Book Review: The Tatami Galaxy

I first watched The Tatami Galaxy anime several years ago, and it lit my brain on fire. I loved the recursive storytelling, the unique and unpredictable animation style, and the cocky-yet-downtrodden voice of the main character. So when I saw that Morimi's original novel had been translated into English, I felt I had to read it, if only because it felt like peering behind the curtain of a work I really admired.

And while I enjoyed the book, I will say that my biggest takeaway is that it made me appreciate Masaaki Yuasa's anime adaptation even more.

The book is still a good read, its biggest success being its cerebral, self-absorbed narrator. I've seen some reviewers find him unreadable or obnoxious, but the charm and depth with which he's portrayed I really enjoy -- he feels like a character straight out of an old Japanese comedy (à la Musui's Story or some kind of modern kokkeibon), mostly thanks to Morimi's rich references to the Tale of Genji, yokai stories, and the rich cultural history of Kyoto¹. I can also see why this book won many awards specifically for translation: Emily Balistrieri did a great job bringing Morimi's voice to life, surely a tall task given how precise the humor and tone of his work is.

All that said, the original novel version doesn't deliver on the parallel universes premise nearly as well as the anime adaptation does. This is where I'd give credit to Yuasa: he really cleaned up the pacing in a way that makes the comedy and absurdity of the whole thing shine. In the novel, Morimi quite literally lifts and repeats sections wholesale over and over again, such as the opening sequence, his descriptions of Ozu, the meeting with the fortune teller, the moth incident, and so on. In a way it's a limitation of text -- as the reader, I literally just skipped over a few pages at a time when this started happening after a few times. In the show, this same gag is done through visual storytelling and voice acting: characters start talking at absurdly fast paces, events get compressed, little jokes and jabs like the fortuneteller charging more money every loop of the story throw in variations every time around. These small changes make the overarching form much more digestible.

This is most apparent in how each section ends, since he essentially "gets the girl" in every single branch of the narrative, which I honestly think waters down the existentialist message that's the high point of the show. The main character's refusal to embrace life in the beginning iterations still kinda works out for him, which makes less sense than a world where his abdication of responsibility comes back to bite him.

All in all, I'm glad this novel walked so that the TV show could run, but if you haven't seen or weren't a die-hard fan of the show, I don't know if it's worth it on its own. Probably just go watch the show instead (and then watch everything else Yuasa has ever made, you'll thank me later).