This essay won a prize in the Eve Festival of Rags Drum 2020, organized by Lab on Roof.
Foreword
The fearsome black hole in that pit toilet could hold its own against “the child-snatching man” and “the bottomless swamp deep in the woods” among the greatest terrors of my imagination.
Tomihiko Morimi, The Sun and the Maiden, “Memories of the Toilet”
The humor of Tomihiko Morimi’s fiction is obvious at a glance. Morimi often opens, for instance, by expounding some arcane-looking term of his own invention, such as “four-and-a-half tatami mats.” The effect is of solemnly delivering an explanation that is pure nonsense. A first encounter with his writing also brings a certain freshness, even unease. The reader feels abruptly thrust into a world at once ordinary and peculiar, a sensation not wholly unlike beginning Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. Read a little further, however, and the resemblance vanishes.
But once we ask why Morimi’s fiction is funny, the question resists any brief answer. We might attribute its humor to his fertile imagination, but that tells us nothing about how the humor is made. A novelist can write a comic sentence that makes readers laugh because he knows how to attune himself to them. He does not necessarily need to understand the source of that sympathy. He need only put the amusing ideas that occur to him on paper. This essay is concerned with uncovering the resonance between writer and reader that arises through humor.
Humor and theories of humor
Any attempt to trace humor to its sources must begin with the most basic question: what is humor?
The modern Chinese word youmo derives from the English “humor.” It describes something deliberately intended to make people laugh. The term does not specify why the laughter occurs, but it does imply that a message has somehow elicited a sudden pleasure in its recipient. Accounts of the cause of humor are usually divided into three broad families: superiority or disparagement theories, release theories, and incongruity theories. Superiority theory grounds humor in resentment, contempt, and a sense of being above someone else. Release theory treats humor as a discharge of the tension and repression produced by social constraint. Incongruity theory locates humor in “the unification of inconsistent, incongruous, or unsuitable parts or circumstances within a complex object or aggregate, or in their acquisition of some relation that the mind can apprehend.” Most forms of humor can be explained through incongruity. This does not make the theory infallible, but incongruity has entered many more specific theories of humor and gives us a powerful instrument of analysis. It will therefore guide the discussion of Morimi’s work below, alongside the other two approaches.
Different kinds of humor also produce different experiences. The humor of a novel, for example, often feels unlike that of a stand-alone joke. Both can give a reader or listener pleasure, but humor in fiction seems much more complex. Consider these two passages:
Little Robert asked his mother for two cents. “What did you do with the money I gave you yesterday?”
“I gave it to a poor old woman,” he answered.
“You’re a good boy,” said the mother proudly. “Here are two cents more. But why are you so interested in the old woman?”
“She is the one who sells the candy.”
“Good Boy”
“She won’t want to come back to a place like this.” The words had barely left my mouth when the Master let rip a thunderous fart. Even he was startled by its volume and gave a little “Eh?”
The Eccentric Family
The joke reveals, through a quick reversal, that the boy gave the woman money to buy candy, not to help her. The reader grasps the point at once. The second passage, embedded in a literary context, works differently. Its humor is richer and more complex, yet when taken out of the novel it can sound remarkably crude. What the excerpt loses is the place of humor among the novel’s other elements. The Master’s response here belongs to his characterization, and its comedy extends beyond the sentence to the work as a whole. Put another way, humor does not always arise solely from a sudden shift in relevance. It can also arise from the comic form of the larger work.
Whether approached by cause or by form, humor is a complicated product. I will not add another general causal theory. Instead, I will approach Morimi’s humor at several scales: the self-contained passage; the work as comedy; the recurring element of the “coined term”; and the level of literary ideas.
A cognitive-pragmatic analysis: Morimi’s fiction as a chain of short jokes
Many excerpts from Morimi retain a strong comic charge outside their original context. The humor of these self-contained passages can be studied most directly. Relevance theory, developed by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson in Relevance: Communication and Cognition, provides the main framework for doing so.
Relevance theory treats linguistic communication as a cognitive process that depends on inference. It proposes two principles: the cognitive principle, that human cognition tends to be geared toward maximal relevance, and the communicative principle, that every act of ostensive communication communicates a presumption of its own optimal relevance. Speech, as purposive action, is thus an ostensive-inferential cognitive process. Both parties tend to seek, and assume that the other party seeks, the greatest relevance at the lowest cost. The degree of relevance depends on cognitive effect, meaning the effect on the existing context, and on the effort required to process it.
