Maxi Kim was born in a military camp on Mt Paekdu, the tallest volcanic mountain on the East Asian peninsula. According to an ancestral inscription his birth was heralded by the spectral presence of the haiku poet Issa over the mountain’s caldera. He studied Japanese and American literature at University of California, then studied French theory at California Institute of the Arts, where he wrote his first novel One Break, A Thousand Blows!. Previously the co-founder of the Borg268; an esoteric arts collective in the Bay Area from 2009-2012, he now resides in Los Angeles. Maxi was the former managing editor for Entropy Magazine, and his work has appeared in BOMB, Frieze, for 3:AM Magazine, and Editions Ere. When not writing and lesson planning, he spends most of his free time reading Orwell and watching re-runs of The X-Files. Read Richard Marshall’s interview with Maxi on 3:AM here.
THE PICTURE OF TOMI SASAHARA —An Excerpt from One Break, A Thousand Blows
Yoshi’s aim was anti-metaphorical. He told her that the point was to get past modernism, get past post-modernism. To express a pre-modernist, posthuman morphogenetic aesthetics in all its wild and sacred expressivity. She told him his project was perverse. He smiled. The monkey then asked if she would help him with his books. She told him she would, but on one condition. He would have to give her something in return. He told her that he would help her uncover the truth about her mother. She said no. He then offered to tell her where her biological father was. She agreed. Little did she know that he meant her ‘literal’ father as in the Latin litteralis ‘of or belonging to letters or writings’. Still, this was of no real concern. He knew what she knew; who she really wanted to meet was her phantasmatic Other. You see, like Ryu she was suffering from spiritual syphilis.
The office was filled with the unusually rich fragrance of orchids, and when the autumn breeze stirred amidst the flowers of Chancelor Kato’s greenhouse there came the open glass door the slightest scent of diarrhoeic dog excrement, and the more intoxicating perfume of the sashimi-orange mebina-hybrids. And as if on cue, the fantastic shadows of birds in flight flitted across the Grand Counselor’s long tussore-silk curtains that were stretched in front of the huge sliding doors, producing a kind of simulated japanese effect, and making him think of those pallid, vice-addicted nineteenth century writers of London who, through the medium of an art that is necessarily immobile, sought to convey the sense of swiftness and motion. The sullen murmur of water shouldering its way through the many potted experimental breeds in the greenhouse, or the dalmatian circling with monotonous insistence round the dusty po-mo furniture in the sitting room, seemed to make the stillness more oppressive. The dim roar of Tokyo was the like bourdon note of a distant organ.
In the south-west room sat Ryu Asakawa; whose sudden disappearance some years previously caused great public excitement and gave rise to many strange rumours. He looked toward the painting that was clamped to an upright easel. The nineteenth century picture was one of the most unusual examples of shunga, pornographic polychrome engravings painted by the Ukiyo-e school. With her bedlam of greasy hair, enigmatic stare and Schiele-like composition, the print had the strange poetic expression of the genre, but none of its trappings. There are no seal marks (it is rumoured that the nihilist-haiku poet Issa had a hand in painting it), no kimono patterns, none of the formal signs of femininity. The girl is obviously a girl, but there was something tomboyish about her; or to put it as Ryu would have put it, a superhuman innocence that transcended gender.
Imagine early-eighteenth-century Edo, present day Tokyo. According to Tomi, she was the granddaughter of the legendary swordsman Isaburo Sasahara. How his magnificent blade ingrained the fear of God and Buddha himself into the hearts of his enemies. It was he who had single-handedly killed sixty-six of his Lordship’s best samurais; no blade of the Tokugawa Regime could penetrate his lightening steel. But alas, Great Isaburo was finally taken down by dishonourable means, western gunpowder. Due to the Lordship’s renewed interest in finding the fugitive granddaughter, Tomi’s wet-nurse made the most difficult decision of giving away guardianship of the four-year-old Tomi to the red-faced snow monkeys of the Jigokudani clan. Normally, the two worlds never would’ve cooperated in such an agreement, but the snow monkeys like all in the animal kingdom had great admiration for the late Isaburo Sasahara. The slow but steady encroachment of the merchant class, corrupt Buddhist priests, and gaijin foreigners, had take its toll on the wild; how the nippon monkeys thought fondly of the old ways; how they admired Isaburo’s stand against unjustice and cruel inevitability. It was certain that little Tomi would be safer in the macaque world. The vassals of the most powerful daimyo wouldn’t think of looking for the girl in the freezing wasteland that was Nagano prefecture. The locals deemed it ‘The Valley of Hell’. Our simian friends called it home.
As she tells her story, a series of questions occur to Ryu. What did she eat in the mountains? What was a typical day like? How did she ever get out of the clan? How did she ever manage to learn her grandfather’s art of the sword? What ever prompted her to return to this world? What was the future for her? Simultaneously, there is a weaving that occurs; a cross-pollination of his dream narrative with Chancellor Kato’s pedagogical telos. But Kato’s questions unlike Ryu’s are simply rhetorical, ideologically driven. Why is art today so boring? If it is the case that attitude dominates today’s artmaking practice, ought we not make the case that the active feature of today’s concepts and theories —those things that presumably generate art— are just mere attitudes? What business is it of career curators to contaminate the ideal utopia that is the art school? With art schools increasingly functioning as extensions of museum brands, art fairs, biennials, and the broader art market, where are the theoretical and aesthetic hubs for the art students? Who looks out for the emerging artists?
To an outsider there would be something unnerving about the way Kato went on and on. The conviction with which he spoke, the quick, superfluous hand gestures; one wondered if he believed even a word of it. His left eye didn’t quite match up with his right, but nevertheless he was exceptionally handsome. Now that Ryu thinks of it, Kato was the evil twin of Toshiro Mifune with the sculpted body of Yukio Mishima. And like the otherworldly Mishima, he could never quite manage to bulk up his lower half. Ryu on the other hand was of modest otaku stock; he has been mistaken for Takashi Murakami (japan’s Andy Warhol) at a number of gallery openings.