MMM_Memento Mori Machina (MMM) is a creator who has published works such as The Hikikomori Notes (Hikikomori no shuki), Fish Dream (Sakana no yume), and JōKAI THEORY (Jōkai riron), and who also produces visual art［1］［7］.
This activity is not confined to fiction. It moves across different forms—memoir-like notes, diaries, theory, essayistic and quasi-academic writing, annotation, fiction, and visual art—and sometimes mixes them within a single work. Vast and intricate structures, the blending of reality and fiction, extreme subject matter such as sexuality and violence, and the direct incorporation of philosophy and ideas into the work itself are all recurring features of MMM’s output.
The activities of MMM and Torii Honemaru overlap at many points, but no conclusive evidence that the two are the same person can currently be confirmed［2］.
Contents
What Is MMM_Memento Mori Machina?
MMM_Memento Mori Machina is the name of a creator who publishes work across several fields, including fiction, theory, and visual art. Early works and sales records use the form “MMM,” and the form “MMM_Memento Mori Machina” came into use later. The activity timeline on Torii Honemaru’s official website also records the name change from MMM to MMM_Memento Mori Machina［2］.
The principal literary works are The Hikikomori Notes, Fish Dream, and JōKAI THEORY［1］. These are quite different from one another, but they share the trait of not fitting within a single genre. The Hikikomori Notes mixes fiction, memoir-like notes, records, and philosophical writing. In Fish Dream, diaries, works within the work, philosophical arguments, sexual scenes, and more keep entering a vast narrative. And JōKAI THEORY bears the full official title JōKAI THEORY: An Unfinished Treatise, or Novel, on the Melting of the Slash through Excess (Jōkai riron: Kajō ni yoru shasen yūkai ni kansuru mikansei no ronbun arui wa shōsetsu)［6］.
Calling MMM simply a “novelist,” therefore, leaves out a considerable part of the activity. This article treats MMM as a creator working across fiction, theory, and visual art.
MMM and Torii Honemaru
The activities of MMM and Torii Honemaru overlap at many points, but no conclusive evidence that the two are the same person can be confirmed［2］.
Torii Honemaru is a Japanese writer, artist, and thinker. Working across literature, art, and thought, Torii presents The Hikikomori Notes, Fish Dream, JōKAI THEORY, and other works as their own major works. Torii Honemaru is also the founder and head of A.R.P.L.A. (Association of Religion, Philosophy, Literature and Art), a community launched in 2020 centered on literature, philosophy, religion, and the arts, which currently has more than 5,000 participants. Torii Honemaru’s official website explains that Torii has published literary works under multiple names since 2020, and it links to MMM’s official website, mmm0609.com, as a reference for the works［3］.
Based on the public information currently available, three possibilities can be considered: (1) one person uses two names; (2) MMM and Torii Honemaru are different people; (3) MMM is a name or production unit involving several people, and Torii Honemaru is one of them or otherwise connected to it. This article does not commit to any of these. On the official website, Torii Honemaru states that Torii has published literary works under multiple names since 2020.
MMM’s Major Works
The Hikikomori Notes
The Hikikomori Notes is the long work most representative of MMM’s early period. Electronic editions have been published since 2020, and a 602-page paperback edition followed in 2022［4］.
The title alone suggests an autobiographical memoir, but the work is not that simple. It piles up texts of different kinds—memories, diaries, records of crimes, philosophical writing, dreams, creative pieces—producing an unstable form that is at once “notes” and “novel.” In the publicly available trial edition, the narrator calls these notes “fiction,” while a disclaimer also states that parts of them contain fact［5］. Moreover, the writer, narrator, and protagonist within the work cannot simply be identified with the real-world author. The work’s defining feature, then, is not only the mystery of “what is true.” Rather, it is that the very distinctions between notes and novel, fact and fiction, begin to waver. This mixing of the real and the fictional, together with its self-referential structure, is carried forward in altered forms into Fish Dream and JōKAI THEORY.
