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[ESSAY] “Doll and Void: On Noboru Tsujihara’s Mistress Koharu” by Tyran Grillo
Noboru Tsujihara (author), Kalau Almony (translator). Mistress Koharu, Honford Star, 2025. 256 pgs.
The greeting “I’m home” requires somebody to receive it, even when its recipient has arrived in a cardboard box labelled “furniture”. Returning to his Tokyo apartment, Yano Akira, a thirty-nine-year-old publishing editor, whispers these words to Koharu, the life-sized love doll who occupies his bedroom. Noboru Tsujihara’s Mistress Koharu, translated by Kalau Almony, opens by allowing this domestic reassurance to seep through just such an ontological crack.
Tsujihara measures this household with the patience of a surveyor taking instructions from a dream. Akira’s apartment belongs to an investment company, and its forty-five square metres are apportioned with almost contractual precision. Even his privacy rests upon somebody else’s ownership, though he remains confident that the arrangements within it answer to him. The floor plan gives this confidence a material grammar: Koharu stays in the bedroom, while the living and dining area accommodates a different version of her purchaser. Domestic sovereignty depends upon which door has been closed and whose existence can be kept behind it.
Such spatial exactitude finds a familiar echo in “My Slightly Crooked Brooch”, the Tsujihara story I translated for the 2011 anthology Digital Geishas and Talking Frogs, in which the protagonist, Mizue, rents an apartment overlooking the temporary home her husband shares with another woman. Railway connections turn an injured marriage into a daily itinerary, while an estate agent provides the vantage point from which intimacy becomes observable. In Mistress Koharu, a woman once again selects accommodation for its view into somebody else’s life.
Akira’s profession provides another instance of apparent certainty: early in his career, he corrects a historical photograph printed in reverse, restoring the image to its authorised orientation. His exactitude extends towards the narrative decisions concealed within every matter of record, that inaccessible workshop in which facts acquire their persuasive sequence. Yet his own relationships depend upon comparable interventions, with uncomfortable meanings edited out until a manageable account remains. The conscientious reader of other people’s fabrications continually grants himself an exemption from his own discoveries.
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Akaneya Kyoko, a freelance subtitle translator whose attraction to Akira develops into surveillance, brings equally exacting habits to her work. After meeting him briefly at a publishing company’s party, she commissions a detective’s report and eventually moves into a building overlooking his own. Her professional attention to timing finds a private counterpart in binocular observation, through which she studies bodily gestures with the concentration she devotes to a film. The man she hopes to know becomes a sequence she can replay in her mind, his ordinary movements accumulating the authority of evidence while their observer supplies the story that connects them.
Her failure to discover Koharu reflects the limits of the apartment as well as the unexamined assumptions she carries into her reading of it. The binoculars reveal Akira’s living and dining area, whereas the doll ordinarily remains in the separate bedroom. Kyoko subsequently notices an unfamiliar woman outdoors without understanding her connection to the man across the park. These obstructions qualify the fantasy of peeping as omniscience, even as her conviction that Akira is a harmless, bookish bachelor does further work on his behalf.
Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) lends her binoculars a cinematic ancestry, offering a vocabulary for the pleasure of looking without being seen. Elsewhere, a gallery manager demonstrates the erotic value he assigns to a doll’s averted eyes, turning her face aside so that his customer can enjoy looking without encountering an answering gaze. Kyoko and the salesman thus approach possession from opposing windows of the same structure, each treasuring arrangements in which the viewed figure cannot interrupt the viewer’s pleasure. She imagines that her scrutiny will eventually be vindicated by a happy marriage, allowing an anticipated future to serve as retrospective permission for an intrusion already under way.
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Ukai Chikako, the proprietor of Rosebud, Akira’s regular haunt, complicates this arrangement through a relationship he prefers to understand in financial terms. He visits her apartment for sex and leaves money, treating payment as a safeguard against emotional entanglement. Chikako’s account of their intimacy exceeds that explanation, particularly when they watch Blue Mountain Range, a.k.a. The Blue Mountains, and she recognises herself in a geisha whose affection goes unacknowledged by the man she loves. Cinema offers her a means of apprehending what Akira overlooks, even though it was he who introduced the film and who considers himself its informed admirer. Knowledge of a work can coexist with an astonishing vacancy where its implications touch the intellect.
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The title’s “mistress” can designate a woman who commands a household, but also the lover whose intimacy depends upon exclusion from its acknowledged order. The doll Akira regards as a wife and the woman who serves as his occasional sexual companion occupy positions he considers separate, though both arrangements reserve for him the authority to interpret what their attachment means. Calling Koharu a wife consequently grants domestic service a promotion without making room for disagreement, while the title allows mastery to flicker within apparent subordination.
