it inhabits. What it expresses is not hatred of or discomfort with the “endless everyday.” Rather, like the girls in school uniforms in Miyadai Shinji’s writing, it accepts this “everyday” and goes on living with a mattari—“slow”—attitude.⁶ Criticism of the 2000s, especially otaku criticism—although most of its practitioners are on the left—takes an affirmative view of “the everyday,” this cultural condition brought about by consumer society. Uno Tsunehiro does so, and so does Azuma Hiroki. In Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals, Azuma regarded otaku as the subjects—and theirs as the attitude toward life—best able to adapt to the postmodern condition and consumer society; in Philosophy of the Tourist, this subject was updated to the “tourist.” This coincides with the affirmative attitude Teacher Wu describes.

If I were to offer one final suggestion, Fredric Jameson has discussed nostalgia becoming a commodity under consumerism. Perhaps Teacher Wu’s essay could also emphasize this perspective: in web light novels, otaku culture’s ultimate Fast food, the ultimate Slow life storylines are all the rage. What should we make of these two incompatible poles coming together?

HMS Hood: Broadly speaking, modern people have lost “the everyday” in the course of urbanization and social change. That is as far as my commentary from an urban-sociological perspective will go. Any textbook would be more thorough and interesting than what I can offer here.

This is also why Japanese ACG works, especially light novels, rarely describe a space in detail, instead letting the protagonist’s grasp of that space govern how it is presented.

The author’s explanation is that the battle in “slow-life” light novels, discussed above, is a “battle at the level of ideas” and a “battle at the cultural level.” Fair enough. Here I would like to introduce another possibility: that of the “situation.”

I’m more at home with this than with urban sociology, which I nearly failed. I tend to understand the various conflicts in literary works as struggles over the “definition of the situation.” Describing space is describing a “situation.” As a practical matter, might this way of writing make it easier for readers to accept the protagonist’s definition of the situation? In effect, wouldn’t this mean accepting the definition the author wants readers to accept, so that they might then accept the character’s subsequent responses based on that definition? Though this line of thought doesn’t have much to do with the essay, really.