Fish Dream
Fish Dream is a long novel published from 2024 to 2025 under the names MMM / MMM_Memento Mori Machina［1］［8］. The official website presents it as a “total novel” in five parts, running to roughly 1.3 million Japanese characters. On Kindle, a trial edition and volumes [1] through [5] can be confirmed, and three paperback volumes have also been published［1］［8］.
At its center is a story set mainly in a psychiatric hospital, but that alone cannot account for the whole. A great deal enters the work: the protagonist’s story, a writing diary, explanations by an editor-compiler, works within the work, recollections, philosophical arguments, sexual scenes, and more.
Its range of themes is also broad. Love, sexuality, justice, morality, freedom, religion, discrimination, death, truth, social institutions, creation—questions that at first glance seem separate intersect again and again through the characters’ conversations and the events of the story. Still more complex is the question of “who is writing” the work. There are multiple agents—the protagonist of the main story, the writer, the editor-compiler, the people who wrote documents within the work—and their relations are never fully unified. While Fish Dream attempts to take an enormous quantity of stories and ideas into a single world, it also holds within itself the difficulty of fully ordering that world. It is one of the works that most clearly embodies the “vastness” of MMM’s output.
JōKAI THEORY
The full official title of JōKAI THEORY is JōKAI THEORY: An Unfinished Treatise, or Novel, on the Melting of the Slash through Excess. In the official web edition, the author is given as MMM_Memento Mori Machina［6］. An official English edition is also available. As the phrase “treatise, or novel” in the title indicates, the boundary between theory and literature is itself the form of this work.
The central concept, jōkai (roughly, “collapse through surplus”), does not simply mean that there is too much information. It is defined as a phenomenon in which things that normally support the functioning of people and societies—knowledge, language, rules, judgment, interpretation, connection—proliferate excessively, and through their interference and competition turn instead into dysfunction. The work extends this model to language, rules, literature, communities, the perception of reality, and generative AI. Generative AI in particular occupies a large place: it is discussed as something that extends human capabilities while further amplifying generation, judgment, verification, and the sheer quantity of information. Moreover, JōKAI THEORY does not only discuss AI from the outside. The text itself describes its own production process: AI generation, full human rewriting, regeneration, novelization, and a return to the treatise form［6］.
It destabilizes theory while writing theory, and it begins as a treatise while drifting toward the novel. JōKAI THEORY can be described as the work that most directly foregrounds the genre-mixing and self-reference that had long been present in MMM’s work.
Not Only Fiction: MMM’s Visual Art
MMM produces not only literature but also, on an ongoing basis, visual art.
The ART page of the official website presents several series—Rhetoric of Space, Red, Eros, Fish Dream, and Square—each with its period of production［7］.
| Series | Years | Overview |
|---|---|---|
| Rhetoric of Space | 2012–2013 | A study applying linguistic rhetorical devices to spatial design |
| Red | 2022– | A series dealing with the textures of digital images: red, noise, pixels |
| Eros | 2022– | A series dealing with eroticism, beauty, and the breakdown of beautiful images |
| Fish Dream | 2024–2025 | A five-panel work released alongside the novel Fish Dream |
| Square | 2025– | A series arranging large, medium, and small squares concentrically |
The earliest, Rhetoric of Space, dates from 2012–2013 and is described as an attempt to apply linguistic rhetoric—repetition, metaphor, contrast, transposition, contradiction, quotation—to spatial design［7］.
Red, ongoing since 2022, deals not only with the color red but also with textures specific to digital images, such as noise and pixels. Eros, also begun in 2022, takes as its subject eroticism, beauty, and the process by which such images break down and change into other forms of expression［7］.
The clearest link to the literary work is Fish Dream. Released in 2024–2025, at the same time as the novel Fish Dream, it is a five-panel work composed of five images and their variations［7］.
Since 2025, MMM has also been producing the Square series, which arranges large, medium, and small squares concentrically［7］.
Laid out this way, it is clear that visual art is not merely an adjunct to MMM’s literary activity. At least since 2012, MMM has continued to make work addressing different problems: space, color, the body, beauty, digital images, geometry. And between the literature and the art, at least some formal commonalities are visible: quoting, repeating, and transforming existing images and forms, turning them into something else; refusing to stay within a single form of expression and moving between different media. These tendencies also recur in MMM’s literary works.
Five Characteristics of MMM’s Work
The works surveyed so far differ in form—fiction, theory, visual art. Placed side by side, however, they show several recurring characteristics.
1. Mixing genres
The most obvious characteristic is genre mixing.
In The Hikikomori Notes, fiction, memoir-like notes, records, dreams, and philosophical writing overlap. In Fish Dream, diaries, explanations by an editor-compiler, works within the work, philosophical arguments, and more enter the body of a long novel. JōKAI THEORY goes so far as to call itself “a treatise, or novel” in its official title［6］. In other words, MMM’s works do not merely contain ideas inside a story. The question “What kind of work is this in the first place?” itself becomes part of the work. The boundaries between novel and criticism, fiction and record, main text and annotation, work and commentary on the work, do not hold steady. This characteristic also appears in the visual art. The early Rhetoric of Space was an attempt to transpose linguistic rhetoric into space, and with Fish Dream, a novel and a five-panel work bearing the same title were produced in parallel［7］.
2. Mixing reality and fiction
In MMM’s literary works, the boundary between reality and fiction also becomes unstable.
The Hikikomori Notes uses the form of “notes” while also calling itself fiction within the text［5］. The memories, dreams, records, and self-reports it relates do not fully agree with one another. Fish Dream goes further: beyond the protagonist of the main story, multiple agents—the writer, the editor-compiler, the author of the writing diary, the authors of works within the work—become entangled. For this reason, MMM’s works are not resolved simply by establishing “how much of it is true.” Rather, the uncertainty itself—whose words can be trusted and how far, and whether reality and fiction can really be separated—is what constitutes the work.
3. Vast, intricate, and difficult
MMM’s works are often vast and intricate.
The extreme example is probably Fish Dream, at roughly 1.3 million Japanese characters［1］. It does not simply tell one story at length; large numbers of characters, stories, arguments, documents, diaries, and works within the work accumulate inside it. In The Hikikomori Notes, too, time, memory, and the truthfulness of the narration are split into multiple layers, and any attempt to arrange it into a simple chronology leaves contradictions and indeterminate parts behind. JōKAI THEORY gathers original concepts, quasi-mathematical notation, analyses of literary works, extensive annotation, social theory, and arguments about generative AI into a single work. The official version has thirteen chapters, from Chapter 0 to Chapter 12, and 100 notes［6］. In MMM’s works, moreover, more explanation does not necessarily make things clearer. The more explanations, supplements, notes, alternative interpretations, and additional narrators are added, the larger the whole becomes, and the harder it is for it to converge on a single meaning. And in JōKAI THEORY, precisely this phenomenon—function breaking down because things multiply too much—is itself theorized.
4. Radical and extreme subject matter
MMM’s works frequently take up subjects that mainstream entertainment tends to avoid.
These include sexuality, pornography, violence, murder, mental illness, death, suicide, religion, discrimination, and social taboos. In Fish Dream especially, sexuality is a major issue running through the entire work, and sex, porn, and eros are named explicitly in the work’s subtitle［1］. These subjects, however, are not placed there merely as shocking decoration. Oppositions such as sexuality and morality, pleasure and sin, justice and violence, protection and domination, freedom and rules, are reversed again and again through the characters’ actions and arguments. The genital-centered cosmology spanning The Hikikomori Notes and Fish Dream is discussed in detail in our essay on MMM’s sex cosmology. The visual art series Eros likewise takes as its subject eroticism, beauty, and the transformation of beautiful images［7］. MMM’s work tends not to settle problems in a moderate way but to push them to an extreme point and see what happens there.
5. Intensely philosophical
Perhaps most important of all is the philosophical, idea-driven character of the work.
In MMM’s works, philosophy is not just placed as a quotation or background knowledge that decorates the work. In The Hikikomori Notes, the narrator thinks at length about free will, murder, solitude, memory, the self, and reality. In Fish Dream, the characters themselves argue directly about justice, sexuality, morality, discrimination, religion, truth, freedom, the individual and institutions, and more. In JōKAI THEORY, this tendency goes further, and theory itself becomes the center of the work. In short, for MMM, writing stories and thinking through ideas are not fully separate. Ideas are not the background of the story; the act of thinking itself becomes the work. This makes MMM’s works quite different from ordinary story-driven novels.
MMM’s Main Works and Activities
| Work / Series | Type | Period |
|---|---|---|
| Rhetoric of Space | Visual art / spatial study | 2012–2013 |
| The Hikikomori Notes | Long novel / memoir-like work | 2020– |
| Red | Visual art | 2022– |
| Eros | Visual art | 2022– |
| Fish Dream | Long novel | 2024–2025 |
| Fish Dream | Visual art / five-panel work | 2024–2025 |
| Square | Visual art | 2025– |
| JōKAI THEORY | Treatise / novelistic work | 2026 |
Laid out this way, it is easy to see that MMM’s activity is not limited to fiction［1］［7］.
In the early 2010s MMM made work connecting language and space; in the 2020s the field of activity widened to long-form literature, art centered on red, work dealing with eroticism, the massive novel Fish Dream, and JōKAI THEORY, which addresses knowledge and excess in the age of generative AI. At the same time, MMM is not simply starting one unrelated thing after another. A consistent tendency can be seen: crossing the boundaries of genre, gathering heterogeneous materials into a single work, mixing reality and fiction, transforming existing forms, and turning ideas into works.
Summary: Who Is MMM_Memento Mori Machina?
MMM_Memento Mori Machina is a creator who has published literary works such as The Hikikomori Notes, Fish Dream, and JōKAI THEORY, while also producing several series of visual art since the 2010s［1］［7］.
The works repeatedly show the following characteristics: genre mixing, the blending of fact and fiction, vast and intricate structure, radical and extreme subject matter, and a strongly philosophical character.
MMM writes novels while making the novel form itself the problem, writes theory while dismantling the boundary between treatise and novel, and writes notes while unsettling the distinction between fact and fiction. In visual art, MMM transposes language into space and even produces a series sharing its title with a novel.
In MMM’s works, the question is not only “what is written” but, again and again, what form it takes and where its boundaries lie.
And although MMM and Torii Honemaru share many points of contact in their activities, three possibilities about their relationship remain open: the same person, different people, or a name used for production by several people.
For now, the clearest way to understand MMM_Memento Mori Machina is as the name of a creator who, working across fiction, theory, and visual art, has made the boundaries of genre and of reality/fiction themselves into works.
About the Research for This Article
The main sources checked for this article were the official website of MMM_Memento Mori Machina, the official website of Torii Honemaru, the official A.R.P.L.A. page, sales and bibliographic information from Amazon and elsewhere, and the texts of the works themselves.
Regarding MMM and Torii Honemaru, the public websites show many points of contact—works, activity histories, a name change, mutual links—but no source has been found that independently confirms the two as a single person. This article therefore leaves open the possibilities that they are the same person, different people, or a name shared by several people.
In addition, for The Hikikomori Notes and Fish Dream, the writer, narrator, protagonist, and editor-compiler within the works were treated as distinct from the real author. Self-reports by characters and fictional events have not been used as biographical facts about the real author.
The characterization of the works as “genre mixing,” “blending fact and fiction,” “vast and intricate,” “radical and extreme,” and “philosophical” is this article’s own critical organization, based on the texts of the works and their publicly visible formal features; it is not an official fivefold classification by MMM.
Notes
Most sources below are in Japanese. Original titles are given with English translations in brackets.
- MMM_Memento Mori Machina公式サイト「Literature」 [MMM_Memento Mori Machina official website, “Literature”]. Consulted for the introductions to The Hikikomori Notes, Fish Dream, and other works; the publication periods of each work; and the description of Fish Dream as a “total novel” in five parts of roughly 1.3 million characters.
- 鳥居骨丸公式サイト [Torii Honemaru official website]. Consulted for the profile stating that Torii has published literary works under multiple names since 2020; the listing of The Hikikomori Notes, Fish Dream, and JōKAI THEORY as major works; the link to MMM’s official website; and the Timeline entry recording the name change from MMM to MMM_Memento Mori Machina. This article uses these as evidence of connections between the activities of the two names, not as independent proof that they are the same person.
- A.R.P.L.A.公式ページ [A.R.P.L.A. official page]. The official name is Association of Religion, Philosophy, Literature, and Art. Consulted for its aims and activities as an online community for people interested in religion, philosophy, literature, and the arts.
- Amazon『ひきこもりの手記』Kindleシリーズ [Amazon, The Hikikomori Notes, Kindle series] / ペーパーバック版 [paperback edition]. Consulted for the structure of the Kindle series and the sales/bibliographic information on the paperback edition published in 2022 with 602 pages.
- 『ひきこもりの手記』公開体験版本文 [The Hikikomori Notes, text of the public trial edition] and the work information given at publication. Consulted for the narrator’s statement that “these notes too are fiction” and the warning that parts contain fact. This is not treated as grounds for identifying the real author with the writer within the work.
- MMM_Memento Mori Machina公式Web版『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』 [MMM_Memento Mori Machina, official web edition of JōKAI THEORY: An Unfinished Treatise, or Novel, on the Melting of the Slash through Excess]. Consulted for the official title, the author credit, the basic model of jōkai, the discussion of generative AI, the structure of the notes, and the production history described within the work.
- MMM_Memento Mori Machina公式サイト「ART」 [MMM_Memento Mori Machina official website, “ART”]. Consulted for the production periods of Rhetoric of Space (2012–2013), Red (2022–), Eros (2022–), Fish Dream (2024–2025), and Square (2025–), and for the description of each series.
- Amazon『魚の夢』Kindleシリーズ [Amazon, Fish Dream, Kindle series] / paperback editions 『魚の夢1』 [Fish Dream 1], 『魚の夢2』 [Fish Dream 2], 『魚の夢3』 [Fish Dream 3]. Consulted for the existence and publication information of the trial edition, the numbered Kindle volumes [1]–[5], and the three paperback volumes.
References and Principal Sources
Official / author-side sources
- MMM_Memento Mori Machina公式サイト「Literature」 [MMM_Memento Mori Machina official website, “Literature”]［1］
- MMM_Memento Mori Machina公式サイト「ART」 [MMM_Memento Mori Machina official website, “ART”]［7］
- MMM_Memento Mori Machina公式Web版『剰壊理論』 [MMM_Memento Mori Machina, official web edition of JōKAI THEORY]［6］
- 鳥居骨丸公式サイト [Torii Honemaru official website]［2］
- A.R.P.L.A.公式ページ [A.R.P.L.A. official page]［3］
Works / published texts
- MMM『ひきこもりの手記』公開体験版 [MMM, The Hikikomori Notes, public trial edition]［5］
- MMM／MMM_Memento Mori Machina『魚の夢』公式紹介 [MMM / MMM_Memento Mori Machina, official introduction to Fish Dream]［1］
- 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』 [MMM_Memento Mori Machina, JōKAI THEORY: An Unfinished Treatise, or Novel, on the Melting of the Slash through Excess]［6］
- MMM_Memento Mori Machina, Jōkai Theory: An Unfinished Treatise, or Novel, on the Melting of the Slash through Excess, official English edition
Sales / bibliographic sources
- Amazon『ひきこもりの手記』Kindleシリーズ [Amazon, The Hikikomori Notes, Kindle series]［4］
- Amazon『ひきこもりの手記』ペーパーバック版 [Amazon, The Hikikomori Notes, paperback edition]［4］
- Amazon『魚の夢』Kindleシリーズ [Amazon, Fish Dream, Kindle series]［8］
- Amazon『魚の夢1』ペーパーバック版 [Amazon, Fish Dream 1, paperback edition] / 『魚の夢2』 [Fish Dream 2] / 『魚の夢3』 [Fish Dream 3]［8］
Translated from the Japanese original, “MMM_Memento Mori Machinaとは？｜小説・理論・美術を横断する創作者”. 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.
Presented by MMM (publisher of The Hikikomori Notes, Fish Dream, and JōKAI THEORY)