is a Japanese novel by Yasuo Tanaka. Published in magazine form as the winner of the 17th Bungei Prize in 1980, it was also nominated for the Akutagawa Prize, and published in book form by Kawade Shobō Shinsha in 1981. A bestseller shortly after publication, the novel was controversial among contemporary critics for its apparent glorification of luxury consumption and its use of extensive annotations to identify desirable real-world products, brands, services, and locations encountered by the book's fictional characters. Academic critics have since identified Somehow, Crystal as an early and important example of Japanese postmodern literature. The book has been translated into Korean, German, and English, and a Japanese film adaptation was released by Shochiku in 1981.
Plot summary
While her boyfriend Jun'ichi is out of town, college student and part-time model Yuri passes the time in Tokyo by shopping for luxury products, visiting affluent neighborhoods, eating expensive food, and seeking new kinds of entertainment. At a dance club she meets Masataka, to whom she describes her relatively frictionless life as "crystal". Yuri has a sexual encounter with Masataka that she enjoys but finds less satisfying than her experiences with Jun'ichi. When Jun'ichi returns, Yuri learns that he also was unfaithful during his trip, but she reflects on her financial independence and decides that staying with Jun'ichi is the best fit for her crystal lifestyle.
Major themes
Scholars and critics have focused on the role of the annotations in Somehow, Crystal, largely dismissing the main narrative thread as "thin on plot",, "plotless", having a "thin plot", having a plot that "verges on nonexistence", and providing "mere scaffolding" for the notes. The published book contains 442 notes, most of which explain, and opine about, brands, music, places, and trends that the characters encounter, leading literary scholar Faye Yuan Kleeman to describe the book as a "thinly disguised product and lifestyle endorsement narrative". The anthropologist Fabio Gygi has summarized Somehow, Crystal as a "catalogue novel".
For some critics and scholars, the notes seemed to promote consumerism. Contemporary critic Takashi Tsumura attributed the popularity of the book not to any literary merits, but to its particular appeal to young consumers. Noting the detail with which a single paragraph contains notes for shops like Kinokuniya, neighborhoods like Daikanyama and Hiroo, and places to eat such as Chez Lui and Lecomte, literary scholar Marc Yamada observed that the notes divert attention away from the main text, instead "focusing the reader's desire on consumer products". Comparing the book to a series of television commercials, literary scholar Masao Miyoshi wrote that Somehow, Crystal "tries to look ironic and sophisticated, but barely manages to conceal its crude apologia for affluence".
Literary scholars writing well after the publication of the book have focused on the intertextuality of the narrative and annotations. Drawing on the writings of Hiroki Azuma about postmodernism as a shift away from narrative and toward hypertext and database as cultural forms, Marc Yamada highlights the relationship between main text and annotations as a "database of cultural information that the reader is required to synthesize", thereby decentering the possibility of a single author. For literary scholar Norma Field, the notes, which in the book are written in a completely different style to the main text, reflect a dominant, masculine authorial voice that she describes as a "voyeuristic presence" watching and responding to the main female character. Christopher Smith, a literary scholar and translator of Tanaka's work, instead interprets the main text and notes as expressions of two aspects of Yuri's identity, which she manipulates in order to navigate different social situations and relationships.