I don't think you fully get a sense what Kajii is like unmediated by Rika (beyond the sense that she surely behaves very differently with her sugar daddies), but as Rika gets to know Kajii better she stops projecting quite so much, and also we see different characters projecting completely different things onto Kajii, which allows us to kind of triangulate not just what Kajii's like but what people's perceptions about Kajii tell us about society on a wider scale.
I think what is so impressive about Kajii (on an artistic level) is that many of the things we learn about her come from deeply biased sources, and she herself contains so many different contradictory elements, and yet you do get the sense of a coherent character underneath it all. Rika never fully understands it and neither does the reader but you do feel that it's there.
Also, if you have a book where one character becomes obsessed by another, to a certain extent you have to make the reader also obsessed or else the book doesn't work, and in this case I totally shared Rika's obsession. Is she maybe going to weird lengths to research this article? Maybe! But it's to understand Kajii better and I'm 100% on board with trying to understand Kajii better.
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Date: 2025-06-03 07:36 pm (UTC)I think what is so impressive about Kajii (on an artistic level) is that many of the things we learn about her come from deeply biased sources, and she herself contains so many different contradictory elements, and yet you do get the sense of a coherent character underneath it all. Rika never fully understands it and neither does the reader but you do feel that it's there.
Also, if you have a book where one character becomes obsessed by another, to a certain extent you have to make the reader also obsessed or else the book doesn't work, and in this case I totally shared Rika's obsession. Is she maybe going to weird lengths to research this article? Maybe! But it's to understand Kajii better and I'm 100% on board with trying to understand Kajii better.