The Tatami Galaxy by Tomihiko Morimi

First published in Japan in 2008; published in translation by HarperVia on December 6, 2022

This thoroughly odd novel was apparently a hit in Japan, where it was adapted as an anime television miniseries (because Japan). I watched the trailer on YouTube and it’s, um, colorful? Anime rarely speaks to me, but different strokes.

The book was apparently followed by a “spiritual successor” and an actual sequel. The sequel also became an anime miniseries in Japan that has apparently been released in the US on Disney+ or Hulu. (I glean this information from Wikipedia so take it with a grain of salt.) The sequel (Tatami Time Machine) will be published in translation in 2023. I think I’ll give it a pass.

The novel is set in four parallel universes. It tells, at times, a somewhat interesting story. It is typical in a novel of this sort to illustrate how a life might be different if a person makes different choices. Tomihiko Morimi eschews the typical by imaging a character who makes similar mistakes and encounters similar misery in every life he lives. The story is, at times, so absurdist or surreal that it might have been inspired by Borges.

The unnamed narrator is a college student who, in each universe, is beginning his junior year, having accomplished nothing during his first two years. He is pretty much the same guy in each reality. He consistently lives in a four-and-a-half tatami room and he always has a porn collection. Ozu is always his friend and a man Ozu calls “Master” always lives above him. He always reads Jules Verne. Some passages, including his description of the regret he feels for wasting his first two years at the university, are repeated verbatim in each section.

The stories diverge in other details. In each universe, he flashes back to his first year in college, when he examined flyers for student clubs and, although they all seemed “pretty shady,” chose one he would later abandon. He makes a different choice in each universe. The first is a film club called Ablutions. In the second universe, he becomes a disciple of Master Higuchi (although for two years, the narrator is not sure what kind of disciple he was).  The third is the Mellow Softball Club. In the last universe, the narrator joins an underground organization, Lucky Cat Chinese Food, and more particularly, the Library Police, a suborganization that has taken on the life of an intelligent organization.

The narrator sees the clubs as opportunities to expand his nonexistent social contacts. The narrator has limited social skills, which might explain why he ends up making friends only with Ozu, a troublemaker who might or might not be a good companion. In the third universe, he practices conversation with Ozu’s love doll; in the fourth, a plot is afoot to kidnap the doll. In the first, the narrator calls himself the Obstructor of Romance because of his unsuccessful love life. A mysterious fellow “who dared call himself a god” is apparently trying to decide whether to play cupid with the narrator or his friend Ozu. The god is not clear that either of them are worthy of Akashi, a judgmental engineering student who (in some universes, at least) makes a “positive impression” on the narrator.

The god tells the narrator that he ties and unties the red threads of destiny each year. That’s quite a job, but the god seems to tie and untie them in nearly the same way in each universe. While the details vary, the narrator’s life always begins with hope and seems to end with a feeling of lost opportunities. In repeated universes, a fortune teller advises the narrator to seize chances. He finds it difficult to heed that advice. He knows he should ditch Ozu, who is something of an albatross, and pursue paths to happiness — perhaps Akashi — but the narrator is incapable of overcoming his social ineptness. Even moths are better at socializing than the narrator.

The last section creates a source of hope in a bleak story. The narrator finds himself in a labyrinth (hence the Borges comparison) consisting of endless four-and-a-half tatami rooms. The contents are not always identical (Ozu’s love doll appears from time to time) and some might come from one of the other realities, but the food supply (fish burgers and sponge cake) is always the same. The narrator makes infinite decisions during the 80 days he spends wandering through the rooms, creating the possibility of infinite fates, but his fate always seems to be another four-and-a-half tatami room. In the end, an escape changes the narrator’s life, but he won’t talk about that drivel because (as he observed in another reality), “There’s nothing so worthless to speak of as a love mature.”

I’m not sure what to make of The Tatami Galaxy. The novel alternates between being engaging and boring. The narrator is frustrating in his incapacity for change until he changes. The idea of living a life in alternate realities is a clever variation on the venerable time loop story, but the final journey through a labyrinth piles fantasy on top of fantasy and distracts from the story’s point, assuming Morimi had one. Maybe I need to watch the anime miniseries to make sense of it all, but lacking the motivation to do that, I’ll leave it to readers to form their own conclusions.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS