Healing Style

Near the middle of Kurita Yuki’s (1972–) novella Hamizabesu (Hamisabeth, 2002), a young woman becomes annoyed when a former coworker calls and pesters her for a date:

I hung up the phone.

I pulled out the plug.

Angry, I went to take a shower. While wandering around the room naked, my whole body started to tingle. It seems that because I was upset my circulation had improved. (66)

In Kurita’s later novel Oteru moru (Hôtel Mole, 2005), a woman asks her boss why she was picked for the job of hotel receptionist. The boss replies:

Your features. I knew when I saw your resume photograph, and I knew for sure when you came for the interview and I saw you sitting at the front desk. Your face is a face that invites sleep, or what in the industry we call a “sleep-inducing appearance.” When customers see that face, they feel they are going to sleep well that night. (52)

These two scenes reveal two aspects of ambient mood regulation in postindustrial Japan. In the first example, the woman does not dwell on why the phone call was annoying. Instead, she shifts her mood by shifting her sensory environment: “Angry, I went to take a shower.” She deals with ill feelings not with thinking but through water on the body and air on the skin. She displaces irritation on the level of affective sensory cues not dependent on cognition for their efficacy.

In the second example, the boss employs this same strategy of sensory displacement for commercial purposes. The receptionist’s face generates a calming mood for customers, helping them to forget their worries. In both cases, the affective cues employed are not situationally specific. Characters use the shower, the air on naked skin, and the calming face for their ability to afford calming moods irrespective of context.

Such forms of transposable calm emerged in Japan in the mid-1990s as marketable commodities, both in therapeutic guises (relief from anxiety) and more generally in contexts of relaxation and stress relief. Around this time a new persona emerged in the media, the “healing style” (iyashi-kei) individual: a person (often but not always female) who puts those around them at ease.1 This use of the term first emerged in reference to female television talk-show personalities and later expanded to include actresses, fashion models, comedians, politicians, and even academics. In more casual contexts, to dub someone healing style became shorthand for a personality type particularly adept at making others feel comfortable. Before long, self-help books emerged, usually for woman, on how to embody the healing style persona for advancement both professionally and personally. For example, Hanebayashi Yuzu’s 2005 Iyashi-kei josei ni naru hinto (Hints on becoming a healing style woman) gathers one hundred relationship counselors to advise readers on how to “make him feel relieved and fall in love.”

As a supplement to this kind of emotional labor, other healing style objects went on the market promising to help their purchasers attune to a more relaxed self, including products for a wide variety of therapeutic modalities (aromatherapy, pet therapy, color therapy, plant therapy, sound therapy, art therapy, massage therapy, sex therapy, etc.), television shows, pornography, and robots. Desperate for an expanded demographic to make up for the declining birthrate in Japan, toy companies like Bandai began marketing relaxation toys directly to adults. One example is the million-seller Primo Puel series of talking dolls, introduced in 2000. The toy was initially marketed to twentysomething working women but soon found popularity among the middle aged and elderly as well. One version produces four hundred phrases, such as “kiss me” or “I’m lonely,” and recognizes spoken phrases like “I’m home” and “let’s play.”2 Ambient media was incorporated into this larger boom in healing products, alongside a wider range of relaxation-oriented art, music, photography, and video. Healing style goods emerged not to “heal” any particular illness but to serve as technologies to help the bedraggled subjects of recessionary Japan tune in to the low-affect urban ideal. All of these products shared the promise of producing calm for (and in) the consumer. Market watchers began to speak of a “healing boom.”

Ironically, these “healing goods” (iyashi guzzu) could promise relaxation in part because they offered a break from all of the other affective appeals encountered daily in contemporary Japanese media. In contrast to commercially motivated affective appeals, iyashi goods offered their users the chance to construct a personal affective space free of outside intervention. At the same time, the marketing of these goods gave rise to an advertising discourse of “stress relief” and “healing” aimed at the creation of new consumer desires and demands for self-care.

As journalists and cultural critics never failed to point out, the “healing boom” emerged directly in the aftermath of the two largest traumas of late twentieth-century Japan: the Kobe earthquake and the Aum Shinrikyō sarin gas attacks, both in early 1995. These episodes of national trauma—along with the more widespread effects of the economic recession and subsequent restructuring—were often said to have provided the emotional context for the emergence of calm as a lucrative and marketable feeling.3

While the widespread anxiety triggered by these events may have played some role, the explosion of healing goods in the late 1990s was but the most pronounced stage of a much longer-term shift toward technologies of mood regulation. As historian Tanaka Satoshi describes, the iyashi trend is the most recent in a long string of healing booms in modern Japan. Early twentieth-century trends included practices such as the all-vegetable-soup diet, the drinking of one’s own urine in the morning, and the practice of attaching coins to the body with cellophane tape, to name only a few examples.4 Another boom occurred in the 1960s and 1970s with the emergence of “natural” healing products promising to provide restoration and relaxation and guard against the stresses of “modern life.” The emerging therapy industry introduced a remarkable string of supplements and exercise trends around this time, particularly once the mass media recognized self-care as a perennially popular (and low-cost) focus for television and print media. Early commercial successes included the comfrey boom in the year following the Tokyo Olympics (1965) and the best-selling book on “garlic healing methods” by Watanabe Tadashi (1973).5 This was followed by a parade of new health trends from 1975 to 1980, most of them still on the market today: goji berries, umeboshi, shiitake, kombucha, maifan stones, bamboo foot massage, rice vinegar, Manchurian wild rice, hydrangea soup, pollen, deep-sea shark liver oil, chlorella, pickled chicken eggs, aloe, reishi mushrooms, geranium, digestive enzymes, magnetic necklaces, treadmills, and exercise equipment for hanging upside down (burasagari kenkōki). Candy maker Kotobuki opened Natural House, Japan’s first natural food supermarket, in Jiyūgaoka, Tokyo, in 1978.6

The stated goal of these new health trends was often less gaining a competitive edge and more simply “coping” with the perceived stresses of contemporary society. One of the principles Tanaka notes at the heart of the high-growth-era healing trends is a tendency to equate human civilization (bunmei) with illness and nature (shizen) with health—a core tenet of romanticism updated for the age of therapy culture. This emphasis on the “natural” was a significant shift in focus from health fads earlier in the century, which often touted their origins in cutting-edge science to prove their futuristic powers to overcome sickness.7 In part, this backlash against scientific progress reflected the growing public awareness of human-generated environmental problems. The hard sciences lost much of their futuristic allure, and attention turned toward the creation of environments felt to be more “organically” suitable for nurturing human health. By the 1970s advertisements for healing goods shifted to promote therapies based on supposedly more natural, ecological, and holistic principles.