From this perspective, a speaker typically supplies the necessary information while the recipient infers the implied intention. When receiving information, the recipient first construes the speaker’s intention in terms of maximal relevance, then revises that inference as more information arrives until an optimally relevant interpretation is reached. Humor often arises from the gap between the first inference and the final one. That gap takes the form of incongruity. Relevance theory can accommodate nearly every humorous passage and show how it works. In Morimi’s fiction, the following types are especially visible, though they are not exhaustive.
1. Humor produced by a clash of discursive contexts
Let me state at once that, although I am in such a sorry state now, I was not always like this.
Shortly after birth I was the very incarnation of purity and innocence ... Why have you come to this? Is this the final reckoning of your life?
Some may say that I am still young and that human beings can change without limit.
What nonsense. Young people must not be coddled.
The Tatami Galaxy
The first two paragraphs dwell on the narrator’s present wretchedness. When the third turns to other people’s encouragement, the ordinary expectation is that a more hopeful account will follow. At the very least, he might recognize the kindness of those trying to console him. The reader’s initial inference of maximal relevance is therefore that the fourth paragraph will turn positive. Instead, the narrator rejects the hopeful remark and declares his circumstances hopeless and irreversible. The optimally relevant interpretation turns out to be one more statement of despair.
2. Humor produced by a dense accumulation of tropes
“Use too much and every dish will turn into curry.” The concision of this description strikes the nail squarely on the head. The danger is so grave that a responsible adult must warn us, “Take care to control the quantity.” Who knew curry powder could be so perilous? I could already see the curry demon lurking deep in the woods.
The Sun and the Maiden, “The Curry Demon”
“Use too much and every dish will turn into curry” is already an obvious exaggeration. Ordinarily we do not pile figurative devices together at such density, still less embed one inside another. Here an exaggerated sentence becomes the object of yet another comparison. In the language of relevance theory, the profusion of figures violates the communicative principle because it is semantically superfluous. A reader seeking maximal relevance is led to suppose that the “curry demon” must matter, that it carries some deeper and more vivid meaning than the word “dangerous.” Instead, the phrase appears precisely where it seems least necessary, and its redundancy gives the passage its childish delight.
3. Humor produced by the unexpected reuse of a noun
“The Speedy Kotatsu is no easy customer either.” “The Speedy Kotatsu? A kotatsu is a kotatsu, but what’s this ‘Speedy’ business?” “A strange lot of people carry a kotatsu around the campus. It comes and goes without a trace, so we call it the Speedy Kotatsu.”
The Night Is Short, Walk on Girl
The dialogue explains how the “Speedy Kotatsu” got its name. The Japanese name invokes Idaten, a Buddhist guardian deity famed for speed. Combining the god with a heated table is already unexpected. At first, the reader is inclined to treat the phrase as a momentary simile rather than as the creation of a proper name; it sounds far too unserious for that. Yet Morimi goes on using the name again and again. Only then does the reader realize that the phrase has become a proper noun. The optimally relevant interpretation is not that the kotatsu merely resembles Idaten but that this one kotatsu, carried roaming through the campus, is called the Speedy Kotatsu.
Morimi uses the same device throughout his fiction with expressions such as “four-and-a-half tatami mats,” The Crackpot of Monte Cristo, and “proxy war.” By stacking these novel terms on top of one another, he gives the stories much of their expressive force.
Relevance theory can analyze the comic elements in the great majority of individual passages, but it cannot escape one limitation. It explains how a stretch of text changes a context, yet cannot grasp an element that operates on the larger scale of a novel. Its analyses therefore remain fragmentary. The theory does not connect all the incidents involving the same character and pays too little attention to the context built by the text as a whole. Relevance theory is rigorous but limited. I use it here to suggest an explanation at the lowest level of humor’s generative mechanism.
Humor and comic form: Morimi’s fiction as comedy
Hegel writes: “Any contrast between essence and appearance, or between an end and its means, may be called laughable if it reveals contradiction or disproportion, so that the appearance negates itself or the opposition comes to nothing in its realization. Comedy, however, demands something more profound.”
If we treat a novel as a patchwork of empty comic episodes, we inevitably miss some of what it does as a whole. The most important loss is its comic form.
In Hegel’s thought, substantiality is the totality of universally rational ethical powers, the highest good embodied in law and subjective morality. Subjectivity, by contrast, does not contain the objective content of ethical substance. It consists only of standards of good and evil formed within an individual consciousness. In comedy, the principal factor is subjectivity and substantiality recedes; in tragedy, substantiality is what acts.
