Katie Goto-Švić
YuYu Hakusho and Virginia Woolf
“I’m sick to death of this particular self. I want another.”
—Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography
The main character of Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel Orlando: A Biography is a young man who turns out to be inexplicably immortal, but begins life in the Elizabethan Era. A man, although Woolf makes note of his sex being obscured somewhat by the fashion of the time. His story begins, and in the first chapter he goes on to play fuckboy to Queen Lizzie herself for the money and status, to play with swords in his parents’ attic with dehydrated heads hanging from the rafters, then finally to play lover to a Russian princess before getting jilted in the middle of a rainstorm.
Then one day he embarks on a career as a writer, only to be insulted by one of his heroes, and is so upset he holes up in his manor, a neurotic recluse, until he pulls enough strings to be made Ambassador and flees all the way to Turkey. A perfectly normal path in life so far for a nobleman–until one night he goes to sleep and wakes up a fully formed, unmistakable woman. The Lady Orlando.
If only the real world could be as straightforward and confusing as Orlando"s. He was a man, lived fully as a man, then woke up one day and was fully a woman.
Of course there"s also the ever-unexplained part about him living on and on across centuries, never aging past the equivalent of thirty-six or so, but time-related disparity isn’t really the point, for the sake of this story at least.
The point is that Orlando shapeshifts, living perfectly, seamlessly, between one and the other. No need to bring down upon oneself the tremendous weight of social alienation (albeit pretending not to care less). No need to pay attention to rabid, saliva flinging, canteen-sausage-roll-breath stinking screams of “SHIIIM!!!” across the school playground circa-2005 while wearing the boys’ uniform shorts beneath a double layering of shirts (pale yellow uniform on top, General Pants polo in green beneath) with the sleeves rolled and collars popped.
Cambridge Dictionary defines “shim” as a small object or piece of material used between two parts of something to make them fit together, or to prevent them from rubbing against each other. Unintentionally apt, considering "shim" is also a slur of choice for someone with a she-him sort of existence. The word is in itself an amalgamation of two parts –"she" and "him" – but when screamed out loud or whispered behind hands, it functions to intimidate or embarrass the two apart, back into compliance.
Yet in Orlando"s world, even after he becomes Lady Orlando, he can cross-dress back and forth whenever the situation or the feeling suits her. That perfect body can literally shape-shift, for god’s sake, so it only makes sense to assume it wouldn’t have any trouble with a convincing cross-dress, emulating the spirit of both male and female so exquisitely to the point no one questions it until the 19th century.
Much more skillful than a teenage girl dressing like an indecisive 2000’s emo/pop punk, half to three-quarters of the way into the boys’ uniform, and hair spiked with too much hair gel because he/she didn’t realize the counter-intuitive nature of the amassed weight on the day-long performance that could be expected of a gravity-defying hairstyle.
As an adult it feels like a silly story, a reminiscence, until it isn’t anymore, and the weight of two people mutilating each other inside your single chest cavity is a reality you know you"ll never be able to deal with neatly, with ad-hoc stubbornness and a refusal to accept your limitations.
“Nature, who has played so many queer tricks upon us, making us so unequally of clay and diamonds, of rainbow and granite, and stuffed them into a case, often of the most incongruous, for the poet has a butcher"s face and the butcher a poet’s; nature, who delights in muddle and mystery, so that even now...we know not why we go upstairs, or why we come down again...”
-- Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography
A ruined version of both.
So what"s there to do, Shim?
Choose female, the one you already have the clean-cut, uncomplicated physicality for? Choose male, and dedicate pretty much your entire life to imperfect yet heavy-duty medical intervention? Or, a more recent alternative, join the they/them club even though you"re not sure exactly what material effect that would have other than to make socializing just that bit more awkward again, and to be honest it feels a bit distant and sterile, not to mention grammatically irritating and just a bit off-key, even if technically it can be worked.
At least that’s how it is for you.
Sad there’s no Orlando option.
Waaayyy too much cake, more than you could ever shove into your goddamn face, even if you tried. You"d just end up making yourself sick.
Besides, "a ruined version of both" sounds more like gothic prose and less like drowning in a glut of hashtags and virtue-signaling celebs.
Some physical anomaly in the brains of people who are gay, bisexual, transgender… there are some hypotheses suggesting it may be for population control, an ingrained part of biology and nature. But our neuroscience is still primitive, so you’ll probably never get to know what"s up with your own brain in your lifetime.
**
Recently you excavated, sort of but not really by accident, a long-abandoned message board from 2003 about the demon hunting and martial arts anime "YuYu Hakusho" based on the manga by Yoshihiro Togashi.
That anime is a goldmine for queer subtext. You can tell it always was, even back in 2003, because the old message board screamed from beyond the grave with a succession of capital letters: SHUT UP KURAMA’S NOT GAY!!!
The character, Kurama, is a pretty fox demon with long magenta hair and bright, acid-green eyes. He’s actually a few thousand years old, but after being mortally wounded in the demon realm, he hijacks an unborn fetus and is reborn in the human realm, the real world.
