Solo Dance

by Li Kotomi

Description

A powerful novel about the LGBTQ rights movement and gay love in Japan and Taiwan, from the most important queer voice of East Asia’s millennial generation.

Cho Norie, twenty-seven and originally from Taiwan, is working an office job in Tokyo. While her colleagues worry about the economy, life-insurance policies, marriage, and children, she is forced to keep her unconventional life hidden—including her sexuality and the violent attack that prompted her move to Japan. There is also her unusual fascination with death: she knows from personal experience how devastating death can be, but for her it is also creative fuel. Solo Dance depicts the painful coming of age of a gay person in Taiwan and corporate Japan. This striking debut is an intimate and powerful account of a search for hope after trauma.

My thoughts:
“No matter how far she traced the threads of memory, she couldn’t place the exact moment when that vast darkness had seeped over her, nor identify its source.”

Li Kotomi’s Solo Dance (translated by Arthur Reiji Morris) is a short, sad novel about a lesbian woman living in Japan, struggling with depression, thoughts of suicide and her sexuality because of her traumatic past in Taiwan. It’s a sad, tough novel at times, but definitely worth it for the cultural insights and queer literary references, specially to Notes of a Crocodile by Qiu Miaojin. I’d be interested in reading more from this Author.