The novel’s cultural abundance therefore does more than furnish a sophisticated alibi for avoidance, since films also permit recognitions that ordinary conversation cannot sustain. Kyoko’s recommendations move Akira, awakening emotional possibilities his routines have kept dormant and drawing him into conversations he begins to seek out. Their discussions can nonetheless become another means of directing a desired response, with her judgement shaping his education as carefully as her reconnaissance arranged their seemingly chance encounter. Tsujihara leaves an uneasy interval between being changed by another person and being prepared for a role in that person’s imagination, where the pleasures of conversation remain vulnerable to an invisible screenplay.
Akira has already cast Koharu through the name he chooses for her, borrowed from the courtesan in The Love Suicides at Amijima by Chikamatsu Monzaemon, the playwright on whom he focused as an undergraduate. The bonds between women in the play complicate his casting still further, holding open possibilities of obligation that his private theatre reduces to the question of who will satisfy him.
Bunraku, too, troubles the dream of autonomous personhood through figures whose apparent lives depend upon the labour that sustains their movements. The spectator’s recognition passes through that dependence, making the puppet an awkward companion for any philosophy that locates authentic existence exclusively in self-sufficiency. Akira knows the theatrical convention yet resists its pertinence to his bedroom, where the supporting labour has acquired a receipt and a set of handling instructions.
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Koharu’s first speech emerges from a lullaby Akira remembers his grandfather singing, so that animation travels into the apartment along a strand of familial tenderness. Her presence relieves his insomnia with extraordinary thoroughness: “He found that when he went to bed with any part of his body touching Koharu, he would fall into a deep sleep such as he had never before experienced.” The further observation that “he had completely stopped dreaming” gives their intimacy a peculiar psychic economy, especially as Koharu begins to dream memories of her own. The unconscious appears to have changed sleeping partners, leaving its former occupant blissfully untroubled, as though somebody else could undertake the inwardness he finds exhausting.
His insistence that Koharu has never seemed “unheimlich in the Freudian sense” deserves a scepticism his reading does not supply. Freud’s account reaches beyond uncertainty as to whether a figure is animate, emphasising the disturbing return of what has been repressed or supposedly surmounted. When Akira’s scholarly friend Higa discusses E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “The Sandman”, the story’s telescope brings the novel’s optical arrangements into sudden alignment with a student’s passion for the automaton Olympia. The name Giuseppe belongs both to Koharu’s maker and to the optician who supplies Olympia’s eyes, giving the organ of discernment a suspicious provenance. Akira can recognise the allusion while imagining himself exempt from its danger, keeping interpretation at that safe distance from which a warning remains somebody else’s literature.
Freud’s heimlich enfolds domestic familiarity alongside concealment, making the home a structure whose most reassuring surfaces may shelter their own estrangement. In my research on animal reanimation, I have been drawn to the moment when the wish to restore a beloved presence encounters an existence no longer answerable to the restorer. Koharu unsettles a related wish, since the comfort Akira finds in her animation depends upon its continuing to serve him. The magical realism of her developing independence exposes the condition attached to his generosity, bringing the purchaser’s need for authorship into view. The familiar can become terrifying precisely by declining to remain familiar on command, and the puppet’s movement sends an answering tremor through the hand that thought it held the strings.
The genealogy of the “Dutch wife” extends this household’s vocabulary into colonial history, which the novel approaches through the bamboo sleeping companions used in Dutch-occupied Indonesia. An aid to the coloniser’s rest presages the sexual substitute, preserving an association between comfort and an available body. Koharu’s own passage through international markets introduces another hierarchy, with prospective purchasers judging her appearance against racialised expectations of desirability. Dismissed as “leftovers” by an earlier dealer, she enters Akira’s life bearing the market’s verdict on a body whose particularity has frustrated connoisseurs schooled in a consensus of preferred measurements.
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A different origin story reaches him through an essay by Tomioka Taeko, which recounts a neurosurgeon’s development of dolls in response to family crises involving mothers and the sexuality of their disabled sons. These accounts remain distinct, although their conjunction makes care a troubling source of permission to manufacture a compliant partner. The doctor describes his creations as daughters being sent into marriage, folding paternal authority into a therapeutic rationale. Disabled people’s own understandings of pleasure remain remote within this account of their needs, while the proposed solution requires another body to be available without negotiation, its silence certified as helpfulness.
Akira’s father, whose dementia necessitates increasing assistance, presents a less compliant experience of dependence, resisting a residential arrangement his son has organised. Set against this difficulty, tending to Koharu initially allows Akira to enjoy an apparently grateful recipient of care, and her maintenance becomes a source of purpose. Eunjung Kim’s “Why Do Dolls Die?” offers a productive complication here, questioning the equation of bodily passivity with diminished worth. Kim describes relationships in which “human beings become prostheses to the doll”, reversing the direction in which assistance ordinarily confirms the helper’s superiority. The body in need of support can reorganise the supporter’s life around its requirements, exposing the dependence that an apparently independent person might otherwise overlook.