Seen through Hegel’s aesthetics, The Tatami Galaxy is far from typical. Suppose we treat the protagonist’s dream of a “rose-colored campus life” as an expression of substantiality, an idea bearing on social standing and personal worth. Substantiality then remains present throughout. At first the protagonist feels desperately removed from any real value, and the result even carries a tragic note. As the story develops, however, a great reversal occurs. His relentless pursuit of the substantial comes to look absurd. Each cycle absurdly reruns the same tragic conclusion, or what he takes to be a tragic conclusion. Only when he surveys it all from the perspective of the infinite parallel world of four-and-a-half-tatami rooms does he understand that the “rose-colored campus life” he desired does not exist. The comedy of The Tatami Galaxy thus lies not in comedy alone, but also in the dissolution of a tragic paradigm.
Hegel briefly identifies three kinds of content that can become objects of comedy. Each repays attention in the context of Morimi’s fiction.
1. An end and a character wholly without substance, yet caught in contradiction and therefore unable to realize themselves
In The Tatami Galaxy, the protagonist’s desire and greed for a nonexistent “perfect rose-colored life” produce this kind of comedy. Such a life is abstract and unreal. In pursuing it, he forfeits what satisfaction the present might offer. Not only can he never reach his goal; he abandons too many valuable things and opportunities along the way. The comic turn comes when, after failing to reach that ideal state, his final exchange with Ozu reverses their earlier roles.
In the preceding cycles, the protagonist still longs for the perfect life:
I demanded to know what amusement he found in making my pitiful life still more miserable. Ozu showed his customary yokai grin and chuckled. “This is my love for you.”
“I have no need of anything so filthy,” I replied.
At the end of the story, the protagonist realizes that what he sought was insubstantial. He happily rises above the failure and ceases to care about it:
“Enough nonsense. Let me pay!”
“Why are you so determined to pay?”
I gave him a wicked grin. “This is my love for you.”
“I have no need of anything so filthy,” he replied.
(2) Individuals who pursue a substantial end and character but, as individuals, become instruments that work entirely against its realization.
Morimi’s stories do contain this kind of comedy, but they eventually dissolve it, after first steering the reader toward a misreading. In The Night Is Short, Walk on Girl, for example, Chief-in-Chief Underpants vows not to change his underwear until he meets the woman he loves. The vow looks like a perfect case of a person obstructing his own end, yet it never actually affects whether he meets her. The animated adaptation introduces a clearer example. The Senior tries to retrieve his trousers from Rihaku’s tram, but the tram pulls away before he can reach them. He then appears half-naked before the young woman. After enduring every imaginable hardship to reach her, he makes a terrible impression and is knocked into the water by her “friendly punch.”
Why is this form of comedy seldom prominent in Morimi’s fiction? One important reason is that his writing rarely foregrounds a sharply drawn social issue. It tends to center on individuals, and its endings are seldom tragic. When Morimi portrays male university students in particular, he never mocks them as a group for their behavior. He was once one of them, after all. Nor does he look away from their occasional excesses. Like most storytellers, he first gives a situation its comic form, then treats it affirmatively. What he finally seeks is an ingenious way of letting readers recognize themselves in these characters, not an excuse to jeer at them from outside.
(3) An external accident entangles the situation, allows the end to be attained, and turns both inner character and outward circumstance into comic contradictions that receive a comic resolution.
Every cycle in The Tatami Galaxy ends in this fashion. The final opportunity always depends on two elements: Akashi’s fear of moths and the mochiguman keychain she has lost, which happens to be in the protagonist’s possession. Both arise by chance.
Morimi also delights in combining coincidence with conspicuously complicated relations among his characters to create comic scenes. Near the end of The Eccentric Family, for example, the tanuki elders meet to elect the next Nise-emon while, in the room next door, the Friday Fellows are preparing a tanuki hot-pot banquet after earlier disorder forced them to move the gathering there. Yaichirō turns into a great tiger in his fury and destroys the partition. This coincidence gives Yasaburō a chance to save his mother and turns the surrounding atmosphere comic:
The adjoining room, packed tight with everyone from the elders to the senior officers, heard the warning “The Friday Fellows are here!” Inarticulate cries filled the chamber. The panicking tanuki all lost their disguises, and countless balls of fur welled up until the floor looked covered by a writhing carpet. Professor Yodogawa burst in crying, “Sorry! Sorry!” and, though entirely by accident, sent more than a few furballs flying with his feet.