Yet what was on offer in most cases here was rarely what was explicitly claimed: a return to a more “natural” way of living or a return to a state of health before the onset of stress or illness. Rather, what the new goods implicitly promised was the ability to manage one’s personal comfort and energy levels. Once “illness” became generalized into a failure to adapt to the demands of city living, “healing” could transform into a euphemism for this ongoing pursuit of increased emotional control and a comfortable, mood-regulated lifestyle.8 Such forms of self-care no longer were only a temporary need in an otherwise productive life but turned instead into core techniques of ongoing subjective maintenance. The emphasis was on somatic technologies as “techniques of the self” (to again use Foucault’s term), to be used by a person to manipulate his or her own daily emotional and energetic rhythms. This more personal approach to mood regulation—beginning in the late 1970s and peaking in the late 1990s—was the first to emphasize transposable calm as a personal means of coping with the contemporary.

Japanese fiction has reconfigured its affective appeals in order to compete with and reflect upon this mood-regulating culture through what I call “ambient literature.” Like the other ambient media described in this book, ambient literature is an aesthetic response to the demand for transposable calm. Ambient literature rethinks the novel as a mood-regulating device. Like the ambient cinema discussed in the previous chapter, ambient literature has two major aims: to generate calming moods and to provide a space to reflect back on therapy culture as a whole.

Kurita Yuki’s work can be situated in a growing body of ambient literature that, like other ambient media, embraces the affordance of calming moods as a primary objective. Japanese fiction began to reflect the new culture of mood regulation as early as the late 1970s with Murakami Haruki’s debut novel, Kaze no uta o kike (Hear the wind sing, 1979). In a 2002 book on “post-Murakami” literature, literary critic Nakamata Akio cites this work as the first major example of what would become a dominant trend in Japanese literature of the 1980s and 1990s: the “healing style novel” (iyashi-kei shōsetsu). Murakami’s narrator states at the outset of the book his reason for writing is a “small attempt at healing himself.” Nakamata elaborates:

Murakami Haruki starts writing as a “small attempt to heal himself,” but at the same time he also heals [iyasu] many of his readers. It is well known Murakami managed a jazz bar during his student years. It might be too much to imagine Murakami as a barkeep, soothing the souls of his customers by listening to their worries. But in fact, Murakami’s writing can be read as one kind of “healing style” fiction.9

While the term healing style dates to more than a decade after Murakami’s debut novel, Nakamata’s anachronistic use of the term is apt. Murakami’s early work charts much of the affective terrain of what came to characterize later ambient literature, including, as Nakamata points out, an avoidance of psychological interiority and a preference for light, transparent diction.10

Yoshimoto Banana (1964–) is also well known for the calming effect of her writing, beginning with her debut novel, Kitchen (1988). Ann Sherif describes how Yoshimoto’s narratives concern “the process of grieving and healing and exhibit a steadfast belief in the possibility of reintegration into society, even after extreme alienation or trauma.” She quotes Tokyo psychiatrist Machizawa Shizuo, who describes how even his suicidal patients are able to find in Yoshimoto’s novels “an optimism and brightness absent in their own lives.”11

In the wake of the popular success of Murakami and Yoshimoto, a number of younger novelists developed styles engaging mood regulation and healing themes more directly. These include Kurita Yuki (1972–), Seo Maiko (1974–), and Ōshima Masumi (1962–).12 These novelists began their careers at a time when literature was competing for affective space with the more directly mood-oriented practices of the therapy culture industry. This chapter focuses on the ambient literary style they devised in response and the way it negotiates between narrative tension and the atmospheric affordance of calm.

The Hôtel de Mole Dormons Bien

Kurita’s works are particularly compelling in their exploration of an ambient literary aesthetics.13 This chapter focuses on her 2005 novel Hôtel Mole, a work deftly deploying the calming resources of ambient literary style at the same time as it casts a critical (and sometimes satirical) gaze on therapy culture itself. The novel tells the story of twenty-three-year-old Honda Kiri, a young woman beginning her first real job: a night-shift attendant running the front desk of the Hôtel de Mole Dormons Bien. She soon learns the Hôtel de Mole is no ordinary Japanese business hotel. Everything about the hotel is geared toward providing the highest-quality sleep possible. Interviews are conducted with potential guests concerning personal sleep history. Check-in occurs immediately after sunset, and checkout, at sunrise. The guest rooms are entirely underground—up to thirteen floors down—and have regulated light timers to ensure ideal levels of darkness. The lobby, which Kurita describes in great detail, is designed to generate relaxing, soporific moods as guests make their way to their rooms. As the human face of the hotel’s relaxing promise, Kiri is trained to impart a warm and soothing welcome to hotel guests. The narrative follows Kiri from her job interview, through her training, and on to her first weeks alone on the job. Along the way she begins to unravel the mystery of how the hotel generates such deep sleep. Interspersed with these episodes are scenes set at Kiri’s home focused on her complicated relationship with her sickly identical twin sister.

The popular reception of Kurita’s fiction has been marked by an emphasis on the soothing quality of her writing. In a review of Hôtel Mole in the literary journal Bungakukai, Higashi Naoko reports on the powerful physiological effect the novel had on her: “Several times while reading this mysterious story, I was overcome with sleepiness. This certainly was not because I was bored. . . . In the same way a delicious description of food triggers hunger, the qualities of sleep were so powerfully portrayed here that I became quite sleepy.”14 Higashi ends the review by noting she plans to keep the novel near her pillow at night to function as a sort of talisman to prevent insomnia and promote restful sleep. In a review of an earlier Kurita work, Onuiko Terumii (The seamstress Terumii, 2004), critic Yoshida Nobuko writes in a similar vein, reporting that just after reading she felt full of warmth. Novelist Kakuta Mitsuyo likewise feels her spirit is lifted after reading Kurita’s novels.15

Hôtel Mole affords its readers therapeutic forms of calm not just through its sleepy setting but through the strategic deployment of an ambient literary style. While the act of reading demands at least a minimum degree of attention, ambient literature deploys a range of techniques to develop emotionally calming and environmentally immersive atmospheres. As I describe in the next section, Kurita’s work draws upon all levels of textual form to generate these moods, beginning with the most minute elements—individual words—and building outward to the level of narrative flow and the emotional dynamics of the story as a whole.

