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Is Fish Dream a Mega-Novel? | Reading a 1.3-Million-Character Japanese Novel through Karl, Letzler, and the Maximalist Novel

日本語で読む

MMM’s long novel Fish Dream (Sakana no yume) is described on the author’s official website as running to roughly 1.3 million Japanese characters, and according to retail bibliographic data its three print volumes total 2,024 pages[1]. It takes in a large number of fields—literature, philosophy, religion, sexuality, politics, psychiatry, social thought and more—and holds within its enormous structure narrative, dialogue drama, essays, diaries, dreams, pseudo-documents, works within the work, and metafiction.

The classification the author’s side puts forward is sōgō shōsetsu, the “comprehensive novel.” The term appears not only on the official website but also in the work’s long subtitle[1]. Seen from the side of literary theory, however, the work has another strong candidate for a name: the mega-novel.

That said, “mega-novel” does not have a single, monolithic definition. The mega-novel as discussed by Frederick R. Karl and the body of works later discussed under the same word by David Letzler differ in emphasis. Karl stressed openness, incompleteness, chaos and order, decentering, and indeterminacy within a gigantic form, and in fact distanced the mega-novel from the comprehensiveness that earlier giant works had aimed at. Letzler extended the scope to a wider range of periods and regions and centered his discussion on encyclopedic volume of information, redundancy, cruft, and the attentional load placed on the reader[2].

Fish Dream does not fit both in the same way. In its attempt to take vast amounts of thought and knowledge into a single book, it also approaches the comprehensive giant novel that Karl set against the mega-novel. On the other hand, in that this comprehensiveness never finally succeeds—the more is written, the more the world splits apart, and the center and conclusion become unstable—it also has strong points of contact with the Karl-type mega-novel. In terms of encyclopedism, redundancy and attentional load, it overlaps even more clearly with the Letzler-type mega-novel.

Moreover, the work’s growth to giant size takes a distinctive direction. Where Gravity’s Rainbow grows enormous in close connection with science, war, corporations and technology, J R with capital, communication, finance and voices, and Infinite Jest with addiction, entertainment, media and attention, in Fish Dream sex becomes one of the enormous central points. From sex branch out love, desire, the body, domination, gender, reproduction, birth, religion, morality, freedom, justice and death, and on each of these the characters speak, argue back, and generate new ideas and bizarre conceits.

In a word, Fish Dream is a mega-novel that, with sex at its core, tries to say everything about how human beings live, couple, multiply and die, through countless voices, debates and ideas.

This article first establishes why Fish Dream can be regarded as a mega-novel, and then sorts out how it differs from other representative mega-novels and how it relates to the “comprehensive novel,” the maximalist novel, and the total novel. An overview of Fish Dream itself is given in “What Is Fish Dream?”

Contents

  1. Fish Dream can be regarded as a mega-novel
  2. What is a mega-novel? More than sheer size
  3. Why is Fish Dream a mega-novel?
  4. What sets Fish Dream apart from other mega-novels
  5. Is Fish Dream a maximalist novel?
  6. How does the “comprehensive novel” differ from the mega-novel?
  7. How it differs from the total novel: trying to unify the world and splitting apart
  8. The theory of the mega-novel in JōKAI THEORY
  9. Conclusion: an extreme example of the mega-novel in Japanese-language literature

1. Fish Dream can be regarded as a mega-novel

There is no need to think of “mega-novel” as a label reserved for American literature. On this point, however, Karl and Letzler must be distinguished.

In his 1985 essay “American Fictions: The Mega-Novel,” Karl discussed the mega-novel as a phenomenon specific to postwar American fiction[2]. As Stefano Ercolino summarizes Karl’s 2001 restatement, Karl’s mega-novel combines paradoxical features: length, openness, incompleteness, chaos, order, traditionalism, and experimentalism.

Moreover, the mega-novel Karl had in mind is not a form that further expands the comprehensiveness aimed at by earlier long works. Rather than neatly gathering the world into one book, it takes on indeterminacy and decentering. In Karl’s 1985 essay, it is distinguished on this point from comprehensive giant works such as One Hundred Years of Solitude[2].

Letzler later applied the name “mega-novel” to a broader body of works. His corpus includes not only Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 but also a work originally written in Japanese, Murakami Haruki’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (Nejimaki-dori kuronikuru)[2]. In Letzler’s argument, the central problems are the vast amounts of information, digression, redundancy and cruft contained in giant works, and the reader’s attention that must process them.

