Angela Carter's City of Beautiful Objects

You never know what will happen in Tokyo. Anything can happen.¹

When Angela Carter won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1969, the bursary shortly took her to Japan alone. This visit, which later became several years of living, was a much influential experience, shaping her writing and her character.

Several of the tales in Fireworks (1974) occur against the backdrop of an enigmatic Tokyo, where one heroine finds herself, “always rummaging in the dressing-up box of the heart for suitable appearances to adopt in the city.”² Largely autobiographical in tone, we observe depictions of her love affairs in Japan, shortly after the unravelling of her first marriage.

In Edmund Gordon’s biography, Carter is in awe of Tokyo and its juxtapositions, once describing it as a “breathtakingly vulgar megalopolis”³ yet relishing its alluring society of abundant beautiful objects and culture; the always-purposeful people existing in an endless, controlled chaos amongst the neon lights. In her wanderings she was often drawn towards Kabukicho, listening to jazz in its coffee shops.

In The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr Hoffman (1972) she translates this mystifying experience of surreal contrasts, painting a dreamscape version of Tokyo where streets are free from the oppression of directions and “can go wherever they please.”⁴ Much of this is experienced through protagonist Desiderio, who tells us,

Nothing in the city was what it seemed-nothing at all!⁵

Here Carter had indeed found a city that so amply fed her imagination, inspiring some of her most pivotal works.