Ambient Literary Aesthetics

The words in Hôtel Mole are mostly common, familiar terms. The vocabulary is not the sort to give readers pause or confusion. This does not mean the words express simple meanings, simply that they are simply put. For example, to describe mystery, Kurita sticks to the most familiar adjective available, fushigi (mysterious). The novel does not engage in the refinement of emotional tone through descriptive variety. Instead, fushigi remains fushigi—a familiar term for the unfamiliar. Common words like fushigi cue a mysterious atmosphere but do so in a nonspecific way. While every reader of Japanese has a familiarity with this word, the word is at the same time general enough to be unlikely to cue any specific details or images. This allows it to invoke a general atmosphere of mystery while maintaining a dispersed, amorphous state of attention. Fushigi is an ambience.

This same aesthetic of ambiguity through transparency is replicated on the level of the sentence. The text on the back cover of Hôtel Mole, likely the first description readers will encounter upon picking up the book, summarizes the novel in three straightforward lines:

The words employed here—with the minor exception perhaps of kairi shita (estranged or separated)—could hardly be more everyday. This is a mysterious story about people who gather at a hotel to find blissful sleep. This curious premise is stated as matter-of-factly as possible. As the final line signals, this is a mystery departing just a tiny bit (hon no sukoshi) from the familiar (a “world on the other side of daily life,” to borrow Ise’s phrase from chapter 3). This is not the gaping anxiety of a mystery threatening to topple the known world. Instead, just a touch of mystery surfaces, contained and vaguely familiar, not unlike a daydream.

Notice the last two sentences in the summary are fragments. The copula is implied, but its absence emphasizes the final nouns in both lines. A mysterious hotel. A story detached from everyday life. The nouns are invoked in parallel as if the hotel and the tale (monogatari) were one and the same. The idea of gathering for a pleasant sleep provides an assurance of calm while the little bit of mystery—the curiosity of a hotel designed entirely for sleeping—promises comfortable uncertainties and soft fascinations to let the imagination wander.

This basic equation of familiar simplicity plus comfortable mystery governs the emotional architecture of ambient literature. Sentence structure, like diction, tends toward the straightforward and evocative. The phrasing is short, light, and succinct. Kurita’s readers often comment on the sense of ease afforded by the lightness and precision of her language. Ishii Shinji, in the afterword to Kurita’s 2002 novella Hamisabeth, describes her diction as exact (seikaku), avoiding vague nuance and “using the ordinary meanings shared by everyone.” 16 He notes surplus exposition is studiously avoided, as is any belabored explanation of characters’ emotional states. The story flows by smooth and easy.

But Ishii senses something more than simplicity of language has contributed to the smooth (surusuru) experience of reading Kurita. Here, he turns to the mystery part of the equation and in the process uncovers precisely what is “healing” about Kurita’s style:

Kurita doesn’t write about unknowns as if they were knowns. The unknown is enshrined in the depths of the novel as it is [sonomama] and expressed with exquisite precision, as if affixed with a pair of tweezers, in a language everyone can understand. For the reader, the meanings of the various words are easily understood. But at the same time, just beyond this surface covering of language, the structure and meaning of the “unknown”—as an “unknown”—becomes thoroughly absorbed.17

What Ishii describes here is the way ambient literature paradoxically reaches at mystery through a language that does not reach at all. Unlike the Kantian sublime, which seeks a direct confrontation with the enormity of the unknown in a moment of shock and terror, the ambient approach to mystery is simply to leave mystery as mystery, transmuting the unknown not by attempting to arrest it in language but through a careful evocation of the familiar qualities leading in its (unspoken) direction. Instead of attempting to plumb the depths directly, ambient literature’s placid language evokes the depths through the translucency of its shallow surfaces.

Sensory Invocation

Kurita achieves perceptual clarity while maintaining semantic uncertainty by emphasizing sensory detail. As Elaine Scarry describes in Dreaming by the Book, writers can achieve a high degree of perceptual vivacity by instructing readers to imagine the material conditions necessary to produce a given sense perception. When reading literature, “what in perception comes to be imitated is not only the sensory outcome (the way something looks or sounds or feels beneath the hands), but the actual structure of production that gave rise to the perception.”18 Ambient literature makes extensive use of this technique, with detailed mimetic depictions of characters encountering soft fascinations in their sensory surroundings—the soothingness of sound, texture, color, light, temperature, and so on. Many of these encounters focus especially on the tactile qualities of objects. The characters’ hands here operate not as levers to move things around but as media to feel and explore the textures of the atmospheric spaces inside the story. As Deleuze writes, “It is the tactile which can constitute a pure sensory image, on condition that the hand relinquishes its prehensile and motor functions to content itself with pure touching.”19 In this way the characters’ perceiving hands become extensions of the hands of the reader, which are themselves occupied with holding the book.

During Kiri’s first visit to the hotel, her attention is drawn to the chair behind the front desk as she waits to be interviewed:

The chair was nice. Tall enough to support the back of the head, with armrests as well. The surface felt like velvet, making me want to keep stroking it. I reached out my hand to touch the back of the chair. My fingers felt something hard. Taking a closer look, I saw a plastic plate about the size of my little finger. It said “Cowhide.” Was this to explain what the chair was made of? I tried sitting down. Even through my clothes, I could feel the suppleness of the leather on my skin. I closed my eyes and soon felt my body yielding to the softness. A moan of comfort began to bubble up from deep within my throat. (13)

While this paragraph does not move the plot forward in any significant way, Kiri’s hands here play the crucial function of invoking a receptive sensory awareness of the surrounding environment and in turn reinforcing the overall ambient mood. This type of tactile encounter reappears throughout the novel.

As Ishii points out, Kurita’s descriptions of such seemingly mundane objects as a desk chair are characteristically careful and precise. This textual precision is thematized in the narrative by the small plastic plates Kiri finds affixed to objects throughout the hotel, each revealing the material used in the object’s construction. At first, Kiri is puzzled by such attention to detail, but when she later asks her boss about the plates, she receives the rather oblique answer that they are there “so the employees do not become confused” (36). As Kiri eventually comes to recognize, part of generating a relaxing atmosphere in the hotel involves paying attention not only to visual appearances but also to the more immediate tactile qualities of the hotel’s surfaces.

