Rieko Matsuura: An Evening with a Contemporary Japanese Novelist (The Apprenticeship of Big Toe P)

Lecture Information:
Every decade or so a novel appears that leaves its mark on an entire generation. For Japan in the 1990s, that novel was Rieko Matsuura’s The Apprenticeship of Big Toe P. An astonishing, gripping read, this now legendary book was both a critical success and an instant sensation that flew off the shelves. Selling more than 300,000 copies in hardcover, it rocketed its cult author to stardom almost overnight.

The Apprenticeship of Big Toe P tells the story of Kazumi Mano, a naïve twenty-two-year-old who wakes up one afternoon to discover that her big toe has turned into a penis. Her life as an ordinary girl is over, and a rigorous “apprenticeship” has begun. Kazumi flees her homophobic fiancé after he tries to castrate her, and hooks up with a blind pianist with whom she falls in love. Together they join a troupe of sexually deformed and emotionally twisted men and women who tour the country performing what amounts to sexual freak shows. In the course of her bizarre journey, Kazumi is forced to reconsider what she had always passively accepted: her body, her sexuality, and her life.

By turns provocative, intelligent, humorous, heartbreaking, and grotesque, The Apprenticeship of Big Toe P is like no other novel you will read. Matsuura is a master of sensual slipstream, and this work is her chef d’oeuvre.

Lecturer Information:
Rieko Matsuura was born in Matsuyama, Japan, and graduated from Aoyama Gakuin University with a BA in French literature. She debuted as a writer in 1978, while still in college, with “The Day of the Funeral,” a short story that won that year’s Bungakukai Prize for New Writers. Since then, she has published six works of fiction and three essay collections—among them Natural Woman (1987), a series of three related novellas exploring lesbian love; The Apprenticeship of Big Toe P (1993), a bestseller that won the Women’s Literature Prize, Japan’s most prestigious literary award for women writers; and A Dog’s Body (2007), about the intimate but nonsexual relationship between a woman with “species identity disorder” who turns into a dog, and her friend-turned-owner.

The Apprenticeship of Big Toe P is Matsuura’s first novel to be translated into English.