There are also actual instances of the word “mega-novel” (メガノベル / メガノヴェル) being used in Japanese. A 1997 introduction to John Updike’s Rabbit at Rest (Japanese title Sayōnara usagi) used the expression “a super-large novel, a ‘mega-novel,’” and Furukawa Hideo has called The Tale of the Heike (Heike monogatari) “a polyphonic medieval mega-novel.” Furukawa’s own Arabia no yoru no shuzoku [The Tribe of the Arabian Nights] and Sei kazoku [Holy Family] have also been associated with the mega-novel in criticism and in interviews with the author[3].

In other words, there is nothing inherently forced about applying the term “mega-novel” to Japanese-language literature. This article does not equate Karl with Letzler, and refers as needed to neighboring theories of giant literature, such as the encyclopedic novel, the systems novel and the maximalist novel. On that basis, it actively positions Fish Dream as one example of the mega-novel in Japanese-language literature.

2. What is a mega-novel? More than sheer size

Huge novels have existed for a long time. A work cannot be called a mega-novel on the basis of page count alone.

In the Karl-type mega-novel, openness, incompleteness, chaos and order, and the instability of the center are what matter. Letzler, by contrast, takes as his problem the encyclopedic information contained in giant works, the cruft that at first glance looks meaningless, unnecessary or digressive, and the reader’s finite attention[2].

When reading a giant work, the reader cannot process everything with the same intensity. One has to decide what to read closely, where to skim, what to remember and what may be forgotten. The hugeness of the mega-novel acts even on how the reader allocates attention.

There are also several neighboring concepts. Edward Mendelson’s encyclopedic narrative concerns the broad organization of cultural knowledge; Tom LeClair’s systems novel deals with interdependent systems of capital, information, institutions, technology and so on. Ercolino’s maximalist novel addresses contemporary novels in which several features—length, polyphony, narrative excess, encyclopedism and others—systematically coexist[2].

These are not synonyms. There is more than one way of making giant literature giant. In the case of Fish Dream, Letzlerian encyclopedism, redundancy and attentional load are quite strong. At the same time, Karlian incompleteness, chaos and order, and the failure of totalization can also be recognized. Yet the desire to “take in everything” is itself in tension with the Karl-type mega-novel. This double character is important for thinking about Fish Dream.

3. Why is Fish Dream a mega-novel?

3-1. A scale of roughly 1.3 million characters and 2,024 printed pages

The most obvious feature is physical scale. The author’s official website describes Fish Dream as roughly 1.3 million characters. This figure is the author’s own declaration, not an independent measurement by a third party. Meanwhile, according to retail bibliographic data, the print volumes Fish Dream 1, Fish Dream 2 and Fish Dream 3 run to 594, 701 and 729 pages respectively, for a total of 2,024 pages[1].

The text is divided into Part 0 and Parts 1 through 5, comprising 75 chapters in all. The chapter count was checked against the text of the work itself and has not been independently confirmed by external retail bibliographic data[4]. But the work is not mega-novelistic simply because it is long.

3-2. Swallowing heterogeneous knowledge and ideas in bulk

The range that Fish Dream covers is extremely wide. Literary theory, epistemology, philosophy of language, ontology, ethics and theories of justice, theories of discrimination, theories of sexuality, politics, economics, psychiatry, religion, mystical thought, art, architecture, music and more all exist within the same work.

The text also explicitly refers to Dostoevsky, Georges Bataille, the Marquis de Sade, Nietzsche, Simone Weil, the Bible and others[4]. These fields are not lined up as independent pieces of trivia. An argument about sexuality connects to religion and capitalism; the problem of justice spreads out into violence, discrimination and institutions. Doubting memory becomes a problem of cognition and language, and goes on to shake even the reliability of records and of authors.

Part 1, Chapter 7 depicts the protagonist’s own creative writing as inserting academic writing into literary writing and “forcibly connecting” the colloquial and the literary register, verse and prose, logic and myth, and multiple literatures, religions, philosophies, arts, architectures and so on[5]. This encyclopedic inclusiveness is a feature closer mainly to Letzler and Mendelson, and must be considered separately from the core of the Karl-type mega-novel.

3-3. Embracing multiple genres and textual forms

In Fish Dream, genre is not stable either. Romance, pornography, mystery, suspense, horror, splatter, fantasy, action, battle and escape drama intersect. Nor is the writing limited to ordinary narrative. Long dialogues, philosophical debates, essays, diaries, letters, fragments, dreams, pseudo-documents, works within the work, and commentary by an editor all find their way in.