There is, however, more to this passage than the introduction of precise material details. The vivacity of this description comes through how Kiri does not so much tell readers how the chair feels but rather guides them through the perceptual experience of her body coming into contact with the material. Readers sense the chair not as an isolated visual object but through the caress of a hand against its surface, the feeling of support along the head and arms, the cool yielding of the leather under the weight of the body. Scarry notes such passages are made vivid by how “the people on the inside of the fiction report to us on the sensory qualities in there that we ourselves cannot reach or test.”20 Kiri’s sensory contact evokes readers’ own haptic responses. Notice how differently the passage reads with Kiri’s presence removed: “The back of the chair was tall, with armrests. The surface was velvety. On the back was a hard plastic plate reading ‘Cowhide.’ This may have been to explain what the chair was made of. The leather was soft.” This more objective description gives just as much technical information about the chair but has almost none of the sensory and emotional resonance of the original. As Scarry emphasizes, moments of imagined contact give described objects their sense of solidity and weight: the hand on the leather, the body on the chair, the head on the headrest. Such moments bring a sensory immediacy to the chair it otherwise lacks.

But what makes this encounter with the chair so soothing? This paragraph in microcosm contains all the criteria for a calm encounter: a sense of suppleness and ease combined with a stable base of embodied security and support. The headrest and armrests are crucial here. What enables Kiri to sink into the chair, even closing her eyes, is not only the velvety softness of the leather but also the sense of safety, of ontological security, of being held. Scarry describes John Locke’s notion of the vital emotional role played by the perception of solidity. By promising to stop “our further sinking downwards,” solidity “establishes the floor beneath us that, even as we are unmindful of it, makes us cavalier about venturing out.”21 This supportive background is crucial for creating an ambient space. In ambient literature tactile feelings of ontological security provide the absolute background against which the imagination can venture out and explore the unknown. Securely held by these literary furnishings, a reader can confidently explore ideas and experiences that might otherwise be too unfamiliar or threatening.

After adjusting to the soft surfaces of the hotel, Kiri realizes the tension she was feeling in anticipation of her job interview has dissipated, and she feels so relaxed she almost starts to yawn. In the novel itself, however, no causal relation is ever asserted between the hotel’s design and Kiri’s relaxed state. Despite Kiri’s detailed description of the objects around her, she never offers any explicit reflection on how these ambient aspects of the hotel are working to make her sleepy. Instead, she leads readers with her through a number of sensory encounters and then simply describes how she is feeling. These descriptions serve as direct physiological cues for readers, much in the way reading about yawning is often enough to make a person begin to yawn.

The high redundancy of emotional cues in Hôtel Mole pointing toward a relaxing mood helps ensure that even if every reader does not respond to every affective cue and even if individual cues are of varying impact based on the different sensory proclivities of each reader, the cumulative effect will still be to firmly establish an ambient mood. This additive process is especially crucial in the early pages of the book. Establishing this strong emotional framework early on serves to orient readers’ expectations for the remainder of the novel. Later, even if comparatively discomforting emotional cues appear, the strength of these earlier sensory experiences helps to weight the novel’s affective focus toward a dominant mood of calm. Moods have a great deal of inertia. Already in a relaxed mood, readers are apt to focus on elements reinforcing this atmosphere of calm and to deemphasize those elements working against it.22

This is not to say a shift in emotional tone later in the text would have no consequences. To maintain a mood, emotional cues must be reintroduced periodically. This is precisely what happens throughout Hôtel Mole. Over the course of the book, Kiri makes her way deeper into the hotel (from the lobby to the elevator, the bedrooms, and finally the lowest floor in the building), each time describing in detail her sensory surroundings. Each scene reinforces a mood of calm uncertainty while venturing deeper into the unknown.

Establishing an Incubatory Space

Like other forms of ambient entrainment, ambient literature builds an enveloping space around readers as they read. The “healing” aspect of the healing style refers not to the alleviation of a particular ailment but to the restorative atmosphere within which healing can occur. This safe enclosure provides a heightened level of protection from exterior threats, allowing a person to redirect energies usually devoted to coping with the outside world to the interior task of physical and emotional healing. This incubatory structure is found (at least ideally) in in-patient hospital care, in the protected emotional space of the therapy session, and, perhaps in its oldest guise, in the practice of the spiritual retreat.23

The design of the Hôtel de Mole focuses on nurturing this sense of envelopment, of being held within a warm, safe, womb-like space. To reach the front door of the hotel, Kiri first passes through an inconspicuous alleyway hidden between two buildings. The alley is so narrow it seems impossible to pass to the other side, but by turning sideways, Kiri is able to slide through. She announces her name over the intercom, and the doors slide smoothly open. She enters and feels the doors quietly slide closed behind her. Before her is a long hallway. The walls are beige; the ceiling, a deep wine red. As Kiri walks forward, every step sinks softly and inaudibly into the carpet. Everything is quiet. The lighting is faint, and she cannot see her wristwatch through the darkness. As she looks up, she realizes the ceiling is unusually low.

After some time, Kiri reaches the end of the hall and emerges into a large reception area. The walls are concave, giving the room a spherical shape. Long curtains made of a thick and heavy material hang from the ceiling. They are also a dark and rich shade of wine. To one side sits the front desk and the leather chair previously described. On the other side hangs a large painting, about the size, Kiri notes, of a double bed. The painted image is abstract and composed entirely of dark colors. Nearby, a small source of light flickers near one of the walls. It wavers now and then, like a candle. Kiri smells a faint hint of wax in the air. Below the painting sits a sofa. Or rather, something like the seating area of a sofa curves directly out of the wall, part of the building itself.

These descriptions, each related through Kiri’s perceptual experience, vividly instruct readers to conjure the sensory experience of entering the enclosed space of the hotel. Everything is designed to be womb-like, a place of perceptual softening and incubated security. The initial obstacles to entering position the space “a little bit apart” from everyday life. The low lighting, hushed acoustics, and faint aromas allow the senses to relax and open, while the soft fabrics, warm colors, round walls, and low ceiling provide a feeling of being enveloped and held.

