A moving collection of six short stories that explores what must be stripped away to find the truth and celebrates the beauty of embracing who you are.
Chiaki Ogawa has never doubted that he is a boy, although the rest of the world has not been as kind. Bound by his mother’s dying wish, Chiaki tries to be a good daughter to his ailing father.
When the burden becomes too great, Chiaki sets out to remake himself in his own image and discovers more than just personal freedom with his transition—he finds understanding from the people who matter most.
I borrowed this one from the library and now I NEED it in my collection. As in, my physical collection. PLEASE.
The first story hits like a brick.
It isn’t every day that someone gets the meat of dysphoria and the euphoria of being able to be the person one actually is. Chiaki has always known he was a man, but he’s bound by the love of his family. It isn’t aggressive. It isn’t intended to be mean, or to crush him into a shape. His mother wanted him to be a beautiful bride and his father only tries to live up to her dying wish, raising a daughter. Chiaki, in turn, realized his pursuit of masculinity while in a feminine shape would end up hurting his father.
But what he wants is to be his father’s son.
So he gets his affairs in order and gets gender affirming surgery in Thailand, leaving his father with a guide to trans folks. On his return, his father weeps… not because Chiaki returned outwardly a man, but because he realizes he had not been the supportive father he could have been. With that, Chiaki absolutely blooms. He embraces life again. He does everything he wants to, needs to!
And in the background, his friend is there to help him. The best friend a guy could have.
Honestly, the most relatable scene, the most intense scene, is when Chiaki holds his butchering knife to his breasts, fantasizing about simply removing them. He dreams about his father removing his breasts and uterus, letting him have a masculine body, saying tearfully, “Now we can hunt together!” It made me cry. I often had such thoughts when I was younger, desperately wanting to cut myself apart for the body I felt I should have had. Even now, sometimes I get hit with intense dysphoria regarding my chest before it settles down again. While I grew around my body, Chiaki made it his own.
Most of the other stories are rather… forgettable. They’re shorts, nothing much, and the other big story is about a child who hates his mother and blames her for his father leaving. He wants to curse her to feel his feelings, but it accidentally is cast upon him, filling him with such empathy that he realizes that although he has interpreted his mother as a stupid, vapid creature, she acts with nothing but love and care for him, focusing not on herself, but for his wellbeing. She does suffer. She does feel pain. But she did not want to cause him pain.
Anyway, a watermelon was birthed from his nose, so. Woof.
Worth a read, honestly! If you’re on QLL, put this baby on hold. The first story is worth the wait.
