教育

What does it mean to receive an education?

From the book: “It is said that if you orgasm more than three times a day, your grades will improve. This school is a whirlwind of discipline and desire, where winning is heaven and losing is hell. Is my happiness right? The first full-length novel of Akutagawa Prize winner Haruka Tono, questioning human ethics.”

This novel follows the daily life of the boarding school student Yuto, who attends a dystopic school for teens with psychic abilities where students are constantly observed by cameras and are recommended to have at least 3 orgasms a day in order to improve their grades. Yuto tries his best to follow all of the recommendations of his school and get his daily orgasms in so that he can score well on the “tests” all students are periodically forced to take that grade their psychic abilities. Improving your grades is directly linked to improving your social standing at the school as it comes with benefits like having fewer roommates or a private room, those in lower classes needing to use 敬語 with you, and more.

While peaking into Yuto and the other student's lives, the reader is taken along for the ride through countless sex and masturbation scenes, strange hypnotic dream sequences, mini-stories that are completely unrelated to the main text, unsettling acts of violence, and strict, unexplained acts of discipline from school teachers.

Japanese level: N2

This book does not feature many grammatical structures beyond JLPT N2. The prose is also very straightforward. I think 「教育」 is an accessible read for those at the N2 level, although you can still expect to need to look up a fair amount of unknown words.

Specialized vocabulary you’ll encounter:

Sex-related vocabulary

You may be interested in this book if:

You like strange, surreal stories

You want to enjoy an atmospheric read and not necessarily a plot or character-driven one

You enjoy stories featuring sex and sexuality

My review of the book:

★★★★☆

I loved Haruka Tono’s Akutagawa prize-winning novel 「破局」, so when I saw he had a new novel coming out I was already quite interested. Then, after reading the plot summary and seeing the eye-brow-raising combination of words「ハレンチ x 超能力 x ディストピア」on the obi I immediately put in a pre-order so I could read this on release day.

I went into this expecting something bizarre, which is exactly what I got. However, I really enjoyed the almost comical tone in certain parts of the novel. For example, Yuto is at one point cleaning up the club room after his after-school activities end. The acts of rinsing dirty glasses and wiping the dried bodily fluids leftover from his sempai’s sex off the couch are described in the same sentence in a dead-pan manner. I couldn’t help but burst out laughing at that strange juxtaposition! This contrast of matter-of-fact narration with the out-there happenings in the school read almost as if written by an AI and makes for a unique reading experience.

「教育」 presents and explores many ideas, such as what education really is, what it means to be educated, what is correct or not, what it means to be correct, the differences between male and female sexuality and orgasms, hierarchical structures, etc. I don’t necessarily think any of these are new ideas to write about, but the way there were presented was novel and the entire book felt fresh.

I found 「教育」to be slightly long, so if you aren’t necessarily drawn to the summary but want to try a book from Haruka Tono, I recommend you start with「破局」instead as that is much tighter. However, if you found the description above intriguing and want to read a story that could be described as high school slice-of-life meets JAV meets Murakami-esque dream sequence, check this out!