The novel evokes this setting within its first twenty pages, establishing a vivid sensory space where the more fleeting, almost ghostly presence of the characters can drift. The hotel mixes familiar comforts with an edge of the uncanny—an unknown safe enough to drift through calmly. Immediately after these initial encounters, Kiri relates her experience entering the hotel in just this manner:

My impression of the entrance hall is rather different from other hotels I have visited. It isn’t like a resort hotel, a city hotel, or a love hotel. But it isn’t strange enough to feel unfamiliar. I feel like I have been somewhere like this before. But then it isn’t like any of my friends’ homes, or the room of a lover—of course, this isn’t a house at all. Why does it feel so familiar, I wonder? (15)

Kiri is intrigued that despite the lack of windows and plants, the space does not feel lonely. The entrance hall is strangely comforting. At the same time as being incubatory, however, the space is open and porous. The Hôtel de Mole is a space of social circulation, with a new population every night. Like airports, train stations, and waiting rooms, hotels are public spaces to the degree they welcome any person who can afford access and agree to follow the rules. While the hotel establishes a space set off from the street, it still maintains a conduit to the outside. The space is designed to be welcoming yet anonymous, a familiar path into the unknown.

This is also true for books, if we understand them as portable worlds that can accompany movement through urban space. The small format of many Japanese novels—especially paperbacks—makes them ideal companions during the long train commutes of many urban Japanese readers.24 The paperback, no less than the portable audio player, can be thought of as a mobile technology of mood regulation. On reading Hôtel Mole, these transitory commuter spaces resonate with the transient spaces within the novel, allowing the hotel’s restorative mood to seep into the space surrounding the book. In this way, readers of ambient literature are made comfortable about venturing out while in the act of venturing out—affording, perhaps, a new way of relating to public space.

Ambient Subjectivation in Literature

In carving out a space of mystery within familiar everyday rhythms, readers find new ways of relating to routine. As we have seen with ambient music, video, and film, one way ambient media move through the familiar to the unknown is by tapping into the estranging and vitalizing qualities of repetition. The time of ambient literature follows the tempo and repetition of a regulated modern life. The pace of Hôtel Mole is organized around the workday. Kiri applies for a job, has her interview, commutes back and forth to work, and slowly becomes adjusted to working at the hotel. She wakes, goes to work, comes home, dreams, wakes, and goes to work again. Adhering to the temporality of the workday evacuates narrative momentum from the novel and replaces it with a sense of expansive, nondirectional time. Ambient literature avoids spectacle and drama, producing a sensation of perpetual drift rather than movement through a sequence of events.

The free-floating repetition of the everyday merges with the atmospheric quality of the self in ambient literature, where identities are shadowy and rarely asserted with force. While Kiri’s physiological state is described and the subplot concerning her troubled twin sister serves as the emotional trauma upon which the healing qualities of the hotel work their powers, the characters in Hôtel Mole mostly remain lightly sketched, only barely outlined, never fully coming into view. As Nakamata points out, this type of “empty” characterization is common in contemporary Japanese literature from Murakami Haruki onward. Nakamata proposes this downplaying of psychological interiority has something cinematic about it, as if the narrator was a free-floating camera-eye, unreflective but carefully recording every sensory detail.25 Such ambiguity allows a character to become a medium through which readers can wander and feel these unfamiliar spaces. Whereas plot-oriented narratives structure themselves around identification with characters, in the aesthetics of ambience “identification is actually inverted: the character has become a kind of viewer.”26 As noted, Kiri acts less as a self-conscious subject than as a sensing body, lending her perceptual organs to the reader.

As noted earlier, the emergence of such forms of decentered self has often been explained by referring to the collapse of larger narrative orientations, which in Japan is often linked back to the traumas of modernization, World War II, “postmodern” culture, or the recent recessionary decades. As I have argued throughout this book, however, this mode of dispersed subjectivity might be described not as a symptom of social collapse but as a creative and highly adaptive form of engagement with the designed environments of postindustrial life. The technologies of personalized mood control have spurred a recognition that affective environments play a fundamental role in humans’ sense of being in and amid the world. These sensory modes of being run parallel and in some ways prior to more narrative, interiorized forms of identity. Like other forms of ambient media, ambient literature enables readers to dissolve discrete identities into moods of open-ended affective exploration, free from the usual demands of their social and discursive selves.

Compared with more plot-oriented styles, where sensory spaces are mapped onto a relatively rigid architecture of plot and character, ambient literature prefers the internal flexibility of the incubatory space, allowing readers to enter in, feel around, and let their own emotional and affective responses seep into the work. Echoing Roland Barthes’s distinction between writerly and readerly texts, Kurita, in dialogue with novelist Kakuta Mitsuyo, discusses the difference between novels more geared toward a writer expressing himself or herself and texts asking the reader to step into the novel’s space and collaborate in the production of meaning. Kakuta observes how, compared with other writers, Kurita expressly writes for her readers, consciously opening a line of communication with them. Kurita responds by emphasizing the need to leave a space open for the reader to become involved in the text: “I like novels where I can think while I am reading. The novel is there, and I am there. I like things that create this space [ma] for me. Novels where, in this space, we can begin to influence each other.”27 Kurita here identifies a key function of her writing: like Eno wrote of ambient music, ambient literature provides “a space to think.” The combination of the incubatory envelope and the blurring of self allows readers to engage with the novel not as discrete and bounded people but as malleable bodies that can roam a space and be transformed by its atmosphere. Deleuze describes how in such amorphous spaces “we no longer know what is imaginary or real, physical or mental, . . . not because they are confused, but because we do not have to know and there is no longer even a place from which to ask.”28 Ambient subjectivation relaxes the usual borders of self and not self, allowing for a more porous and improvisatory engagement with the senses. As Hans Gumbrecht notes, “The literary elaboration of atmospheres and moods, whose structure one need not recognize, makes it possible to be transported, via imagination, into situations in which physical sensation and psychic constitution become inseparable.”29 Ambient literature provides a means for the usual specificities of self to relax into the more indeterminate contours of imagined space.

Atmosphere–Narrative Counterpoint

Crucially, however, ambient narrative forms never abandon the structural dynamics of storytelling—the buildup of tensions and their eventual release. Instead, they draw upon the larger rhythms of narrative description in order to fold these moments back into an overarching ambient mood. Hôtel Mole oscillates between more explicitly ambient scenes of calming evocation set in the hotel and more narrative character-driven scenes set in Kiri’s home. As with ambient cinema, this allows ambient literature some space for the novel to critically reflect on therapy culture at the same time as it pursues its own relaxing strategies.

