The thing about stream-of-consciousness novels is that they so rarely embrace the obstacles, sharp turns, and tangents that the human mind inevitably follows—indeed, if they did, such novels would be utterly incoherent and would hardly constitute a narrative. What impresses me, then, about Katsuhiko Otsuji’s I Guess All We Have is Freedom—translated into deliciously playful and decadent English by Matt Fargo—is the way Otsuji’s odd turns and tangents feel at once like true stream of consciousness and yet circle back in again and again upon themselves, all in the name of demonstrating how unstable our sense of reality really is.
This collection of five loosely connected short stories includes the work “And Dad Vanished” (Chichi ga kieta), for which Otsuji won the coveted Akutagawa Prize in 1981. In its opening pages, we follow the narrator on a train journey bound out of the city, but his brain quickly follows a different line of tracks into the past, his childhood, and his various siblings’ departures for Tokyo:
At last the engine came barreling into the station like an iron lion, slowing to a hefty halt before heaving its own steam sigh. The travelers on the platform grew tense, drawing their luggage close, animals in the presence of a great predator. Then, with one wary eye on the engine’s fangs, they began gently, momentously, filing into its belly. (13)
From here, the narrator wanders the twisting alleys of his mind where he encounters debt collectors “hard and greasy as a crab shell,” the “negative sustenance” that poverty engenders, his own “monstrous body” prone to bedwetting, and finally a spaceship back into the future where he comes to a landing to his own time. Again and again throughout the book these tangents wend and bend, but always they manage to find their way back to the gravity well that is the present.
However, these detours are never interminable; Fargo’s whip-smart translation works with the narrator’s own wily whims to drive the reader toward the next bizarre image or transformation. The above paragraph, with its assonance in “iron lion,” consonance in “hefty,” “halt,” and “heaving” and semi-onomatopoetic landing on “sigh” compound to play within the reader’s mind. Whether Fargo would claim the title of poet or not, his emphasis on what I would tentatively term “maximalist translation” works in favor of a narrative that is interested not in an internal journey but rather a lateral one.
These translational flairs are not arbitrary but rather make for a delightful and playful reading experience, a tone which matches Otsuji’s narrator’s own various thought-based eccentricities as his wide-ranging stream of consciousness weaves between iron lions, manure paper, cemetery advertisements, bedwetting, and metafictional language that appears in the mind as various inky black type-faces. Otsuji’s emphasis on “objecthood” comes to life in part because the translation itself is lively (11).
Otsuji’s preoccupation with materiality is in keeping with his overarching modus operandi as Genpei Akasegawa, the name by which he is much more famous. As Akasegawa, he was a member of the “anti-art” Neo-Dada Organizers, founded in 1960 just as Japan’s Anpo protests were beginning to come to a boil. Even after the Organizers imploded a year later, Akasegawa would continue pursuing “artistic ‘action’” through the remainder of the 60s, including one of his most infamous works, the Packages series in which he photocopied 1000-yen bills and used the copies to wrap worthless objects. (Kapur, 198-201). Following his arrest for counterfeiting, Akasegawa penned the 1964 essay “Theses on ‘Capitalist Realism,’” where he emphasized the constructedness of reality and expressed frustration at the ways in which his 1000-yen “imitation” became “imitation news” that subsequently recategorized his action as “imitation art” (Akasegawa, tr. Marotti). In other words, though Akasegawa was trying to avoid the label of “art,” the media machine repackaged him as “art,” thus fundamentally changing the reality of what he was trying to achieve.
Though Akasegawa didn’t become active as the fiction author Katsuhiko Otsuji until nearly two decades after Neo-Dada, his preoccupation with symbology, representation, and reality is visible still within the pages of Freedom. “…a dad represents money. An estate. So when there’s no money or estate to speak of, the dad doesn’t really have a voice” (41). It is only with the accumulation of capital that a patriarch can gain any dictatorial power, but in the end, that power becomes a burden, because what an estateless father lacks in power he makes up for in (arguably too much) freedom.
“…[the dad] might say things, but his opinions don’t hold much weight.”
“I guess there’s a certain freedom in that.”
“Yeah, that’s right. Freedom. I guess all we have is freedom.”
“Nothing but freedom.”
That freedom manifests in the wandering of the narrator’s mind throughout Freedom’s various short stories; within his head, he continuously transports and transforms himself beyond his mundane and poverty-stricken reality. For much of the story “The Throes of Home,” he repurposes the threshold of his old apartment into a sandy beach, while in “To the Touch,” the weather becomes “blonde-bombshell dangerous. Cheeks as cheery and pale as a cloudless New Year’s Day. Pupils so placidly glassy that you could drop a stone in and watch it sink all the way to the bottom” (126). Elsewhere in the book, the narrator himself becomes a sumo wrestler, a fishing pole, a housewife, and a refrigerator door. The objects around him are equally unstable. There is, of course, the train-become-lion, but many of these transformations are unsettlingly embodied, as when the narrator discovers a spider has been living in the deadbolt hole of his kitchen door:
Imagine how this spider must have felt, a gigantic blade shearing through its home every day. A tiny studio apartment into which a massive guillotine periodically bursts, cutting a swatch through the living room . . . The guillotine would have struck frequently and without warning. It might come in the middle of dinner, its blade grazing one cheek as it passed. This would have gone on for years, the spider amassing a vast collection of scars as it ducked and twisted around the blade. But as the spider mapped out the guillotine’s path, it began to find a logic in the horror. Fear lost sway as it built a life for itself in the little crannies just outside of the blade’s reach. If the guillotine came screaming by mid-meal skimming the edge of a teacup, the spider wouldn’t even pause its chewing. It slept well, even as the blade grazed its snoring nose.
It’s an easy leap to relate the narrator to his spider neighbor—he’s only just moved house as well, following a divorce, and he’s been forced to contemplate again and again all the things he’s accumulated in his life, most of them seemingly trash. Just as the narrator constitutes the reality of daily objects, they constitute his existence as a person.
Frequently stupified in the back alleys of his own mind, the narrator’s returns to reality are often sparked not by himself but rather by those around him, those who reconstitute reality with him, most notably his daughter, Walnut. She pulls him back to the “real” world with the simplest question of all, “What are you thinking about, Dad?” (168). Otsuji’s narrative resists any attempts to read deeply into it—there are glimmerings of nucleic theses about capital and poverty, but so often, Otsuji’s paragraphs read almost as free association exercises. What he makes clear, however, is that in order to escape the too much-ness of freedom, you need someone else at your side, someone who’s willing to observe reality alongside you and agree, however blandly, that this world is indeed “radical.”
Otsuji Katsuhiko (Akasegawa Genpei). I Guess All We Have Is Freedom. Translated Matt Fargo. Kaya Press, 2025.
Laurel Taylor is a translator, poet, writer, and scholar. Her co-translation (with Hitomi Yoshio) of Kawakami Mieko’s Sisters in Yellow will publish in March 2026, and her translation of Maiko Seo’s A Blessing for a Wedding is forthcoming from Europa Editions. She has also translated works by Kaori Fujino, Aoko Matsuda, and Minae Mizumura, among others. Her debut poetry collection, Human Construct (Human kōzō, Shichigatsudo Press) published in November, 2024. Taylor is currently a professor of Japanese at the University of Denver.
Works Cited
Akasegawa Genpei. “Theses on ‘Capitalist Realism.’” Tr. William Marotti. Bunka-Cho Art Platform Japan Translation Series, 1964, 2021, pp. 2–7, artplatform.go.jp/resources/texts/202008.
Faris, Jaimey Hamilton. “Rooms in Alibi: How Akasegawa Genpei Framed Capitalist Reality.” ARTMargins, vol. 4, no. 3, Oct. 2015, pp. 40–64.
Kapur, Nick. Japan at the Crossroads: Conflict and Compromise after Anpo. Cambridge, Massachusetts ; London, England, Harvard University Press, 2018.