First Words/Last Words: Hiromi Goto, "Stinky Girl"

This week’s First Words/Last Words feature comes as a total accident. I was researching the poet Hiromi Ito, and came across the Japanese-Canadian writer Hiromi Goto, whose work strangely enough has a lot of crossover with Ito’s, and with my own obsessions, specifically with stinky brown alien girls. I’ve only read some of the stories in Hopeful Monsters, of which “Stinky Girl” is one, and look forward to reading more. (The collection is partially accessible through the Google Books feature.) I’m including “first words” here this time, too; what, I never said I was systematic.

As I understand it, Goto writes both “young adult/children’s” literature and “adult” literature concerning—much to my delight—alien abduction, depressed Asian girls who go on epic quests to save their neglectful mothers, abnormal or hysterical pregnancies, unconventional bodies, monstrous bodies, a woman who slices off her painful lactating breasts and transplants them onto her husband, then gently instructs him to “do what comes naturally.”

From the back cover of Hopeful Monsters: “Hopeful monsters” are genetically abnormal organisms that, nonetheless, adapt and survive in their environments. In these devastating stories, the hopeful monsters in question are those who will not be tethered by familial duty nor bound by the ghosts of their past. Home becomes fraught, reality a nightmare as Hiromi Goto weaves her characters through tales of domestic crises and cultural dissonance. They are the walking wounded — a mother who is terrified by a newborn daughter who bears a tail; a “stinky girl” who studies the human condition in a shopping mall; relatives on holiday with a visiting grandfather who cannot abide their “foreign nature.”

Then the cover says something about magical realism which I think is a somewhat simplistic way of getting out of talking about the urgencies and immediacies of what Goto does with the writing in this book, with the body, with sexuality and maternity and monstrosity, how monstrosity is conceived, and how it can be reclaimed.

In the essay “Alien Texts, Alien Seductions: The Context of Colour Full Writing,” Goto writes: “How will we go about dismantling our desire to read the alien? How will we disrupt our desire to be seduced by that which does not seek to seduce in the first place?”

The narrator of “Stinky Girl” describes herself as a fat coloured rat girl (but, she hastens to qualify, “If I am a rat, think of, perhaps, the queen of all rats in the sewer of her dreams, being fed the most tender morsels of garbage flesh her minions bring her”), still a “girl” despite her thirty-three years, haunting her local mall.

From the beginning of the story:

One is never certain when one becomes a stinky girl. I am almost positive I wasn’t stinky when I slid out from between my mother’s legs, fresh as blood and just as sweet. What could be stinkier, messier, grosser than that? one might be asked. But I’m certain I must have smelled rich, like yeast and liver. Not the stink of I-don’t-know-what which pervades me now.

Mother has looked over my shoulder to see what I am trying to cover up with my hand and arm, while I meditatively write at the kitchen table.

“Jesus!” she rolls her eyes like a whale. “Jesus Christ!” she yells. “Dn’t talk about yourself as ‘one’! One what, for God’s sake? One asshole? One snivelling stinky girl?” She stomps off. Thank goodness. It’s very difficult having a mother. It’s even more difficult having a loud and coarse one.

Where was I? oh yes. I am not troubled by many things. My size, my mother, my dead father’s ghost, and a pet dog that despises me do not bother me so very much. Well, perhaps on an off day, they might bring a few tears to my eyes, but no one will notice a fat stinky mall rat weeping. People gnerally believe that fatties secrete all sorts of noxious substances from theri bodies. But regardless. The one bane of my life, the one cloud of doom which circumscribes my life is the odour of myself.

At the end of the story, the narrator finds herself in the mall’s new play area, forcing herself to enter the maze of plastic tubing that serves as the children’s play land (she describes very aptly that static shock you get going down those tubes, anyone else remember that?), until her body clogs one of the tubes.

Then I notice. A certain something. For the first time in my life, that which has always been with me yet never perceived seeps into my consciousness. I am so completely encased in plastic that it cannot be diluted by outer forces.

I can smell myself.

But the wonder!

Because my odour is not smell, but sound. . . .

The unbearable voices of mythic manatees, the cry of the phoenix, the whispers of kappa lovers beside a gurgling stream. The voice of the moon that is ever turned from our gaze, the song of suns colliding. The sounds that emanate from my skin are so intense that mortal senses recoil, deflect beauty into ugliness as a way of coping. Unable to bear hearing such unearthly sounds they transmute it into stench.

And my joy! Such incredible joy. The hairs on my arms stand electric, the static energy and my smell/sound mix such dizzying intensity the plastic surrounding me bursts apart, falls away from my being like an artificial cocoon.

I hover, twenty feet in the air.

The children who were stuck behind me tumble to the ground. They fall silently, too shocked to scream, but the pitch of sound that seeps from my skin intensifies, like beams of coloured light. The sound catches the children from their downward plummet and they bob, rose slowly up to where I float. I extend my hands and the children grab hold, hold each others’ hands, smile with wonder.

“Oh my god!” someone finally gasps, from far beneath us. Another person screams. Fathers faint and an enterprising teenager grabs a camera from a supine parent and begins to snap pictures. None of it matters. Tears drip from my eyes and the liquid jewels float alongside us like diamonds in outer space. I burst out laughing and the children laugh too. I don’t know what will happen tomorrow or the day that follows but the possibilities are immeasurable.

We float, the remaining plastic pipes shimmer, buckle beneath our voices, then burst into soft confetti.