The home scenes in Hôtel Mole serve two main functions. First, they reveal just enough about Kiri’s character for readers to begin to empathize with her. We learn Kiri is selflessly raising her twin sister’s child, after this sickly sibling again entered the hospital for a long-term stay. We learn working at the Hôtel de Mole is Kiri’s first real job after graduating from school and that her career has so far been postponed in order to care for her sister and her sister’s child. Without delving into complex psychological motivations, this home context helps develop a stronger resonance between Kiri’s feelings and the reader’s own.

The second function of this subplot is to set into motion a gradual narrative trajectory from illness to wellness. “Healing” itself, after all, implies a narrative arc from sickness to health. Over the course of the book, Kiri comes to terms with her twin’s continued ill health and gradually achieves competence in her position as front desk manager. The novel ends as the tension of both these challenges is finally and fully dissolved. The emotional contour of the narrative is something like a steadily smoothing sine wave. The novel begins by oscillating between scenes of calm sensory evocation in the hotel and less ambient scenes of Kiri and her family at home. While these latter scenes allow us to get to know and empathize with Kiri outside work, they also offer emotional interludes; comparatively familiar and normative spaces serve as a counterpoint to the strange ambience of the hotel. Over the course of the book, these two realms gradually merge, first through Kiri’s dreams (she has a particularly vivid dream of childhood while testing out one of the hotel beds) and finally by introducing the ill sister into the healing space of the hotel itself. The peaks and troughs of this quiet/disquiet oscillation slowly level out and eventually synthesize in the harmonious sense of integration that ends the book. Kiri’s troubled relationship with her sister begins to improve precisely as she gains competence in running the hotel. In this unraveling pendular structure, characteristic of the ambient novel, we experience—and we feel in the slowing pace of the text—how ambient spaces can unravel all narrative tensions. Everything merges with the night.

Affective Contracts

Kiri’s emotional journey might have turned out differently. The candle in the lobby might have tipped over and burned the hotel down, shifting the emotional trajectory of the story and displacing the ambient mood. But this would take it out of the genre of ambient literature, breaking the affective contract implicit to the form. Genre functions as a mood-orienting frame. Film theorist Noël Carroll notes how “some genres seem to traffic in certain specifiable emotions essentially. That is, certain genres appear to have as their abiding point the elicitation of specifiable emotional states in audiences.”30 Different genres also promise a different spectrum of emotional diversity. Epics, for example, often mix in feelings associated with romance, action, tragedy, suspense, and comedy within the same narrative. Other genres are more focused on delving deep into a single emotional register. Ambient media belong to the latter category, and audiences often come to the works primed for a calming affective experience.

As Kurita notes, these emotional expectations are present not only in the way readers approach particular genres but also in readers’ expectations for specific authors.31 A regular reader of an author’s works knows from experience the limits on the type of episodes (and the associated emotions) a writer will invoke. Readers can trust the author will see them through to the end of the story without breaching these boundaries. They are then safe to open themselves emotionally to the novel, reading with a sense of ease and security and knowing their emotional investment will not be suddenly betrayed as the story progresses. As in ambient music, video, and film, atmosphere in ambient literature depends on the gradual building up of trust between audience and text, through the continual reinforcement of calming affect in a variety of registers, allowing readers to relax into the atmosphere of the work.

Paradoxically, the overarching stability of the ambient atmosphere allows for some freedom in the moment-to-moment texture of the story. As Kurita points out, as long as this trust is maintained, the author can include some rather disturbing episodes, and readers will still be able to entrust themselves to the author’s care (mi o makaserareru).32 There are some fairly traumatic episodes even in Hôtel Mole. In one of the few flashbacks to Kiri’s past within the novel, we learn she returned home one day to find her boyfriend having sex with her twin sister, leading to the sister’s pregnancy and the birth of her niece. Meanwhile, at the hotel Kiri at times becomes nervous about her new responsibilities managing the front desk. All of this is narrated within a general context of ambient calm, however, ensuring these obstacles do not derail the overall mood of the novel. The atmospheric stability provides an opportunity to reflect back on traumatic experience from a more equanimous perspective.

In sum, ambient literature generates calm uncertainty through the accumulated effects of the techniques described here: transparent diction and sensory invocation, the generation of incubatory spaces around which ambient subjects can roam, and the gradual development of embodied security within the safety of the affective contract. All of these small- and large-scale affordances additively form the enveloping mood of an ambient work.

The approach to literature outlined here treats mood regulation as the primary work done by a text—literature creates mood spaces through which identity can become more malleable, affording relaxation and repose. Needless to say, adapting literature to be a tool of ambient subjectivation marks a shift away from earlier models of literary and aesthetic production. The final section considers the arguments of those who pushed against the turn toward the healing style in Japanese literature and situates ambience within larger debates over the role of therapy culture in contemporary Japan.

Healing Debates

As noted earlier, ambient literature’s ability to engage in a free play of subjectivation always comes with a trade-off: in order to develop an incubatory calm, the ambient novel must distance itself from the outside world and the more upsetting or exciting forms of emotion that might be triggered there. “Healing” incubation demands the emotional aperture opening onto the outside world be narrowed down. So while ambient literature may provide a space to think, it does not necessarily provide a space to think anything particularly distressing. Eno’s assertion ambient music “must be as ignorable as it is interesting” also marks the limitations of ambience as a method of direct social critique.

Criticism of ambient literature often expresses concern over this prioritization of personal affect in contemporary Japanese culture. In a well-known complaint about Murakami Haruki, novelist Ōe Kenzaburō directly laments the “Muzak” elements in Murakami’s writing:

Murakami doesn’t take an active attitude toward society, or even toward the immediate environments of daily life. He works by passively absorbing influences from various genres, as if he were listening to background music. He just goes on spinning within his interior fantasy world.33

As Ōe’s comments indicate, the aspects of ambient literature most troubling to its critics are its apparent “passivity” with regard to social and political issues and its tendency to retreat into imagined interiors.

Literary critic Kuroko Kazuo, in an article critiquing both Yoshimoto Banana and the larger “healing” trend, worries over Yoshimoto’s steadfast belief in the power of mood regulation. Kuroko cites Yoshimoto’s description of how sometimes, when she is feeling bad, simply eating a piece of cake is all that is necessary for her to turn her feelings around and be happy for the rest of the day. Kuroko points to this therapeutic use of food as an example of Yoshimoto’s apathy toward wider social struggles.34 Similarly, Ann Sherif ends her own essay on Yoshimoto with a broad denunciation of the author’s optimism: “While her works entertain us and give us a temporary sense of hope for the world, the nuclear threat that Yoshimoto Banana so blissfully ignores remains steadfastly by our sides, for other authors to recall.”35 These critics regard healing style media as a solipsistic practice, a way of using close-at-hand positive affect to block out and ignore the more threatening and intractable aspects of social and political life.

Understandably, the postindustrial emphasis on comfort as an end in itself has triggered a great deal of concern among politically engaged critics. When I have asked various academics inside and outside Japan how they feel about this comforting culture, more than one has replied along the lines of, “Well, I think people should be more uncomfortable.” This perspective sees the focus on material amenities during and after the high-growth years as a way for people to avoid more serious matters: dealing with the legacy of war, assuming political responsibility both locally and globally, and actively participating in the democratic process, to name just a few.

These arguments come in many sizes and shapes. Philosopher Morioka Masahiro describes contemporary Japan as a “painless civilization” carefully screening out the struggle and suffering he sees as essential for developing personal meaning and identity. As noted in the introduction, Asada Akira has sardonically described postindustrial Japan as a culture of “infantile capitalism,” where ordinary people are content to not question those in power as long as their comfortable environments and personal pleasures continue to be provided. Tomiko Yoda elaborates on Asada’s description of Japanese society as a “passive maternal medium,” a “noncoercive force that controls individuals by ‘wrapping’ and ‘embracing’ them in its fold.”36

A similar discourse emerged simultaneously in the United States, where critics saw therapy culture as abandoning self-discipline and the ethical imperative to care for others in favor of a single-minded pursuit of personal sensory gratification. Christopher Lasch’s The Minimal Self (1984) sounded an early caution about the emergence, in art and literature, of “a self uncertain of its own outlines, longing either to remake the world in its own image or to merge into its environment in blissful union.”37 Lasch describes a post-1960s American retreat from an increasingly threatening, complicated, and fractured world, followed by a subsequent flight into self-care:

Confronted with an apparently implacable and unmanageable environment, people have turned to self-management. With the help of an elaborate network of therapeutic professions, which themselves have largely abandoned approaches stressing introspective insight in favor of “coping” and behavior modification, men and women today are trying to piece together a technology of the self, the only apparent alternative to personal collapse.38

Later critiques of postmodernism sound similar notes, most famously Frederick Jameson’s warning of the “waning of affect.” Jameson positions the aesthetic collapse of interior/exterior distinctions and modernist notions of “depth” as harbingers of a new era of superficiality in which people are unable to draw on historical contexts to organize a coherent narrative of self. Experience becomes fragmentary, and political investments start to atrophy.39

The most trenchant critiques of the comfort orientation have surfaced in debates surrounding the influence of therapy culture on education. Oguma Eiji and Ueno Yōko have highlighted the use of “healing” rhetoric in 1990s campaigns by right-wing groups to have depictions of Japan’s wartime atrocities removed from school textbooks. The campaigns argued students would be better off without the added stress and trauma of confronting Japan’s past—allowing therapeutic concerns to trump historical understanding.

Similarly, Yagi Kōsuke describes in his book on “ ‘healing’ as discrimination” how an overemphasis on avoiding uncomfortable feelings can lead to avoidance rather than tolerance of others different from oneself. Yagi points to how, in a society prioritizing comfort and positive feelings, minorities who in their appearance remind “normal” Japanese of uncomfortable histories they would rather ignore are in turn accused of failing to “blend in,” as if sticking out from the crowd were a willful action on their part.40 Such examples raise troubling questions about the impact of a society oriented toward therapy and self-care above all else.

I will not attempt here to sort out the significant differences between each of these arguments, only to point out how each tends—at its most rhetorical, at least—to imply an ethical choice must be made between a strong, active, socially and historically aware subjectivity and a passive, therapeutic, mood-regulating one. In more casual contexts, it has become common to hear complaints of the “peace-drunk” (heiwa-boke) stupor of younger Japanese, implying peace and comfort is to blame for the nation’s cultural, economic, and political stagnation.

While such arguments against comfort can be compelling in the abstract, there is a danger here of reducing complex social and emotional contexts to a simple divide between “active” and “passive” social positions, denouncing comfort and presenting discomfort as a corrective in and of itself. As Ahmed notes, this overlooks the varied access people have to “active” and critical social roles:

Maintaining an active position of “transgression” not only takes time, but may not be psychically, socially, or materially possible for some individuals and groups given their ongoing and unfinished commitments and histories. . . . Assimilation and transgression are not choices that are available to individuals, but are effects of how subjects can and cannot inhabit social norms and ideals.41

Conversely, needs for comfort and healing often correlate directly to how “out-of-place” a person may be within the normative social landscape, whether as a result of illness, disability, gender, sexuality, physical appearance, or ethnicity—not to mention the more general precariousness produced by the neoliberal withdrawal of social supports.42

By portraying comfort as inherently regressive and irresponsible, anti–therapy culture critiques can easily situate themselves in a heroically transgressive position that plays into readers’ desire for critical transcendence—and discounts the real healing needs of many participating in the larger “healing boom.” These critiques also risk falling into a vapid nostalgia for a less “emotionally sensitive” time, whether for the more explicit political commitments of the 1960s (on the left) or for a time prior to the war-renouncing Article 9 of the Japanese constitution (on the right).43 Ironically, this perspective on history parallels therapy culture’s own equation of contemporary society with illness and some prior era as more human and true.