In Part 0, Chapter 1, the narrator who later identifies himself as the editor treats the novel as a “garrulous and coarse” form, and discusses it as an omnivorous form that swells as it swallows “words from every field”[5]. This cannot be directly identified with the literary theory of the real author, MMM. It is strictly a theory of the novel voiced by the editor inside the work. Even so, it corresponds closely to the form of Fish Dream itself.

3-4. Redundancy as the form of the work

Redundancy is what fits especially well with Letzler’s theory of the mega-novel. The characters in Fish Dream speak at length. They rephrase the same problem again and again, anticipate objections, add new examples, and digress into other problems. There is also a great deal of philosophical fragments, debates, jokes and in-text documents that look unnecessary if the only aim were to advance the story.

In Part 1, Chapter 5, the protagonist argues that the complexity of reality survives precisely in the “flab regarded as superfluous” and the “enormous waste” that gets cut away when one builds a simple logic[5]. Of course, this is the protagonist’s statement and not the final conclusion of the work as a whole. Even so, it coincides strangely with the form of Fish Dream, which leaves in place a great deal of the surplus that would normally be deleted. It is not fully synonymous with what Letzler calls cruft, but the comparison is well worth making.

3-5. Chaos and order existing at once

From here the points of contact with the Karl-type mega-novel grow stronger. The structure of Fish Dream is extremely complex, but at its center lies a simple skeleton: “I,” “love,” and “justice.” There is a protagonist who does not understand himself; he meets a girl named Ai (“love”) and becomes involved with a boy who champions justice (seigi). Around them proliferate ideas, incidents, sexuality, religion, documents, dreams and social problems.

The center is simple and the periphery chaotic. This overlaps with the coexistence of order and chaos that Karl saw in the mega-novel[2].

3-6. Trying to encompass everything, and failing to

Here Fish Dream creates an interesting tension with the Karl-type mega-novel.

In Part 2, Chapter 1, the editor explains that the writer originally tried to grasp “the world as a single story, theory, or thought” and to gather it into one book. But the plan failed; as the writer kept adding to it, the text swelled, and “the world split apart”[6].

The work has an intense desire for comprehensiveness. This is close to the direction of the comprehensive giant novel that Karl distinguished from the mega-novel. But the result is not comprehensiveness. The characters’ stories, theories and ideas pass one another by, arguments do not converge, and a unified center is gradually lost.

The more it tries to encompass, the more it decenters; the more it tries to totalize, the more it splits apart.

Fish Dream holds at once the desire for comprehensiveness and the movement by which that desire destroys itself. It is in this latter part that it reconnects with the incompleteness and indeterminacy of the Karl-type mega-novel.

3-7. Making the reader experience excess as well

The editor in Part 2, Chapter 1 explains that even Part 1 alone contains “an enormous mass of voices, words and information,” and that it is “hyper-excessive, or hyper-dense”[6].

In practice, following the story is not enough for the reader. One has to follow the ideas, distinguish each character’s premises, doubt the line between dream and reality, weigh the reliability of documents, remember the chronology of events, read metaphor and irony, and track the logic of long harangues. The burden of reading Fish Dream is not simply a matter of the amount of information. It demands attention, memory, knowledge, different modes of reading, and even ethical judgment all at once.

Letzler’s framing of the problem—that giant works expose the reader’s finite attentional resources—applies quite strongly to this work as well[2].

4. What sets Fish Dream apart from other mega-novels

Not all mega-novels share the same aim. The characterizations of the works below are this article’s own working summary, informed by existing scholarship.

In Gravity’s Rainbow, networks of science, the military, corporations, war, technology and capital occupy a large place. In Gaddis’s J R, a decentered web of finance, communications, corporations and voices drives the work. In Infinite Jest, addiction, entertainment, media and attention are the key problems, and in 2666, literature, borders, history and mass violence form the giant structure.

Fish Dream has a different principle of growth. Put simply, it is the attempt, with sex at its core, to say everything about how human beings live, couple, multiply and die, through countless voices, debates and ideas.

4-1. A mega-novel written in Japanese

The main theoretical history of the mega-novel has been shaped largely by English-language scholarship such as that of Karl, LeClair and Letzler. On the other hand, once the frame is widened to the encyclopedic novel, non-English literatures such as Dante, Rabelais and Cervantes become important, so one cannot say that “the theory of giant literature = English-language literature only”[2].

There are precedents for works originally written in Japanese as well. Letzler includes The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle among the objects of the mega-novel in the broad sense. And as a term in Japanese criticism and publicity, “mega-novel” has been applied to Furukawa Hideo’s Holy Family, The Tale of the Heike and other works[3]. Fish Dream can be read as another example of such giant forms in Japanese-language literature.

4-2. Growing giant around sex

The single greatest feature of Fish Dream is probably that sexuality is placed at the center of its giant structure.

From its official subtitle onward it proclaims “sex, porn, eros,” and Part 1 develops a large-scale debate over sexual desire, pornography, the sex industry, and sexual freedom and repression[1][4]. Thereafter, too, problems of sexuality and the body recur again and again: BDSM, sadism, masochism, shame, reproduction, pregnancy, abortion, antinatalism.

What matters is not the quantity of sexual depiction. When one thinks about sex, the problems of the human being as a whole arise. Why do human beings desire others? Are love and sexual desire the same? Whose is the body? Is desire free? Is domination evil? Which is freer, a society that represses sex or a society that commodifies it? Is reproduction good? Can bringing a person into the world be justified?

From there the body, love, domination, violence, gender, religion, capitalism, freedom, justice, birth and death spread outward. Sexuality is less one theme among many than an enormous junction for thinking about how human beings live, couple, multiply and die.

4-3. Ideas, more than “information,” proliferate abnormally

Fish Dream also contains a great deal of talk about science, politics, economics and institutions. But one of the main fuels that makes the work swell is more abstract ideas.

What is love? What is justice? Who am I? Is there free will? Can others be understood? Can the world be known? Can language express reality? Is being born good? When one tries to answer a single question, the answer gives rise to another question, a new theory is built, another voice objects, and even the premises are called into doubt.

Part 2 inserts “Fragmentary Drafts on a Theory of World Evolution,” which tries to explain even the time and space that humans perceive from the standpoint of biological survival and evolution[6]. In Part 4, the protagonist goes so far as to construct his own TwoSheets theory, which conceives of the world as two kinds of layers[4].

This is not just an introduction to existing ideas. Speculations on the borders of philosophy, thought experiment, bizarre conceit, delusion and pseudo-theory are produced one after another. More than an “encyclopedia of information,” Fish Dream can be read as an enormous catalogue of counterintuitive conceits, ideas, theories, debates, logics and rhetorics—an encyclopedia of ideas, so to speak.

4-4. Voices multiply ideas

These ideas, however, are not arranged systematically as in a philosophy book. The ideas have voices.

The Witch speaks, Seigi-kun speaks, Ai speaks, the protagonist thinks, soldiers, scholars and porn actresses deliver long harangues, the writers of in-text documents write, and the editor comments. One character’s ideas are rebutted by another, and that rebuttal creates a new problem. A third voice doubts both sides, and an earlier position sometimes returns in altered form.

Ideas are not stored as abstract propositions; they appear as voices bound up with a character’s body, desires, history and position. In Fish Dream, voices carry ideas, and the collision of ideas summons new voices.

4-5. A “cannibalistic” polyphony

An interesting text for thinking about this quality is JōKAI THEORY: An Unfinished Treatise, or Novel, on the Melting of the Slash through Excess (Jōkai riron), published under the same name as Fish Dream, MMM_Memento Mori Machina[7].

Note [B3] to Chapter 5 of that book, “Endless gu sorcery,” discusses Dostoevsky as literature that does not voice a particular idea in one direction but creates a field in which multiple ideas arise, pass each other by, collide and dismantle one another. The metaphor used there is “cannibalistic”[7].

Borrowing the word as a critical metaphor, one can say that Fish Dream too has a cannibalistic polyphony. Its ideas do not stand neatly in a row. They criticize other ideas, absorb parts of them, and are themselves transformed by that criticism. An argument affirming sexuality gives rise to the problem of freedom; the pursuit of freedom calls up the problem of domination; language that criticizes discrimination produces new classifications.

Ideas eat ideas. But the ideas that are eaten do not die completely; they come back again in altered form.

4-6. Even logic and rhetoric multiply

In Fish Dream, not only the number of ideas but also the ways of thinking and the ways of speaking become excessive. Metaphor, hyperbole, irony, enumeration, thought experiments, extreme examples, objections, objections to objections, redefinitions of existing concepts and the invention of original concepts are layered many times over.

A new theory is introduced to explain a problem, another example becomes necessary to explain that theory, and from that example the next debate begins. What the reader experiences is not just a quantity of knowledge. It is the vertigo of being made to switch from one logic to another, again and again.