In the real world he has to contain multiple psyches, multiple brains crammed into one. He’s basically two to three people in the one body – fox demon, human, and a haphazard crossover – and they don’t always all get along.
Ruined, compromised versions of all.
Not to mention the searing, sarcastic sexual tension between him and his (also male) fire demon fighting partner, who he originally meets when the latter tries to kill him in a case of mistaken identity. This fight results in him waking up four hours later in Kurama’s bedroom after being wounded – it’s a whole thing, but also like a really bad Tinder date.
In any case, mining for queer subtext in anime is cool and fun. Watching anime 90% for the purpose of mining queer subtext is even cooler and a lot more fun.
Why not?
Fans seem okay with cramming their own porny hetero hentai fantasies into the headcanon, but anything that contains so much as a whiff of having come from fangirls is tantrum-inducing unacceptable. Fangirls ruin everything.
Beautifully, irresistibly, obnoxiously, annoyingly ruined Kurama.
You are ruined.
Maybe the anonymous poster on the long-dead message board was right.
Maybe he isn’t gay. DEFINITELY. NOT. GAY.
Maybe he’s something worse.
Just like you.
And how dare anyone – you, who isn’t the right way and can’t explain why – how dare you see any part of yourself in a character that WASN"T EVEN WRITTEN FOR YOU!!!
Pretty-boy Kurama
Reverse Orlando
Yes, yes, we know it’s not canon. But sometimes half a person"s existence is technically not canon...and never can be...
A ruined version of both.
You like gothic prose better than virtue-signaling celebs.
Such discerning taste. You should be proud.
When you wore the boy"s uniform to school, when you built your body as a young adult in the dojo, crossing the line into doping, were you in love with the pretty boy or did you want to be him?
Or both?
Why is it that when you dated men you thought about women, and when you dated women you thought about men? Why is it that when you wore a dress you thought about your suit and tie, and when you wore the suit and tie you remembered the beauty in the dress? Are you a liar? But why would you want to lie? What are you gaining, always mourning parts of yourself interchangeably?
**
“Oh! Shel, don’t leave me!" she cried. "I’m passionately in love with you," she said. No sooner had the words left her mouth than an awful suspicion rushed into both their minds simultaneously.
‘You’re a woman, Shel!’ she cried.
‘You’re a man, Orlando!’ he cried.
Never was there such a scene of protestation and demonstration as then took place since the world began.”
-- Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography
It always just felt like different car models. The XX or the XY. And cars aren"t all that interesting. And preaching is annoying.
Remember that night when you cried? When you hoped to be re-incarnated when you die, into a boy, a pretty boy? It had to be a pretty boy because it"s nice when people think you"re pretty.
But if the reincarnation happens that way, the way you begged for, maybe you’ll just end up with the same problems all over again but in the reverse. That would probably make sense for two people in the same arbitrary body, each who can never be fully alive while the other is in control, yet neither able to live without the other. They wouldn’t want to, so they slowly throttle each other mutually to death...
“The clock ticked louder and louder until there was a terrific explosion right near her ear. Orlando leapt up as if she had been violently struck on the head. Ten times she was struck.”
-- Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography
Violent convulsions of time and space, reality and fantasy. But then from time to time it just trickles by, languid and unobtrusive, almost peaceful.
Wasn’t Orlando/Lady Orlando so much happier and better a person to be able to live perfectly as both, to switch seamlessly between the two yet still hold both souls in relative harmony?
Although you know now, Shim, that this ideal self can never exist physically in your current realm, only ever in your mind.
Perhaps it’s the obsessive-compulsive tendencies and perfectionism you take pride in–the same traits those bland, mediocre adults said were problematic when you were a teenager–that are also partially responsible for your unrealistic desire for two, clean-cut, shape-shifting-on-demand selves, as opposed to some vague amalgamation.
Physically and socially impossible.
But maybe, one day – in this world, the next, or the other – you’ll go running across a park and into a great sprawling misty moor, just like 19th Century Lady Orlando, all in a seizure of ecstasy and feverish delirium, and then you’ll fall down and snap your ankle, break the bone in two, again just like Orlando. Maybe then the confines of logic and reality, the barriers between what world is real and what world isn’t, will also be broken. Maybe a tear will emerge between the human and demon realms, and everything tying you up will unravel.
Until then, just bleed. Cut and bleed, bleed, bleed,
out all over the page.
Balance those humors and make all those well-meaning (and not-so-well-meaning) people squirm. But you always smile and remember to eat as much of your own cake as you physically can until it makes you sick.
Katie Goto-Švić is a Croatian-Australian queer writer currently living in Japan. She writes in both English and Japanese.
Her work has appeared or is upcoming in L’Esprit Literary Review, Santa Clara Review, New Contexts 3 (Coverstory Books), Grande Dame Literary, BarBar Online Literary Magazine, The Manifest-Station, Unlimited Literature, and Bewildering Stories.
She was selected as a finalist for both the 2021 and 2022 Page Turner Writing Awards.