The Eccentric Family
Accident is not exclusive to comedy; it is a familiar device in all kinds of stories. Even so, Morimi’s fiction plainly uses accidents to produce its distinctive sense of the strange.
Coined terms and a densely furnished narrative
Having considered Morimi’s fiction through both local passages and broad comic form, we can turn to one of its more distinctive features in detail. What stands out to me is his use of “coined terms.” Relevance theory has already shown how their first appearance can be incongruous, but that analysis was confined to the meaning of an individual passage. These terms do more than work at the moment they appear. They serve the narrative of an entire book, and even the narratives of several books. Rather than isolated figures of speech, they are elements built into the fiction. The following examples indicate how.
1. Terms explained once and used many times
Examples include the “friendly punch,” “Chief-in-Chief Underpants,” and the “Friday Fellows.”
Are you familiar with the friendly punch? When people must raise a fist against someone close to them, they clench it tight. ... But hide the thumb inside the other four fingers and try clenching it that way. The hard, powerful fist suddenly loses its confidence and becomes as loving as a lucky cat’s paw. ... When she was little, her older sister taught her the friendly punch. Her sister said, “Only by using the friendly punch can you move gracefully through the world and open the way to a beautiful, harmonious life.” A beautiful, harmonious life. The words struck her deeply. And so she possessed the esoteric art of the friendly punch.
The Night Is Short, Walk on Girl
The opening explanation defines the friendly punch as a way of striking someone “with love.” It gives the heroine an innocent desire for a beautiful, harmonious life. Because the idea is vivid, amusing, and persuasive, its later use when Mr. Todou harasses her keeps her elegant composure intact even as it reveals her resolve. The term feels fresh, too.
2. Terms explained repeatedly and used many times
Examples include “faux electric brandy” and “cat ramen.”
“The recipe for electric brandy is kept under lock and key. An employee of the Kyoto Central Telephone Company once tried to recreate its flavor. After endless experimentation had brought him to the end of his wits, he miraculously invented faux electric brandy. Because it came about by accident, its flavor and aroma are completely different from the real thing.”
The Night Is Short, Walk on Girl
The faux electric brandy in the glass was clear as water, with the faintest orange tinge. I took the glass in my hand and inhaled gently. For an instant, I thought a tremendous flower had opened before my eyes.
The Night Is Short, Walk on Girl
The novel devotes a great deal of attention to the mysterious faux electric brandy. It ceases to be a particular liquor and becomes one of Morimi’s own creations. During the drinking contest with Rihaku it acquires another value: the fragrant flavor of a life warmed through. This further develops its character. In The Eccentric Family, a faux-electric-brandy distillery appears and is treated without explanation as an ordinary part of the characters’ world, immediately intensifying the novel’s fantastic atmosphere.
From these examples we can derive a general pattern for the “coined term.”
The Chinese labels mark a sequence: “term coined” → “first explanation” → “second explanation” → “third explanation” → “term enters narrative setting 1” → “term enters narrative setting 2” → …
When a term is created, it first carries the literal meaning of its form. The Speedy Kotatsu, for instance, suggests a kotatsu that can run. The School Festival Director supplies its first explanation: it is a persistent nuisance to the office. When he discovers that Chief-in-Chief Underpants is using it to write the script of The Crackpot of Monte Cristo, it receives a second explanation. At the same time, the object enters the narrative repeatedly: the heroine’s chance encounter with its riders and the incidents that follow; the pot of soy milk on its tabletop; Master Higuchi’s use of it as a base from which to resell books at a profit; and the romantic spectacle of Chief-in-Chief Underpants writing his script there.
What does such a term actually do? Begin with an ordinary noun that denotes a material object. Consider a “door key.” When the word appears, we imagine something that opens a particular door, with a long shaft inserted into the lock and a shorter, thicker end held by the hand. We abstract this information from our previous encounters with keys. When we read “He walked to the door with the key in his hand,” we normally assume that he is about to unlock it. That inference, too, comes from our experience of keys. A noun therefore carries far more than its referent. It bears a large collection of properties we have attached to it.
A coined term may initially combine two existing nouns and thus inherit some of their properties. But that does not mean it arrives richly endowed. On the contrary, it remains unknown to the reader because it has not yet been explained. Everything supplied by prior experience is only a possibility. A coined term can also narrow its definition. “Speedy Kotatsu,” for example, designates that one kotatsu and no other. Such referents can therefore be understood as entirely new things, and as they are described and take part in the narrative, they continuously acquire new properties.
