REIMAGINING PAPER AND IDENTITY: A QUEER THEORY APPROACH

BY HARLAN GAUTHIER

Examining E. K. Ota’s The Paper Artist through a lens of queer and gender theory is vital to understanding the themes of fluidity, transformation, and a resistance to very stern societal expectations while using paper as a metaphorical medium. There is a celebration of the expression of art and self-actualization, finding yourself. Ota’s work challenges what is seen as conventional ideas of identity, permanence, and gender using queer theory and contemporary visual culture. There is the devastating beauty in the words Ota has written in The Paper Artist and exploring the themes in this work is a wonderfully distressing event.

The Paper Artist by E.K. Ota is told using themes that emphasize reconstruction, fragmentation, and identity while challenging normative gender roles. It resists societal expectations and wants to tell a story that begs the reader to embrace the freedom to redefine oneself and liberation and paper is a major metaphor used in the story. Identity and self is not something you fix, but something you reconstruct and shape on your own to create something beautiful. The use of paper art ties into the characters’ identities. Ota’s story follows a man named Muneo Mizukami and his wife Masako, and how he shatters the relationship he had with his family, especially his daughter Mana. At the start, there are many heteronormative gender roles being portrayed, especially within Muneo and his expectations towards his wife and daughter. He is hard on her and expects her to live up to his expectations that fit the heteronormative standards that society has set in place. Mana wanted her father’s approval as an artist when she was young, seeing as he was famous for being “the paper artist” and she tried to use that to seek his support and love, even once bringing him a watercolor picture that she had made to show him when she was ten. But rather than showing her that support, she received indifference. “The message was clear:” Ota wrote. “her work had been unworthy; she was dismissed; she was not to disturb her father with such insignificant attempts again,” (Ota 81). He didn’t even bother to look at the art, disregarding it and creating art of his own with it. A bird. And this was just the first start of a downward spiral for Mana and her father.

Paper as a metaphor for fluidity and transformation is a vital role for the artist community, especially through a queer and feminist lens that views heteronormativity as something that can be shattered. In his article Desublimating the Body: objection and the policies of feminist and queer subjectivities in contemporary art, Julian Daniel Gutierrez-Albilla uses his arguments to demonstrate abjection as a concept through both racial and inter-racial experiences, and while this article does delve into sexual experience (which can be relevant to our story, seeing as Mana chooses a less than ideal partner that her father does not approve of and then has a child with him) it also uses art as an example of transformation and role reversal. “If my readings (Gutierrez-Albilla’s research) of these examples of contemporary art problematics the notion of abjection in order to deal with the policies of feminist and queer subjectivites in visual representations of the Desublimated body and opens these visual works to highly complex theoretical arguments… they are not used as illustrations,” (Gutierrez-Albilla). This line was crucial to read in regard to The Paper Artist because it shows that art is most of the time going to be subjective and can tell a story, even if the art isn’t paintings. This article also deals with race and culture, a very prevalent and heavy topic in the paper artist, as we see the Mizukami family is Japanese which is where the heavy expectations for Mana come into play, and Muneo’s need for his daughter to meet his. Playing the cello, marrying someone he approves of, being a well-set mother, all these things, that Mana was not, and because of that, their relationship was severed.

“He was a proud man, pleased with nothing short of excellence in his own work and, by extension, his family,” (Ota 82). Muneo uses the fame passed down from his and his wife’s families to instill greatness into his daughter’s brain. He wants to see her become a famous cellist, yet she’s choosing to be in a relationship and have a child with a man who offers nothing. She isn’t choosing her father’s path he’s set for her but reshaping her life in a way she sees fit, much like how her father manipulates paper to the way he sees fit. He doesn’t understand what she would want for herself, even when she left with her boyfriend and her daughter, their grandchild. Mana keeps in touch with Masako, as stated on page 86. Mana already realizes that he will always let her father down, saying “I’ve quit playing the cello. I’ve disappointed him,” (Ota 89). Mana tells her mother of her marriage and sends pictures of her child, Rina. What Muneo had not anticipated was he was to come into the parental role for the child, both mother and father. His wife was diagnosed with cancer and unbeknownst to him, his daughter was to die in a car accident. A sudden change was going to happen to Muneo, and that was Rina, the child. Looking at this through a queer lens, we see the heteronormative role being shattered for Muneo, as he now has to assume the role of caregiver. “In June, the child arrived. Her hair was light brown, slightly curled and frizzy around the temples; her cheeks were pink, but the rest of her face was very pale and her eyes were slanted and somber,” (Ota 97). This is how the reader learns that the grandfather will be taking over being the parental role in young Rina’s life, due to the death of her mother and her father’s absence. It’s almost like a laugh and a jab to Muneo, after all the xenophobic arguments, the disappointments he felt towards his daughter, and all that he missed in his daughter’s life, he was to take care of her child.

