Book review: Toh Enjoe’s Harlequin Butterfly plays with words and logic for a surreal read

Harlequin Butterfly

By Toh Enjoe, translated by David Boyd
Fiction/Pushkin Press/Paperback/105 pages/$18.61/Amazon SG (amzn.to/3KR3UYV)
3 stars

What about a book that can be read only when travelling? This is how Toh Enjoe’s enigmatic novella Harlequin Butterfly – a surreal, disorienting trip – starts.

In a book market saturated with dross, a reader instinctively determines that this question must be self-referential – perhaps a self-conscious jibe at Harlequin Butterfly’s own small volume.

But it turns out to be the musings of an unnamed passenger on a flight. Told to his larger-than-life seat neighbour, entrepreneur A.A. Abrams – a corpulent man who “waits for the layers of his fat to settle into place” – the question evolves to become a breakthrough title, To Be Read Only On An Airplane.

Abrams, emphatically not a book lover, has turned this stray idea into mountains of cash. He is aided, he believes, by a talismanic small silver butterfly net he keeps in his pocket that helps him capture floating ideas for his next big invention.

Yet just as one settles into the fantastical conceit, a second chapter declares that the preceding account is fictitious, Toh, not for the last time, pulling the rug out from underneath. “There you have it: The near-complete translation of To Be Read Only Under A Cat, by the extraordinary polyglot writer Tomoyuki Tomoyuki,” he writes.

Tomoyuki has become the subject of fervent speculation by those in the literary community, his whereabouts currently unknown.

To Be Read Only Under A Cat was written in Latino sine flexione – “a dead language fashioned from yet another dead language”. Abrams is actually a businesswoman obsessed with Tomoyuki, who died after the story was completed.

Harlequin Butterfly thrives on these unanswered questions within shifting realities, a novella not as narrative but a game of Chinese whispers and non sequiturs.

An author of scientific and speculative fiction, and a student of physics and mathematics, Toh creates a self-contained world that resembles an equation. Without much deference to the laws of logic or reality, characters and motifs are mathematical operations and numbers to be manipulated and balanced.

Genders shift and fictional characters make trips into reality to alter timelines. Tomoyuki himself is given a point-of-view chapter to expound on the arbitrariness of language and fame, and there is a passage that entreats readers to embrace illogic and contradictions: “Would it be so strange to have a language in which the grammar transforms every time an inconsistency arises between different tellings of the same story? What if we simply haven’t noticed these shifts?”

In construction, Harlequin Butterfly reminded this reviewer of Hernan Diaz’s Pulitzer-winning Trust (2022), which also excavated a narrative from various perspectives to reveal Truth with a capital T. But Harlequin Butterfly’s concern is determinedly more philosophical and linguistic.

A reader breezing through it is likely to be able to just about follow the scant plot, but at the back of the mind is always a niggling discomfort. Something seems to not quite fit, and when this is later solved, yet another piece of the puzzle comes undone.

Whether this is enjoyable will depend on the reader’s patience and willingness to turn back the pages to investigate – perhaps just the sort of Wittgensteinian language game that one can embark on on a long commute.

If you like this, read: Trust by Hernan Diaz (Riverhead Books, 2022, $23.83, Amazon SG, go to amzn.to/3PT5ooU), a similarly patchwork story and literary puzzle about an unconventional couple plagued with troubles after the Great Depression.