Discussed: Scorpions by Yumiko Kurahashi (translated by Michael Day); Amygdalatropolis by B.R. Yeager

If you spend enough time following literary controversies online, you may have encountered people quarreling over whether depiction is endorsement in fiction. In other words, is including bad behavior in a novel or story bad, even if it’s intended as criticism? This lines up neatly beside arguments over the “likability” of characters, which can also crop up with relative frequency.

These are not new debates. There’s a bit partway through Steven Bach’s memoir Final Cut in which he shares some of the history behind the making of Raging Bull, including one studio executive denigrating the central character. The version of Jake LaMotta that appears in said film is, in fact, fascinating — though “likable” is not a word that would come to mind. As Lyta Gold pointed out in a 2024 essay, arguments over the morality and suitability of certain stories can be traced back for thousands of years.

As a reader and writer, I’m equally in favor of protagonists both likable and despicable, as long as they are written interestingly. A violent sadist can be just as boring as a beatific saint, and there’s a particular challenge in writing a virtuous character who is also interesting. The same is true for the brutally antisocial: someone whose default state is one of relentless violence is fundamentally boring. 

One way to make an unlikable character interesting is through a series of contrasts, and one place to see this in practice is in B.R. Yeager’s novel Amygdalatropolis. I’ve read other work by Yeager, and his Negative Space is one of my favorite novels of the last decade. This novel was his first, and while it’s less overly a work of horror per se, it is also not a book that lacks outright horror. 

Amygdalatropolis is not a book that holds the reader’s hand as they make their way through it. Gradually, a few things become clear: this is a novel about a disaffected young man who spends his time on a forum called /1404/ — a spot that may summon up memories of some of the grimmest places online for certain readers. /1404er/ — that’s what the protagonist is referred to throughout — lives in the house where he grew up, though he’s making enough money to buy his parents to move into the home’s master bedroom. 

Yeager’s novel is one of the few books set in an online community that feels authentic. (See also: Dennis Cooper’s The Sluts, which would make for an excellent double feature with this book.) Much of its power comes from the banality of hearing its characters discuss incredibly disconcerting things, from the slurs they casually refer to one another as to the discussions of doxxing and harassment that take place online. It isn’t always an easy read, but it also feels unsettlingly clarifying about a certain sector of angry young men.

There’s also the route of outright extremity. Yukino Kurahashi’s Scorpions (translated by Michael Day) is the novelistic equivalent of some head-spinning work of grindcore: imagine blastbeats wound around genuinely transcendental moments and you’d have an idea of what to expect. Edia Connole’s introduction to Amygdalatropolis cites, among others, the works of Georges Bataille. In his introduction to Scorpions, Day cites a different transgressive French author, Jean Genet, as an influence on Kurahashi. 

Scorpions is presented as found document: a series of comments made by L., who has been charged with the crime of matricide. That doesn’t do justice to precisely how unsettling the story L. tells is; it is in part about someone with a deep contempt for almost everyone else around her and in part about her love for her brother K.

“K and I had resided in this room, which resembled the brain of a person with bipolar disorder, since our birth. I had spent a week pulling book after book from our voluminous library, casting each aside, until the mountain of books collapsed upon itself, and ever since, sentimentally attached to this chaos, we had been competing to adorn the room with books and rubbish and bits of paper.”

The violence is explicit in Scorpions and implicit in Amygdalatropolis, but both books offer a sense of controlled chaos in their protagonists’ living spaces that seems inexorably tied to their more shocking acts. That seems consistent with the broader method of both books depicting characters transgressing against the social norms around them. What makes both books gripping are the permutations that their characters go through. These are not people you’d want to emulate in any way, but that doesn’t mean that their violations of social morays or criminal codes can’t be fascinating to observe. Still, you might need to get some fresh air into your lungs