In Part 1, Chapter 5, the protagonist sees the complexity of reality in the rhetoric and “waste” discarded when a simple logic is built[5]. Whether or not that statement is correct, the stance of continuing to pick up in words whatever spills out of logic corresponds well to the style of this work.

4-7. The outer world and the inner life grow in a single movement

Fish Dream is also strongly introspective. Of course, introspective mega-novels are not unusual in themselves. Infinite Jest, too, relentlessly depicts addiction, loneliness and the closed loops of the mind.

What is distinctive about Fish Dream is that thinking about the self and thinking about the world are scarcely separable. The question “Who am I?” becomes a problem of memory; doubting memory makes it a problem of cognition; doubting cognition makes the relation between language and the world the problem. Conversely, while thinking about society, justice, sexuality and religion, one is brought back inward: “What can I know?” “What do I desire?”

An encyclopedism spreading outward and an introspection sinking inward form one and the same movement.

4-8. What makes Fish Dream giant?

Fish Dream is not a novel that grows giant solely through information about science and technology, capital or institutions. With sex at its center, it thinks about human life, love, desire, reproduction, justice, religion, society and death. Countless characters speak about these problems; voices collide, ideas eat ideas, and each rebuttal calls up the next. Conceits become theories, theories invade the story, and the story in turn generates ideas.

A mega-novel with sex at its core, swelling through the proliferation of voices and ideas.

This, it seems, is the distinctive character of Fish Dream that comes into view when it is compared with other representative mega-novels.

5. Is Fish Dream a maximalist novel?

A concept close to the mega-novel is Ercolino’s maximalist novel.

Comparing Gravity’s Rainbow, Infinite Jest, Underworld, 2666 and other works, Ercolino lists ten features: length, encyclopedic mode, dissonant chorality, diegetic exuberance, completeness, narratorial omniscience, paranoid imagination, intersemioticity, ethical commitment, and hybrid realism[8].

It should be noted here that the ten items are not a mere checklist. Ercolino himself holds that, while the features do not appear in the same form in every work, their systematic coexistence is what defines the genre. His maximalist novel is also a limited historical category, beginning in the United States in the second half of the twentieth century and later spreading to Europe and Latin America[8].

In Fish Dream, length, encyclopedism, polyphony, narrative excess and a fixation on ethical problems are evident. “Narratorial omniscience,” however, does not straightforwardly apply, because this is a work in which the reliability of several narrating instances—the protagonist, the writer, the editor, the in-text documents—wavers.

In addition, what Ercolino calls intersemioticity does not mean a mixture of textual forms such as diaries, letters and essays. It refers to negotiation with the languages of other arts, such as painting and film. Fish Dream contains references to art, architecture and music, but the extent to which these satisfy this feature needs to be examined separately.

As for the way narrative and essay invade each other, a comparison with the novel-essay, which Ercolino discusses separately from the maximalist novel, is also possible[8]. For this reason, rather than declaring Fish Dream a maximalist novel in Ercolino’s narrow sense, it would be more accurate to position it as a work that strongly displays the features of the maximalist novel.

6. How does the “comprehensive novel” differ from the mega-novel?

The classification MMM’s side gives Fish Dream is sōgō shōsetsu, the “comprehensive novel”[1]. The comprehensive novel and the mega-novel are similar, but not synonymous.

The Japanese term sōgō shōsetsu has no single established definition. In a long interview in the Summer 2010 issue of Kangaeru hito, Murakami Haruki spoke of the “comprehensive novel” with Dostoevsky’s Demons and The Brothers Karamazov in mind[9].

In Noma Hiroshi, on the other hand, an early project of grasping the human being in a unified way across several dimensions—psychological, physiological, social and so on—connects to his later theory of the “total novel” (zentai shōsetsu)[9]. This article does not treat Noma’s project as the same concept as what Murakami calls the “comprehensive novel.”

To put it simply for the sake of comparison: the mega-novel is a concept for thinking about what happens when a work grows giant, whereas the comprehensive novel is more easily understood as a creative ideal concerning how to bind heterogeneous characters, viewpoints and fields together in a single space.

In Fish Dream, the two overlap. Trying to synthesize heterogeneous things, the elements multiply; the more the elements multiply, the more giant the work becomes, the more connections there are, and the more further problems are called up. Rather than competing classifications, “comprehensive novel” and “mega-novel” can be used together as words that explain different qualities of this work.

