H: a review

Flip phones, schoolgirls, (ir?)redeemable transgressions, a river in Kyoto

H, copyright © 2025 by R Merey

I love the novels that hunch under their hoodies when they walk out among us, that bind their breaths in readiness for the pointing of fingers, the sucking of teeth that will snap-echo from across the street. More than this even, I love the novels that edge you to the brink, edge you like the bulging skin of liquid trembling above the brim of a drinking glass — what glass? — the glass called ambiguity.

This is a novel steeped & pickled in ambiguity, but not “ambiguity” as an インテリ exercise for the literati to relish at ironic remove over claret and brie—no, an ambiguity whose sweat you must lick from its pungent skin, an uncontrolled freefall into ambiguity made terrible and romantic by the tsunamis of youthful passion, go-for-broke poverty, smutty beauty and its dispiriting opposite, a love of place you’d have to be placeless to know the accurate tang of, and the ludic amorality (and surprising conscientiousness) of spiritual flânerie. “Why was it easier to ask to be defiled than to be loved?” wonders one character, and my brow-troubled answer is, “さあ.”

Ambiguity: The floating world, the water trade: widdershins places where a person or a thing is not quite this, not quite that. Do you require that your identity be as fixed as granite? (Stone also melts.) Do you require the same of my identity, of hers, his, or theirs? Can you learn to find this 浮き世 variability, this riverlike impermanence, breathtaking? Will its keen-eyed exploitations sicken you? When you come at last to the Shrine of the Serene Water, will it soothe or irk you (and/or both)?

Ambiguity: A shifting of viewpoint, of narrative voice oozing to-and-fro between the first person and the third even within the perspective of a single character: How reliable, you might wonder (I hope you will wonder), is this novel? Does everything that happens, actually happen? Whoa, now — I see that you are exasperated: “One of those anything-might-be-anything novels! God, how fremdschämenlich!” and I see you begin to click away — wait. Merey has the rare talent of making ambiguity piquant, not infuriating. This story earns your discomfort.

Ambiguity: Listen, man. This ¿¿¿-drenched novel is entertaining. It is discomfort you will be here for.

Ambiguity: Protagonist V’s oftentime work is sex, but it is not exactly “sex work”. No registered place of business, no posted list of prices. Sex trading can be noble — work which gives comfort, a moment of happiness (happiness! ambiguous ideal par excellence!), can be work to be proud of. Wait — dwell on this. Proud of. Wait. Dwell on it. Okay, proceed. It is nonetheless ambiguous work. It might smirch you badly.

Ambiguity: Omnidirectional fetishisation. Attractions which we should not admit to having. Or which we hate others for admitting. Or which we condemn in ourselves more than in others. When you read this novel, you might hate our protagonist V. I mean, hate him. I won’t blame you for it. V won’t blame you. V may have you all figured out too.

Ambiguity: There is a fremdschämenlich narrative for white fellows in Japan. If you were my white boyfriend, you could teach me English! But if white equals English, where does V fall? Please do not forget that the Irish were not always “white”, nor the Polish, nor the Jewish, nor so many others whose whiteness was located ambiguously at the edges of the 幻nical circle. Sometimes V sells unEnglish language, in a margin of pseudo-whiteness not always understood by his Englishpilled buyers. Sometimes those who think they are buying language from him are actually buying — um?

Ambiguity: Love beauty if you will, but learn to love it cleanly. Guardedly. There are transgressions that are evil without being wrong. You already know this but hate to know it. H is not a novelistic trompe l’oeil but rather a trompe l’éthos. Or maybe it is the inverse of whatever that is.

Merey bloodies the novel’s nose before the schoolyard bullies can do so, preemptively subtitling it “a trash novel” right on the cover, but that’s not what it is. (The ambiguity of authorial dissembling.) H is a work of storymaking which refuses to relax into the commission of acts of “cowardice towards ambiguity”. Each time I’ve reread Merey’s Read and Then Burn This, I’ve decided that it is my favourite Merey, and each time I’ve reread H (2025, tRaum Books), I’ve decided that actually this is my favourite Merey. (Preferences juddering, shuddering, like footage failing a Harding test.) I love those authors who push unwisely beyond worry, who write a novel of themes which is not a thematic novel, who dig their fingers into us and wait for us to realise (perhaps with revulsion) that that is what we probably wanted.

Find out more about H or buy a copy through the publisher’s website.