Harlequin Butterfly by Toh Enjoe thrives on unanswered questions within shifting realities. Harlequin Butterfly By Toh Enjoe, translated by David Boyd Fiction/Pushkin Press/Paperback/105 pages/$18.61/Amazon SG ( amzn.
to/3KR3UYV ) 3 stars What about a book that can be read only when travelling? This is how Toh Enjoe’s enigmatic novella Harlequin Butterfly – a surreal, disorienting trip – starts. In a book market saturated with dross, a reader instinctively determines that this question must be self-referential – perhaps a self-conscious jibe at Harlequin Butterfly’s own small volume. But it turns out to be the musings of an unnamed passenger on a flight.
Told to his larger-than-life seat neighbour, entrepreneur A.A. Abrams – a corpulent man who “waits for the layers of his fat to settle into place” – the question evolves to become a breakthrough title, To Be Read Only On An Airplane.
Abrams, emphatically not a book lover, has turned this stray idea into mountains of cash. He is aided, he believes, by a talismanic small silver butterfly net he keeps in his pocket that helps him capture floating ideas for his next big invention. Yet just as one settles into the fantastical conceit, a second chapter declares that the preceding account is fictitious, Toh, not for the last time, pulling the rug out from underneath.
“There you have it: The near-complete translation of To Be Read Only Under A Cat, by the extraordinary polyglot writer Tomoyuki Tomoyuki,” he write.