7. How it differs from the total novel: trying to unify the world and splitting apart

The “total novel” may look like a closely related term, but it too is not synonymous.

In Japan, Noma Hiroshi conceived of a total novel that grasps the human being through relations with multiple dimensions—psychological, physiological, social, historical and so on. In Latin American literature there is a separate lineage, the total novel (novela total) discussed by Mario Vargas Llosa and others[9].

Fish Dream, too, has an intense desire for totalization. It does not write only about love, or only about sexuality or justice. It tries to relate the human being, the body, religion, society, politics, language, literature and the world to one another within a single book.

But what makes the work interesting is that the totalization does not succeed. As the editor explains in Part 2, Chapter 1, the plan to gather the world into a single story, theory or thought swells the more it is written, and splits the world apart[6].

Rather than a novel that has completed a total picture of the world, Fish Dream is a novel that depicts at once the desire to totalize the world and the failure of that desire.

Here the boundary between the comprehensive giant novel and the Karl-type mega-novel appears once more. Fish Dream desires comprehensiveness. But it cannot carry that desire through, and produces decentering and incompleteness instead. The work’s mega-novel quality lies, if anything, in this movement of failure.

8. The theory of the mega-novel in JōKAI THEORY

Another text of interest for comparison with Fish Dream is JōKAI THEORY: An Unfinished Treatise, or Novel, on the Melting of the Slash through Excess, published under the name MMM_Memento Mori Machina[7].

As its title indicates, the book presents itself as a “treatise, or novel.” We want to avoid treating all of its statements as the personal thought of the real author. Here it is referred to as the theory of the mega-novel that appears in the text and annotations of that book.

Chapter 8, “The Mega-Novel: Pantrophia and the Post-less Era,” lists features of the contemporary mega-novel such as great length, overdensity, overconnection, and erosion by annotation. It further explains the mega-novel as a form in which the work is extended, layered and swollen within an existing formal space[7].

In the latter half of Chapter 8, this swelling is reinterpreted not merely as a pathology but as an attitude that tries to hold the complexity of the world without reducing it. The world, it says, is enormous, complex, polyphonic and fragmentary, and the sublime and the vulgar, scholarship and scandal, center and periphery and so on exist at the same time[7].

The correspondence with Fish Dream is clear. It does not abandon story and become an essay. Essays enter the story, religion and politics enter talk of sexuality, and personal memories become entangled with social theory and epistemology. Rather than exchanging one form for another, it builds other forms onto its interior.

Note [B3] to Chapter 5, “Endless gu sorcery,” describes Dostoevsky’s literature—a state in which multiple ideas arise, pass one another by, collide and dismantle each other—as “cannibalistic”[7]. Considering the polyphony of Fish Dream, the correspondence with this later text is intriguing.

It cannot, however, be retroactively asserted that the concepts of JōKAI THEORY were already fully formed when Fish Dream was written. Critically, one should limit oneself to saying that a strong continuity can be read between the excessive form practiced in Fish Dream and the theory of the mega-novel that appears later in JōKAI THEORY.

9. Conclusion: an extreme example of the mega-novel in Japanese-language literature

Fish Dream is not simply a long novel. By the author’s account it runs to roughly 1.3 million characters, and the print edition exceeds 2,000 pages. It swallows vast quantities of ideas and knowledge, holds different genres and textual forms, and leaves in place a large amount of redundant argument and digression. It demands of the reader not only the memorization of information but also the allocation of attention and the switching of reading methods.

In this respect, its Letzler-type mega-novel character is very strong. On the other hand, it does not simply coincide with the Karl-type mega-novel. Fish Dream has a desire to encompass the world in a single book, and on this point alone it is also close to the comprehensive giant novel that Karl set against the mega-novel.

But that design does not succeed. The more is written, the more the text swells, and the world splits apart. Ideas do not converge, voices lose their center, and the work holds chaos and order at once. The desire for comprehensiveness ends up inverting into decentering and incompleteness. Here lies another point of contact with the Karl-type mega-novel.

And Fish Dream swells in a way different from other mega-novels. At its center is sex. From there love, desire, the body, reproduction, gender, domination, religion, morality, freedom, justice, birth and death spread outward. Countless characters speak, rebut and build theories. Ideas eat ideas, voices summon other voices, conceits beget other conceits, and even logic and rhetoric multiply.

The label “comprehensive novel” put forward by the author’s side also has the power to explain this form. The work also shares several features with Ercolino’s maximalist novel, and partly touches on the novel-essay and the total novel. But if one focuses on the growth to giant size itself, “mega-novel” is a highly effective critical concept for explaining Fish Dream.

