increasing the size of the hole in her tongue by inserting larger studs. Her inability to connect emotionally with Ama is demonstrated in her continued encounters with Shiba, in secret, for brutal sex. Attracted to his violence, Lui also desires the cosmetic alterations of her body Shiba can provide. In addition to Lui’s pierced tongue, Shiba creates an elaborate tattoo on her back that joins the mythical figure of a dragon with that of a kirin, or unicorn. Significantly, Lui asks that the dragon and the kirin both be made eyeless because of a superstitious belief that sightlessness will keep these treasured tattoos from escaping her skin. This reminds the reader that, rather than her increasingly alcohol-fueled life with Ama, or Shiba’s rough sex, it is the imprints on her flesh that have an overriding importance for Lui.

It is possible that Lui’s double life with her two lovers would eventually have been disrupted by her escalating anorexia and alcoholism, but it is the sudden disappearance of Ama that precipitates a crisis. The routine of Lui’s life with her lover comes to a halt when she learns he has been brutally tortured, raped, and beaten to death. Ama’s death produces a number of different reactions from Lui. Whatever grief she may have felt for a man she is not sure she knew or loved is almost immediately translated into the pain she causes herself to endure when she introduces a lower-gauge stud in her tongue in order to further advance the splitting process. She also asks Shiba to tattoo eyes into the mythical animals on her back, a gesture that seems to suggest she has not only given them their spiritual freedom but that she has also set Ama and herself free.

During this period of unconventional mourning for Ama, Lui finally becomes fully conscious of the defects in their relationshipsuch as the fact that she never knew, or particularly cared to know, his real name or anything about his family or his job. The recognition of her own incuriosity and lack of affect feeds into a self-loathing that has surfaced throughout the narrative, suggesting that Lui has always, to some extent, been aware of her personality disorders. Although Lui realizes she failed to develop a real bond with Ama, to commemorate his love for her she smashes his courtship gift of the gangster’s two teeth into a powder, which she downs with her ever-present bottle of beer. This incident, like so many in Lui’s narrative, remains enigmatic in terms of motive and meaning.

Such rituals as the smashing of the gangster’s teeth seem to exert a strange healing effect on Lui. Another healing aspect of Lui’s response to Ama’s death is her effort to develop a greater emotional intimacy with Shiba. Complicating her relationship with him, however, is her discovery of evidence that suggests it was Shiba who committed the sexually sadistic murder of Ama. Although Lui realizes she is very likely living with her former boyfriend’s twisted killer, she destroys the evidence that may lead to his arrest, putting the disturbing crime behind her with surprising equanimity. Once again, an initial interpretation of Lui’s behavior may suggest that she is operating on an extremely shallow and superficial plane. Underneath the surface, however, there is the suggestion that Ama’s death held deep and important psychological ramifications for her. It was Ama who was her guide and mentor on her journey into this nihilistic countercultural underworld, and his death has somehow allowed Lui to begin to rise out of it.

Throughout the story, Kanehara has employed imagery of lightlessness as a way to describe Lui’s situation, indeed, as a way to describe the rest of her character’s life. Lui anticipates her future as pitch-black, filled with shadows and ashes, or as an exitless tunnel. She is seeking to create an underworld of dark materiality, without sunshine, love, or laughter, in which there is nothing spiritual and in which she herself is little more than a shadow. Ama’s grisly death at the hands of Shiba, however, and the tattoos, piercings, and the sexual abuse she receives at his hands returns to her a nascent will to live.

After Ama’s death, when Shiba introduces eyes into the faces of the mystical creatures he has tattooed on her back, Lui intuitively and instantly understands that he will no longer abuse her and that he will instead look after her and love her. The final lines of the novel incorporate a welcoming sunlight for the first time, in direct opposition to the metaphors of lightlessness that had previously characterized the narrative. On the day the novel concludes, in an ambiance of powerful morning sunlight, Lui chooses water instead of beer to drink, the flow of the cool water down her throat leading her to feel as if suddenly a life-giving river had grown inside of her.

Euphoric amid the experience of water and light, Lui nevertheless is still, to some extent, seeking a split tongue of the kind inspired by Ama. Her pursuit returns the narrative to the issue of the painful body piercings that began her journey. It may be that she will continue to transform her tongue into a snakelike shape. Whether or not she will decide her tongue piercing is little more than an empty consumer preference, Lui knows her journey into the world of tattoos and piercing has not been simply meaningless or defiantly deviant. By the end of the narrative, the reader is allowed to consider all of her risky, masochistic behaviors as, on a deep level, healing-related. Perhaps they are even part of a larger spiritual process, so that her pursuit of her forked tongue at the end of the novel is, surprisingly, placed within a context of an ultimate quest for health and wholeness. Additionally, the imagery of the snake, the dragon, and the kirin point to totem animals that traditionally carry mythical powers and virtues. These may suggest that Lui herself has been in search of such positive attributes.

Deploying a direct, pull-no-punches prose style that does not shy away from graphic sexual passages, Snakes and Earrings shocked readers in Japan with its unblinking depiction of the dark side of a Japanese youth culture utterly estranged from traditional beliefs or values. Kanehara’s youth and gender particularly contributed to the public’s surprise at her ability to present a stark but powerful picture of the depression and dissociation of a generation coming of age in a demoralized, post-“bubble” economy. Beyond its relevance for modern-day Japan, her astute psychological study of a disaffected personality can also be appreciated within a global context; Kanehara’s young people are denizens of a pervasive contemporary counterculture that transcends national boundaries.