This method is more often used to construct characters. Morimi applies it widely to the persons and objects named by his invented terms. Objects should ultimately serve the representation of people, yet he sometimes makes an object a narrative subject in its own right and leaves the person it expresses invisible behind it. The object’s strangeness then spreads through the entire social world of the story. This may be one source of the phantasmagoric quality and peculiar incongruity of Morimi’s fiction.
A thematic case study: The Tatami Galaxy
Close reading is not the only way to analyze humor in Morimi. Humor also runs through a work’s themes as self-mockery directed at the author and his readers, or as a feeling of superiority toward a character. Since every work has a different theme, each may require a separate account. Here I will use The Tatami Galaxy as a preliminary case study.
The novel exemplifies Morimi’s frequent use of the university-student setting. Its protagonist longs for a “rose-colored campus life” but instead lives what he considers a dreadful existence, for which he holds his no-good friend Ozu chiefly responsible. Only after passing through one cycle after another does he realize that the ideal state he desires does not exist. The answer offered by The Tatami Galaxy is to surrender that ideal and enjoy the life at hand.
Making a university student the protagonist brings a student’s predicament directly into view. The novel locates its source in an extreme imbalance between idealism and reality. As the discussion of Hegelian comedy suggested, the ending breaks apart a tragic narrative and strengthens the novel’s comic quality. Before that ending, however, the protagonist repeatedly undergoes the tragedy of time lost beyond recovery. For the first half of each story, he even resembles “the unluckiest student alive, swept into one turmoil after another.” The pattern distills and awakens an experience shared with the reader. Readers are drawn at once into feelings of superiority and into self-mockery, then find satisfaction in the seemingly sensible answer the novel provides: accept the difference between reality and the ideal, and enjoy reality.
This all-purpose answer does create humor, but it also contains a dramatic ambiguity. The Tatami Galaxy imagines an “endless suite of four-and-a-half-tatami rooms” from which the protagonist can learn every possibility of his life. Only after wandering through his many possible ways of living does he recognize that he cannot reach an unattainable ideal state. His ideal differs from every ideal that can genuinely be pursued. It is perfection already known to be beyond reach. Real ideals, however, are often attainable. In that case, what needs to change is our frequent inability to move forward with courage, not merely our failure to make peace with ourselves. Confusing the two ideas and applying the novel’s answer to real life could, in the extreme, become a fatalism that cancels one’s own agency.
From another angle, the idea expressed by The Tatami Galaxy seems to imply a critique of systems built on a single scale of judgment, and to articulate a hope that a multicultural consciousness might act upon the individual. The ideal of “perfection” is defined and constructed by power. When it cannot be reached, perhaps the answer is to ignore it and establish a pluralist system of values instead. This is connected to Japan’s discussion of pluralism as a nation long imagined as ethnically homogeneous. The worldwide movement of globalization has brought many cultures into contact and made the “multicultural society” an increasingly prominent subject in Japan. Something of that discussion seems to lie beneath the theme of The Tatami Galaxy. Within the university system, the protagonist occupies the position of a “stranger.” Just as perfect campus life remains unattainable, the stranger can never quite become part of the Japanese nation.
The problem is that The Tatami Galaxy directs its expectation toward the “stranger.” The result resembles a didactic compromise, a forced acceptance of society as it stands. The story does not try to build a multicultural society. It tries to change the mentality of the individual excluded by the community. If readers take that idea to heart, the humor turns into a cynical sneer. The story solves no problem; it merely pretends to belittle itself and adopts an attitude of knowing detachment.
Conclusion
Humor is a complex field whose causes have never been reduced to a single accepted explanation. Beginning from the three major families of humor theory, this essay has therefore moved from the micro level to the macro level along several lines of analysis: relevance theory and optimal relevance on the pragmatic level; Hegel’s aesthetics and comic form; Morimi’s narrative technique of the “coined term”; and a thematic case study. The aim has been to reconstruct the elements of humor in literary fiction as completely as possible.
The reconstruction shows that every level of a work can contain humor, while the causes and effects of its elements remain distinct and propel one another. At the microscopic level, different works may be funny in much the same way. The more macroscopic the comic element becomes, however, the more particular it appears. At that point, only a case-by-case analysis can explain it.
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