Fish Dream is a comprehensive novel, and a work that strongly displays the features of the maximalist novel. And it can be regarded as an extreme example of the mega-novel in Japanese-language literature, one that, with sex at its core, multiplies to the limit the voices, ideas and debates surrounding human life and death.

About the research for this article

For this article, the text of Fish Dream was checked with attention to characters, speakers, in-text documents and levels of narration. Theories of literature and ideas voiced by the writer, the editor, the protagonist and other characters within the work are kept distinct from the views of the real author, MMM.

“Roughly 1.3 million characters” is the author’s side’s description on the MMM official website, not an independent character count. “Comprehensive novel” appears not only on the official website but also in the product subtitle. The three print volumes and their page counts were taken from retail bibliographic data.

In addition, phrases such as “an extreme example of the mega-novel in Japanese-language literature,” “an encyclopedia of ideas” and “cannibalistic polyphony” are this article’s own critical assessments, arrived at by comparing existing scholarship with the text of the work. They do not mean that Fish Dream holds an established classification as a mega-novel in existing scholarship.

Notes

Most sources below are in Japanese. Original titles are given with English translations in brackets.

  1. MMM_Memento Mori Machina official website, “Literature”. Refers to the author’s side’s description of 『魚の夢』 [Fish Dream] as “roughly 1.3 million characters” and a “comprehensive novel” (総合小説). The product subtitle also contains the expressions “comprehensive novel” and “sex, porn, eros” (セックス・ポルノ・エロス). Amazon retail bibliographic data checked for the print editions 『魚の夢1』 [Fish Dream 1], 『魚の夢2』 [Fish Dream 2] and 『魚の夢3』 [Fish Dream 3]: 594, 701 and 729 pages according to the retail bibliographic data. Checked September 2026.
  2. Frederick R. Karl, “American Fictions: The Mega-Novel,” Conjunctions 7, 1985, and American Fictions: 1980–2000: Whose America Is It Anyway?, 2001. David Letzler, The Cruft of Fiction: Mega-Novels and the Science of Paying Attention, University of Nebraska Press, 2017. Edward Mendelson, “Encyclopedic Narrative: From Dante to Pynchon,” MLN 91.6, 1976. Tom LeClair, In the Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel, 1987, and The Art of Excess, 1989. Stefano Ercolino, The Maximalist Novel, Bloomsbury Academic, 2014. University of Nebraska Press — The Cruft of Fiction; Bloomsbury — The Maximalist Novel.
  3. As an example of the word “mega-novel” (メガノベル / メガノヴェル) in Japanese, the publication notice for John Updike’s 『さようならウサギ』 [Rabbit at Rest] contains the expression 「超大型小説“メガノヴェル”」 [“a super-large novel, a ‘mega-novel’”]. 版元ドットコム『さようならウサギ』 [Hanmoto.com: Rabbit at Rest]. Of his translation of 『平家物語』 [The Tale of the Heike], Furukawa Hideo himself uses the expression 「ポリフォニックな中世のメガノベル」 [“a polyphonic medieval mega-novel”]. 河出書房新社『平家物語』 [Kawade Shobō Shinsha: The Tale of the Heike]. On the relation between Furukawa’s 『アラビアの夜の種族』 [The Tribe of the Arabian Nights] and 『聖家族』 [Holy Family] and the mega-novel, see also 好書好日「古川日出男さん『おおきな森』インタビュー」 [Kōsho Kōjitsu: Interview with Furukawa Hideo on The Great Forest], among others.
  4. MMM, 『魚の夢』 [Fish Dream], Parts 0–5. The structure of 75 chapters in all, and matters of sexuality, ideas, characters, in-text documents and so on, are based on the text of the work. Main passages referred to: Part 0, Chapter 1 = the comprehensive novel and the theory of the novel; Part 1, Chapter 5 = the argument about the surplus and rhetoric excluded from logic; Part 1, Chapter 7 = the protagonist’s creative writing and the connection of disparate fields; Part 2, Chapter 1 = the editor’s account of the failure of the comprehensive-novel plan; Part 2, Chapter 10 = 「世界進化論にまつわる断片的草稿」 [Fragmentary Drafts on a Theory of World Evolution]; Part 4, Chapter 1 = the TwoSheets theory; etc.
