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i feel very good about having read this years after it was loud in the queer zeitgeist some 3 or 4 years ago. i recall much criticism aimed at what was being said; stuff about normalizing detrans and making the white trans girl experience some specially oppressed category etc. etc. heavily idpol based stuff that was ultimately dismissive of trans woman perspectives in favor of token intersectionality. once again something challenging and requiring acute empathy and openess met with defensiveness and myopia. but to the actual book itself. heartwarming, gutwrenching, touching, full of yearning, and devastating. what is easy to miss is that stories like this dont come to being ex nihilo, they are based heavily in the experience of the author and in the anecdotes of real people that they collect. what this story conveys feels absolutely true and real. it fragments the dominant narrative of queer life and transfemme life into a plethora of different lives. it is an expression of the impossibilty of this life chosen. it takes seriously the idea that nothing is given, life can change or end as suddenly as it began and this is truth for the queer subaltern. to live this way is to live without hope, without futurity. there is a persistent cynicism that isn't a brainworm endemic to trans women, its contrarily reality itself as lived from that position. without hope there is only the next step ahead and helping each other to take the next ad infinitum. detransition is represented not as the failure of transition, but the success of patriarchy in pushing women into masculine armor that shields them in a hostile, anti-effeminate society. peters also shows stunningly the problem of personhood in modern society: the idea that we must essentially "be something" to be someone. perhaps career, parenthood, creative pursuit these things define people in the face of others and give ontogical security in a way that is systematically denied to trans women. they cannot be people, their position is too precarious such that even getting a career and a family is considered the exception and is only held onto tenuously. the characters struggle to define themselves and always gesture at others, desperately defer to others to make them a person just to have it quickly withdrawn. this is not just trans women problem or a trans problem, its the problem with modern personhood and the depth of alienation that creates a hierarchy of person-ness. all in all super thoughtful, well executed and raw. highly recomended read and i look forward to reading more of what torrey peters has to offer.

I appreciate Hillman as a writer opposing existential nihilism with mythic psychology. Its at this point trite to affirm that nothing is essential, nothing is firm, even reality itself; so it is that the myth of the acorn resounds as a callback towards pre-christian mythology and the ideas of ancestors that lived in more traditional societies. Even if the acorn, the daimon, guardian angels, etc. aren't real in a strict sense, they are real if we choose to recognize them as forces of personality and self-development. There is irreducibly, a piece of the human assemblage that is neither genetic nor cultural; it is a calling that forcefully makes manifest the individual character when answered and can drive one to suicidal despair when ignored. It makes one wonder at the value of myth when life is lived with it rather than made an object for contemplation. There is much in this approach a greater appreciation for indigenous and non-western cultures well which treat the soul as real and relevant to daily life.

I couldn't help but feel that this story was "Lynchian". The premise is mundane, Kafka Tamura is just another kid running away from his family. The deepening of the story involves chance encounters which later become inseparable from a dramatic notion of fate. Tamura is drawn into a vortex, his fate at odds with the rational, modern, mundane sense of reality brings out the surreal. This is something that the story stylistically clarifies: that surrealism is about subverting what we expect from reality. Dreams are based on our experiences but they are uncanny because they do not follow the rules of the waking world. on the Shore also interestingly seems to suggest kinship between surrealism and myth, Murakami places in our mind the idea that myth is dream and dream is myth. Oedipus and Orpheus live in the unconscious, ruling our fates whether or not we realize it. And this notion seems to nicely complement Shinto and Buddhism, blurring the boundaries of east and west, asserting a shared experience. I loved reading this book, my first of Murakami and I doubt it will be my last.