I follow Eva Illouz here in offering not a defense of therapy culture but a call to take affect regulation seriously as an increasingly important dimension of subjectivation—one that over the past half century has proved robust and resilient if necessarily limited as a tool of social critique. Illouz writes (from the perspective of sociology):

By insisting that the therapeutic lexicon “depoliticizes” problems that are social and collective, many sociologists have made it difficult for themselves to understand why the new middle classes and women have enthusiastically endorsed the therapeutic discourse—other than by presuming, somewhat implausibly, that theirs is a “false” consciousness or by presuming that modern societies are governed by a seamless process of surveillance equally embodied in computerized control of citizens and in the therapist’s office.44

Illouz does not necessarily argue against those who emphasize the ideological dangers of therapy culture but rather insists we be willing to set aside this critique long enough to understand how and why such a culture developed in the first place. Illouz describes this as a model of “immanent critique” that “must emerge from a ‘thick’ understanding of people’s desires and goals and cannot bracket the actual understandings and strategies of lay actors.”45

Studies focusing on these “lay actors” have tended to produce a more balanced perspective on contemporary forms of mood regulation. John Clammer, for example, affirms the role of desire and emotion in late twentieth-century Japanese consumer culture, emphasizing the consumption of material goods is as much about inventing new forms of self as it is about complacency and conformity. Clammer describes the advent of consumerism in Japan as “an entire reorientation to life, to what is possible and to the realization of the idea of the making of the self as an at least partly autonomous project rather than as simply the plaything of history or of social forces beyond the control of the individual.”46

An understanding of the structural transformations underlying neoliberalism also helps illuminate what drives the therapeutic emphasis on self-care. Micki McGee’s work on the American self-help industry points out how self-help became popular in the United States at the same time as employers were systematically cutting back on benefits and services geared at employee development and well-being. With fewer social supports in place, employees were left to their own devices when it came to psychological health, workplace struggles, retraining, and forced career change. The ideology of self-help, McGee argues, helped naturalize this reduction in social supports. Through personal effort, positive thinking, self-knowledge, and private study, the self-help literature argued, nothing was beyond reach. Should a person fall short of his or her wildest dreams, it was to be seen as a personal failure, not something to do with the system as a whole.47

The healing boom in Japan was born in a similar moment of neoliberal industrial reforms. After the economic downturn in the early 1990s, many Japanese businesses moved to restructure along the lines of this streamlined American model. The lifetime-employment ideal of the postwar decades began to be replaced by more flexible, temporary, and cheaper forms of labor. On-the-job training—a mainstay of the previous model—declined, and workers were often on their own in the struggle to remain competitive. Worker vulnerability has only increased since with the spread of companies relying on exploitative labor practices (burakku kigyō) and other precarious employment structures.48 These shifts in employment practices provide a larger impetus for self-care as part of the struggle to remain competitive (or at least physically and emotionally sound) while working in such environments.

Ambient literature has largely avoided addressing these structural changes head on, preferring to focus instead on affording particular affective moods giving audiences the space to think for themselves. Authors tend to understand their role as providing an atmospheric space for reflection and recovery rather than directives on what exactly needs to change. In a 2005 interview, Kurita describes her attempt to provide some feeling of positive affect toward the future, particularly at moments when the present has become a struggle:

When I read a novel or see a film, and it displays tragic events just as they are, I think “but I already knew that . . . .” I want to say “but still there are people who are trying to move forward.” . . . Even amidst all this sadness, it is a positive action to find a way to lift your spirits by enjoying novels or films or music. When you are really feeling bad, you don’t have those kinds of good feelings. Because of this, though I don’t want to affirm reality just as it is, I feel like it is natural for me to somehow calm down and write stories with a hope for the future.49

Hope, in this case, comes through a partial withdrawal from the pressure of worldly events, affording the space, perhaps, for thinking and feeling something new.

What is at stake here is the role of media in relation to society: is it to be a reflective critique or an emotional tool? Older critics such as Ōe and Kuroko insist on a critical literature and warn against the solipsistic dangers of an excessive therapeutic focus. The (mostly younger, mostly female) authors of healing style literature, meanwhile, emphasize the therapeutic benefits of calm for those in need of healing and are more comfortable situating literature alongside other therapeutic objects.

I suggest the tension between self-care and social critique itself is what deserves our attention; ambient media demonstrate the two approaches are not as incompatible as they may first appear. Just as Brian Eno asserts ambient music’s critical distance from the commercial banality of Muzak, what I am calling ambient literature contains the seeds of a critique of the therapy industry as a whole. In Hôtel Mole Kurita explores how a hotel geared entirely toward generating relaxation for its guests can still be stressful for its employees. Kiri’s main struggle during her first week of work is simply staying awake in such a sleep-inducing space. At one point during an early morning shift, she simply cannot keep herself from dozing off and replaces the relaxation music playing in the lobby with a punk album, dancing wildly to the music to keep herself awake. Her boss later complains about this, worrying the music’s energy will seep into the building and disturb the guests sleeping below. But even the hotel membership structure guards against sleep becoming an end in itself. Initial interviews ensure guests have real sleep disorders they need to address, and whenever they become well enough to sleep soundly, even outside the hotel, they are asked to cancel their membership. Higashi Naoko picks up on this in her review of the novel: “What must be understood is the novel is not saying humans live in order to sleep. The hotel also acknowledges this. After all, in order to make waking life as rich as possible, the body and brain need to be well rested.”50

Kurita, whose own experience working as an overnight hotel receptionist helped inspire the novel, also documents the more discomforting aspects of emotional labor.51 Kiri’s boss is strict and demanding and anything but healing style toward hotel employees. Kiri’s position—up all night working and allowed little restful sleep herself—serves as a reminder of all the tiring effort necessary to create a restful space for others. This type of labor has ambient dimensions, too, in the way it often operates at the periphery of hotel guests’ attention, largely out of view (and this is precisely what makes it effective). Alongside the novel’s own calming affordances, Hôtel Mole’s focus on emotional labor helps bring this less comfortable side of therapy culture to the foreground. As Kurita’s novel demonstrates, ambient literature can still engage with the more critical modes emphasized in earlier forms of literary practice, depicting the complexities and contradictions of therapy culture while fully participating in it as a mood-regulating medium. Of course, this is not an easy balancing act, and perhaps no full-throttle social critique can be waged in an atmosphere that has carefully pacified all strong forms of negative feeling.

Such a contradiction is present in Eno’s original demand for ambience to produce both “calm” and “a space to think”: the only way to ensure both is to make sure not to think of anything that would upset the calming mood. The shallow depth of this space to think, while as amorphous and creative as I have described it in this book, nonetheless has therapeutic contours limiting where such thoughts may travel. Recognizing these limitations, however, can lead to a better understanding of what role calm and comfort might play as part of a socially responsive literature. By providing spaces of ambivalent calm, access to an impersonal self, and reflections on the work involved in building a healing mood, ambient literature asserts the value of not just healing as an end in itself but the labor involved in these acts of care.