  5. 『魚の夢』 [Fish Dream], Parts 0 and 1. In Part 0, Chapter 1, the narrator who later identifies himself as the editor calls the novel a 「饒舌で粗野」 [“garrulous and coarse”] form and speaks of its omnivorous, comprehensive character, swelling as it swallows 「あらゆる分野の言葉」 [“words from every field”]. In Part 1, Chapter 7, Section 3, there is a description of the protagonist’s creative writing as 「強引に接続」 [“forcibly connecting”] the literary/academic, colloquial/literary register, verse/prose, logic/myth, and multiple literatures, religions, ideas, philosophies, arts and architectures. In Part 1, Chapter 5, the protagonist sees the complexity of the world in the 「余計とみなされる贅肉」 [“flab regarded as superfluous”] and 「膨大な無駄」 [“enormous waste”] cut away in the process of logical formalization.
  6. 『魚の夢』 [Fish Dream], Part 2. Chapter 1, 「上半身と下半身の接合面──編纂者の余計な解説」 [The Junction of Upper and Lower Body: The Editor’s Superfluous Commentary], explains that in Part 1 the 「声・言葉・情報は膨大」 [“voices, words and information are enormous”] and that it is 「超過剰もしくは超過密」 [“hyper-excessive, or hyper-dense”]. It also states that the writer tried to gather the world into 「ひとつの物語・理論・思想」 [“a single story, theory, or thought”], but that 「書けば書くほど記述は膨張して、世界は分裂した」 [“the more was written, the more the text swelled, and the world split apart”]. Chapter 10 contains 「世界進化論にまつわる断片的草稿」 [Fragmentary Drafts on a Theory of World Evolution]. All of these are statements belonging to the editor and in-text documents within the work, and are not treated as statements by the real author.
  7. MMM_Memento Mori Machina, 『剰壊理論――過剰による斜線融解に関する未完成の論文あるいは小説』 [JōKAI THEORY: An Unfinished Treatise, or Novel, on the Melting of the Slash through Excess], Japanese edition, version 1.0-Final, 2026. Chapter 8, 「メガノベル：包摂的肥大症（Pantrophia）とポストレス時代」 [The Mega-Novel: Pantrophia and the Post-less Era], especially 8.3, 「現代のメガノベルは文学におけるPantrophiaである」 [The Contemporary Mega-Novel Is Pantrophia in Literature], and 8.4, 「美学的転換：PantrophiaとPantrophism」 [Aesthetic Shift: Pantrophia and Pantrophism]. Note [B3] to Chapter 5, 「終わりなき蠱術」 [Endless gu sorcery], describes Dostoevsky’s intellectual polyphony as “cannibalistic.” The corresponding headings are given in the wording of the official English edition. Because the book presents itself as a “treatise, or novel,” this article does not treat its statements as the author’s personal, settled views.
  8. Stefano Ercolino, “The Maximalist Novel,” Comparative Literature 64.3, 2012, and The Maximalist Novel: From Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow to Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, Bloomsbury Academic, 2014. Bloomsbury — The Maximalist Novel. On the novel-essay: Stefano Ercolino, The Novel-Essay, 1884–1947, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Springer — The Novel-Essay, 1884–1947.
  9. Noma Hiroshi, 『全体小説への志向――対話・野間宏』 [Toward the Total Novel: Dialogues with Noma Hiroshi], Tabata Shoten, 1969; 『全体小説と想像力』 [The Total Novel and the Imagination], Kawade Shobō Shinsha, 1969. Mario Vargas Llosa, García Márquez: historia de un deicidio, 1971. On Murakami Haruki’s “comprehensive novel,” see the long interview in the Summer 2010 issue of 『考える人』 [Kangaeru hito]. 新潮社『1Q84』公式サイト — 『考える人』2010年夏号掲載告知 [Shinchōsha, official 1Q84 website: announcement of the Kangaeru hito Summer 2010 issue].

References and main sources

Text of the work and author-side materials

The mega-novel and theories of giant literature

The maximalist novel and the novel-essay

The comprehensive novel and the total novel

Uses of “mega-novel” in Japanese

Presented by MMM (publisher of Fish Dream)

Translated from the Japanese original, “『魚の夢』はメガノベルなのか？｜日本文学のメガノベルとして読む”. Quotations from Japanese sources are our own translations.

*This is an ATTESTED article. Factual statements are based on existing, verifiable sources; where it includes third-party views or the author’s inferences, interpretations, or evaluations, these are presented so as not to be confused with confirmed facts. It contains no deliberate fiction or fabrication presented as real-world fact.

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