Viewing this sudden role change for Muneo through a queer lens is important to understand the depth of the situation. Whether he likes it or not, Muneo will not have to assume a role that is usually reserved for mothers and women. He is, as the story makes so painfully obvious, a man of traditional family values. In a journal written by Melanie Belarmino and Melinda R. Robert’s, they discuss gender roles and expectations around the world and have a section that focuses on Japan. “The treatment towards women extends beyond the culture, taking root in the domestic relationships of Japanese women. Within the relationship itself, a woman’s worth in society is based upon the status of her husband or male partner, leaving much of the power in his hands,” (Belarmino and Roberts 275). This quote can directly tie back to Muneo’s initial reaction to when Mana first pursued a relationship with Rina’s father, Charlie. Both Mana’s parents have a substantial status society, Muneo being famous himself, and Masako coming from a family where the man of the house (her father) was a “Tokyo government official” as stated on page 82 of The Paper Artist. The Mizukami is a name of renowned importance (mostly to Muneo) and it’s clear that Muneo because Mana doesn’t want to uphold the strict roles from Japanese culture he is, as said many times, disappointed. The traditional role of Japanese culture (or any culture, for that matter) is that women are to be supportive and submissive for their male partners and romantic relationships if they want to be seen as “good” to society. While I think that Muneo wants Mana to become a famous cellist for the sake of her family name, it’s not hard to guess that he would also prefer her to find another man to settle with who will also be able to provide and bring more fame to the table. All of this can just be proof that it will be a hard and difficult transition for Muneo to become Rina’s caregiver, because that is not the traditional way a family functions. It’s a shame that he realized, too late, the life he missed because of his need for perfection in his family. The days he missed with his family because of his sinking disappointment. “He could choose bitterness. But he would need every ounce of his strength he had left to create a future he and Rina could live in: this was the thought that went through him during the days that followed…” (Ota 99). He wants a future for him and Rina that can settle between them, and hopefully be better than what he gave Mana and Masako. His own wife and daughter.

There is one line in E.K. Ota’s The Paper Artist that stuck out to me so much. “Do you think you know the twists and turns of a woman’s heart?” (Ota 99). It has so much emotion and depth and adds so much to this story. Because as a character, Muneo does not understand a woman’s heart, but more importantly a mother’s. The gender roles in this short story are incredibly heavy and traditional, and looking at it through a queer and gender theory lens we are able to see as much. Especially when the roles are suddenly flipped for Muneo, the man of tradition, and he has to take on a caregiving role for a child of a daughter he let go because of the disappointment he was never really able to move on from.

Work Cited

Ota, E. K. “The Paper Artist.” Ploughshares, vol. 48, no. 3, Fall 2022, pp. 80–100. EBSCOhost, https://doi.org/10.1353/plo.2022.0114.

Gutiérrez-Albilla, J. D. (2008, August 13). Abjection and the politics of feminist and queer … https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232967359_Abjection_and_the_politics_of_feminist_and_queer_subjectivities_in_contemporary_art

Belarmino, Melanie and Roberts, Melinda R. (2019). Japanese Gender Role Expectations and Attitudes: A Qualitative Analysis of Gender Inequality. Journal of International W omen’ s Studies, 20(7), 272-288. https://vc.bridgew.edu/jiws/vol20/iss7/18