Through this reversal, Akira’s “little chores” acquire a significance his purchase cannot exhaust, since his movements answer to the material needs of his supposedly inert companion. Yet care becomes coercive when he treats her dependence as a guarantee that her existence will remain organised around his benefit. Kim’s account allows us to ask what he owes Koharu without making her eventual speech the condition of her deserving consideration. Neither disability nor dependence establishes consent, and a body’s susceptibility to another’s actions cannot confer the right to determine its entire future.
The fantasy of permanence falters within the silicone itself, whose softening oil gradually leaks away until the doll hardens, giving her body an unexpectedly mortal chemistry. Akira cleans and powders her according to instructions that promise preservation while quietly documenting an ending. Her make-up enhances “a bewitching quality only a doll could manifest”, situating her beauty beyond the human standard against which she might otherwise be judged. To love that particularity would require accepting an existence with its own material limits, whereas Akira’s fantasy reaches towards the elimination of whatever might disturb his enjoyment. The eternity he desires for her begins to resemble a maintenance specification, with somebody else’s continued availability written into every clause.
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Once Koharu ventures into Tokyo alone, the narrative grants her perceptions a latitude that her purchaser’s explanations cannot contain. An invitation to enter a church and the sound of bells carry her through encounters that unfold without any need for Akira to witness them. These passages render a merely private fantasy an insufficient account of what we are reading, while the surrounding precision prevents the impossible from drifting into a conveniently separate realm. The city continues to provide its ordinary routes, allowing a supposedly uninhabitable category of existence to find its way through public space.
Animal perception interrupts that accommodation when a dog barks at Koharu, detecting the absence of a fleshly scent beneath the visual evidence humans readily accept. Within Akira’s aquarium, the ranchu goldfish likewise avoids her. An animal-studies reading can attend to these responses without installing either creature as an infallible judge of authenticity, since their significance lies in perceptual worlds that exceed the household’s human explanations. The fish needs no new voice to become consequential, having already altered the relations around its enclosure through its presence. Yet the narrative translates the ranchu’s retreat into enmity, reminding us how quickly an animal’s unknowable experience can be recruited into a recognisably human drama of rivalry.
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As Akira’s relationship with Kyoko deepens, the possibility of returning Koharu to the gallery exposes the provisional nature of the humanity he has bestowed upon her. Communication elevated her beyond merchandise for as long as that elevation served his needs, but the owner retains a route back to the vocabulary of goods. Such reversibility makes recognition precarious, granting the recognised being a status its benefactor can withdraw. Koharu’s growing will also inhabits a world in which desire repeatedly seeks possession, so that animation carries no guarantee of emancipation from the lessons surrounding it. The novel’s cruellest possibilities gather within the tenderness that first made them conceivable, its reassurances claiming our sympathy long after we have begun to distrust their terms.
Almony’s English sustains this disquiet through an unflustered movement between technical exposition and intimate disturbance, allowing the prose’s practical assurances to acquire increasingly unstable implications. In his translator’s note, he describes following Koharu’s Tokyo route with the novel itself as his guide, a striking confirmation of how thoroughly Tsujihara has made textual space traversable. Occasionally, the informational passages detain us after their implications have become clear, and the narrator’s diagnoses of Kyoko can explain away uncertainties her conduct has already made interesting. Even so, this excess produces a seductive confidence in a world whose particulars appear exhaustively accounted for, making its unaccountable bodies all the harder to dismiss.
What remains most unsettling is the possibility that we have mistaken the dimensions of a body for the dimensions of the life it can contain. Koharu arrives with instructions for keeping her supple, while Akira understands far less about what might make his own attachments capable of yielding. Around them, Tokyo’s railway lines continue to connect destinations that cannot settle the meaning of arrival, and the apartment awaits another greeting. To say “I’m home” within Tsujihara’s fiction is to address an interior whose answering voice may have travelled somewhere the speaker never authorised, carrying back a life for which his floor plan made no provision.
How to cite: Grillo, Tyran. “Doll and Void: On Noboru Tsujihara’s Mistress Koharu.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 6 Nov. 2026, chajournal.com/2026/11/06/mistress-koharu.
Tyran Grillo holds a PhD in Japanese Literature from Cornell University and is an avid reader, translator, music critic, and photographer. His latest book, Fuzzy Traumas: Animals and Errors in Contemporary Japanese Literature (2024, Cornell East Asia Series), explores complex interspecies relationships through a posthumanist lens. Although he has left academia to pursue a full-time career as a professional editor, he remains deeply engaged with his fields of interest through lived experience and creative practice. [All contributions by Tyran Grillo.]