“The Value of Your Body”: Selfhood and Ownership in Suzumi Suzuki’s Gifted

Is beauty a gift? Is the body itself? Beauty could be understood as a quality passed down from parent to child and thereby given or “gifted,” even if only in a passive sense, through genetic happenstance. Beauty could also be a “gift” as in a talent, something that you inherently possess. In both cases, it is something that happens to you. You can work at being beautiful, but to be “gifted” with beauty is to be a recipient. Gifted, a novella by Suzumi Suzuki, translated from Japanese by Allison Markin Powell, explores beauty, and the body itself, as a troubling inheritance, a complicated gift that, at least for women, belongs to you but is never fully in your control.

Gifted’s unnamed narrator is twenty-five and living in Tokyo’s entertainment district. She works as a hostess in a bar, but soon quits her job so she can care for her mother, who is dying of cancer. The mother briefly moves into the narrator’s apartment, but in a matter of days her condition deteriorates enough that she is admitted to the hospital. The narrator’s time is then filled with hospital visits, walks around the city, and occasional contact with friends, mostly by text. These friends are young women who are sex workers or, like the narrator, have jobs that cater to men’s desire for entertainment and company, sometimes leading to sex, sometimes not.

Gifted doesn’t have much plot—what “happens” mostly concerns the mother’s worsening health. Instead, it is structured in part around descriptions of the narrator’s estrangement from her own experiences and emotions and from the world at large. As she admits, “No matter where I am, I feel no sense of reality. . . . there is an inconsistency between me and whatever scene I find myself in.” She drifts through her days, staying hyperfocused on details such as the sounds her apartment doors make as she opens them and the amount of soap left in her soap dispenser. Narrating these details at great length and in a flat, detached tone becomes a way to avoid deeper, more painful thoughts. What she wants is stability and sameness, a regular rhythm that feels like a kind of control.

In the novella’s first paragraph, the narrator tells us how this works: “If the interval between the creaking of the hinges and the turning of the pins in the old lock cylinder is too long or too short, there will be no sense of security.” The self-awareness this quotation demonstrates is in tension with the abstract phrase “there will be no sense,” as though this “rule” for opening her doors is a law of the universe instead of one she made up. She tries to make the world safe in part by denying her own agency as an actor within it. She doesn’t seem to want to deny or end her own existence—although one of her friends recently died by suicide and her friend group talks about suicide a lot—but she wants to ignore it.

Instead of plot, what provides the novella meaning and suspense is the book’s central mystery: why, when the narrator was a teenager, did her mother burn her arm with a cigarette and then set her shirt on fire, shortly afterward dousing the fire with coffee that had gone cold? Although the mother could be accused of emotional distance and neglect, this seems to be her only physically abusive episode. It is the act that makes the narrator’s detachment necessary, while at the same time threatening to break through it. It haunts her, and she reveals what happened only in bits and pieces, waiting until near the end of the book to reveal it all. She both obsesses over the burning—it is the event around which the narrative is formed—and shies away from it, relaying it only in brief, painful moments that are buffered with numbing detail.

This burning left the narrator with scars that she later tried to hide with tattoos: two lilies and a snake that reach from her shoulder down her back. What these scars and their attempted camouflage mean for the narrator, practically speaking, is that her job opportunities are limited. She looks for work where she can wear jackets that conceal the scars or where she won’t fail an interview that requires a scar-free and tattoo-free display of the beauty she can offer customers. But they haunt her on an existential level as well. Years later, the burned area aches, and she’s acutely aware when anyone touches it. It remains sensitive, a physical embodiment of the conflict with her mother, whose cruel touch has become a permanent part of her. The scars—symbols of the mother’s abuse—haunt her, as do the tattoos as symbols of efforts to move on; she carries the violent closeness in her body no matter how far she and her mother drift apart.

Gifted offers no definite answer to why her mother burned her, but the existence of this mystery reveals the characters’ fraught positions in the world, and, indeed, the fraught position of all women. The burning is an acknowledgement that for women, in the world as it currently exists, the body is everything. Both mother and daughter know their life paths are determined by their appearance, their beauty; their lives and bodies have monetary value and their most significant choices have to do with how they wield what little power this value offers them. The narrator acknowledges this explicitly: “Once you have one tattoo, it doesn’t matter how many more you get—it has no further impact on the value of your body.” She knows that, given her low social class and imperfect beauty, that value is low: “as far the world was concerned, none of us mattered much.” The narrator claims not to care, but this is an unconvincing act of defiance.

The mother, in contrast, has tried to fight this reduction of the self to the body. She worked as an actress, wrote poetry, taught classes, and wrote and sang songs, all efforts to survive as a single mother while at the same time bringing art and beauty into her life. The daughter is skeptical. Of her mother’s job as a nightclub singer, she says, “The bar’s long gone now. Just as well, since my mother played it up as if it had been a hotbed of cultural exchange. I became aware of her delusion around the time I left home.” The mother published several poetry collections, but the daughter remembers only that for the mother, poetry-writing was a retreat from the world, an escape from the disorder they lived in.

The narrator learns, however, that her mother’s efforts in earlier years to insist she was more than a mere body faltered, as she was forced to sing “practically naked” and subjected to objectification. She looked down on the women around her who exchanged money for sex even as her own position was perilously close to theirs. And, as the narrator grew and gained independence and sexual freedom, her mother saw that her daughter might be drawn into the world of sex work as well. The burning may have been a way to keep that from happening, an attempt to destroy the beauty that carried with it so many burdens.

What are women in the world of this novella supposed to do? Lurking behind the narrator’s facade of indifference is another female figure, this time a middle-aged woman who works in a grocery the narrator visits on her way to the hospital. This woman has worked there for years, seemingly unchanged. The narrator is rattled when she hears a man in his thirties “brazenly calling out ‘Mother’ to the middle-aged lady.” The narrator is outraged:

But I had not been raised to call people who were not my mother “Mother.” The word, connoting the parent who had once held dominion over my body, carries too much meaning.

For the narrator, the figure of “mother” is loaded, evoking power, control, and the threat of violence, but for this man, the word is dismissive, a misogynistic insult. His use of the word is flattening, an attempt to squash the individuality and the dignity of a vulnerable woman. Within this context, the narrator’s detachment from the reality around her gains a new poignancy, for, at best, this grocer’s present will be her future.

Late in the book, the narrator lists the things her mother “bestowed” upon her: “ . . . a perfectly healthy body, the scars that had slashed the value of that body by half, and, in the dwindling bloom of my twenties, time to waste walking in the languid morning.” The mother gave her a body and then harmed it, passed along her own beauty but marred it, or at least marred it in the eyes of an exacting, cruel world. This is her inheritance, and she, understandably, isn’t sure what to do with it.

Allison Markin Powell’s translation captures this confusion perfectly. Gifted is full of odd rhythms, slowing down to describe mundane details in the apartment and speeding up to rush through stories of trauma, as though the narrator isn’t sure or doesn’t want to decide which events matter more than others. So much of her life is fleeting: “What remains is only a vague recollection of half the day, and I spend the other half making memories that will soon vanish.” Markin Powell keeps the vocabulary simple and the sentences straightforward. They frequently begin with “I” followed by a verb or a simple phrase: “I’d wait . . . ,” “I avoided . . . ,” “I was wearing . . . ,” “I suppose it’s inevitable . . . ” The narrator is trying to survive, and her unadorned language is often passive (“there has been too much lost,” “I had often been uncertain”). It is a way of evading pain, as though the narrator knows that asserting herself may get her in trouble. Her body is a gift, but it’s a gift she is still struggling to take full possession of and use as she wishes. Gifted explores what it would require for a woman to fully own her own body, and its lack of clear answers indicates what a perplexing question that remains.

Gifted by Suzumi Suzuki, translated from Japanese by Allison Markin Powell (Transit Books, 2024).