Is Mariko Ōhara’s ‘Hybrid Child’ Feminist?
“Why do you think living creatures have children? […] Because they become disillusioned with themselves. They start to lose confidence in their own degenerating selves […] They look to the future, stretching out like an endless desert before them, and all of a sudden they become lonely. That’s why…that’s why…they give birth…”
Content Note: the second-to-last paragraph of this review contains mentions of misogyny, violence, and rape.
Sometimes I feel like I’ve seen it all, even in speculative fiction. An expansive genre of literature containing elements that do not exist in the real world, speculative fiction promises to deliver endless possibilities. I’m hungry for something different, though not necessarily new (a term I find increasingly problematic). I’m searching for a feeling of captivation: I want a book that will make me sit up and think.
Mariko Ōhara’s science-fiction novel Hybrid Child is a book worthy of prolonged contemplation. Hybrid Child is set in a distant future that feels lifetimes apart from the world we know, primarily due to how advanced its technology and space travel is. The book begins with the escape of Sample B #3, a cyborg who possesses the ability to take on the form of any living thing that he ingests, from his lab. With a military Special Officer on his tails, he makes off to a house inhabited by a well-known female writer and the AI-spirit of her dead daughter, Jonah, who lies buried underneath the house. Ōhara’s premise promises to keep boredom at bay and expand one’s perception of the boundaries of the genre.
However, the story morphs quickly — fitting, considering that Sample B #3 also morphs, taking on the body and identity of Jonah, blurring the boundary between male and female, living and dead, machine and human. Thus, while Hybrid Child has four sections, the bulk of the plot, tension, and core ideas of the novel are situated in the third and largest one, “Aquaplanet,” whereas the first two — “Hybrid Child” and “Farewell” — feel like individual episodes, appetizers leading up to the main course. Readers, therefore, have an extensive list of characters to keep up with throughout the novel, though it becomes more difficult to track who is most important as the novel proceeds.
Ōhara’s approach to sci-fi is fluid, as details of highly advanced technological developments exist side by side with tender fairytale-like moments in which the biological and the mechanical mix, like the aircar with wings growing out of it, “reach[ing] up to the sky like palm leaves […with] amorphous panels, layered like scales, [shining] gold with light coming down from heaven.”
A multifaceted work that is moving and problematic in equal measure, Ōhara’s tale twists and transforms into something radically new compared to what readers might expect solely from a synopsis. As the premise promises, Hybrid Child ruminates on motherhood, mothering, nurture, and rebirth (I am still processing the lines “She has been born into the world in the exact same body as her ‘mother,’ from her mother’s cloned cells. Her mother had often said to her, with a combination of hatred and affection, ‘You are my excrement…’”). However, it is perhaps more about spirituality, religion and God in literal and metaphorical terms. Ōhara’s point of reference appears to be Christianity; the persistence of Biblical names like Jonah and Daniel, as well as the significance of the slums on the planet Caritas being named Yahweh-Yireh, are difficult to overlook even for a lapsed Christian like myself. Readers will find themselves contemplating not only the recurring theme of death and spirituality concerning artificial intelligence but also the similarities that lie between the church and the military, with the very concept of a “Military Priest” and Ohara’s rather on-the-nose assessment about how “perhaps the church divided and multiplied like a primitive life form” serving as but some of the entry points into the conversation.
Hybrid Child is also a study in violence, an exploration of identity in relation to time, agency, machines and technology. It should come with a series of trigger warnings, as it contains scenes of misogyny, from fat-shaming to unnecessary sexualization of the female body and voyeurism, as well as numerous scenes of graphic violence and even one scene of a brutal rape and murder. All of these moments felt unnecessary to the novel, functioning only as flourishes that added nothing but shock value to the story, some of them difficult to stomach and even more difficult to process because of how unexpectedly they would come up, like mushrooms after a heavy spring rain.
I am unsure whether I would call this a feminist work, despite the novel being presented as such, nor am I sure how to word my own reading experience and relationship to the text, now that I have had time to process the text. Hybrid Child is unlike anything I have ever read, and it made me feel a mixture of fascination with Ōhara’s concepts and imagination, frustration with the pacing and structure of the novel, shock and discomfort at the violence and treatment of the female body. Hybrid Child should not be dismissed, but it is not a book that can be easily categorized or summed up with a neat verdict. I only hope that those who feel they are prepared and able to undertake the journey of reading it will find the experience rewarding, as I have, even with its thorns and shortcomings.
