On Pierre
Oct 18, 2026

I had insomnia again last week, during that long expanse between Sunday evening and Monday morning. Roughly speaking, it was one of those cases where I’d slept for a short amount of time, then woken up in a panic and wasn’t able to fall back asleep. I remembered that my friend Balckwell (黑井先生) had released the final version of his novel Pierre and the Ambiguities a few days earlier, so I downloaded the .epub, converted it into a .mobi, and spent half an hour looking for the cord to connect my girlfriend’s old kindle to my computer and transfer it so that I could comfortably read it in bed in the dark with the just-barely backlit screen. I read until a little bit before sunrise, falling asleep after finishing the first half. I read another chapter on the bus to work the next day, then finished the whole book on Tuesday. (I should note this was my second time reading it — I’d read an earlier version last year.)

It felt strange reading from a Kindle again. I’ve spent most of the past year reading paper books, thus why it took so long to find the Kindle cord. Pierre seems like a book best read in bed in the dark, the exact circumstances I read it that sleepless night last week. So the Kindle was necessary — the lamp in my room is a bit too bright. Its light dissolves away the spirits emanating from the book and its narration. The narrator in particular had a candlelit quality to them. Despite the anachronism, I imagined the narrator as being a voice from pre-war Vienna, yet set free the grip of time. Someone who’d spent many fruitful hours talking about the works of Freud the music of Schoenberg, and whatever else was in vogue in those days. Somehow that narrator has found themself in the 21st century, observing a video-game-playing library-book-reading creature both of and out of our time with interest. I can almost imagine that there is something more to the affinity between the protagonist Pierre and this narrator, like Pierre had been sent a questionnaire in the mail about what kind of voice he’d like narrating a book about him. His own first-person voice would be out of the question. Some of the options were quieter and some louder, but this one, butting in to insert his learned opinions from time to time, made Pierre feel at home and lended his life the gravity it needed.

The story opens with Pierre halfway between consciousness and a dream. He imagines a mysterious object that he calls “the plastic boogie.” The goddess Minerva tells him that the plastic boogie is not for him, and instead makes him watch knights fight snails in a swamp, but the snails approach the knights so slowly, and the swamp’s suction force is so intense, that he just falls in and never witnesses the epic battle. When he wakes up he feels a strange sense of loss — that the plastic boogie is the secret to becoming a normal functioning member of society, and that he is deprived of it. The novel then follows his life in the world without the plastic boogie, working at a fruit store, feeling as though everyone else expects him to want more. He’s not necessarily passionate about working at the fruit store, but he doesn’t particularly mind working there either. He shares an apartment a roommate, the kind of guy to be able to furnish the place with stuff he’d inherited from a dead uncle. They have a whiteboard where they mark their schedule for the week with dry erase markers, play video games together, talk about their weird dreams, and altogether seem to be living a life quite idyllic in my eyes, but lacking in his.

While working at the fruit store, random people who have no reason to care about him ask him questions about what he’s doing with his life and voice their consternation when they learn that, other than coming to this store three times a week, he’s not doing anything. To paraphrase, the conversations go something like this: “Shouldn’t you be in school? What, you’ve already graduated? Don’t you feel bad relying on your parents to pay rent? What, you’re able to pay rent on your own? That doesn’t seem right…”

The strangers who say such things to him, usually quite old, are a sort of daily shadow of his parents. He only sees his parents once every few months, and when they meet they don’t talk about these concerns at length, but Pierre seems to hold onto every word they do say (and what lies behind those words). He enjoys his parents. He wants to spend time with them, but he can’t because there’s this barrier that seems to come from him “wasting his potential.” His parents want to help him, but they have no idea how. Pierre wants to live up to his potential too, but he too has no idea how. He is living a life that in and of itself he is fine with. He perhaps also has his own “yearning for something more”, but it seems incompatible with the career-based vision that his parents (and seemingly everyone else has). He wants to be a part of the world, and having a “real job” seems to be a big part of that.

Pierre makes some decisions, or decisions are made for him (it’s hard to tell the difference), and he ends up with a tiny piece of the plastic boogie, which just ever so slightly ejects him from this initial reality. To put it as simply as possible, Pierre meets a shadow self, then ends up working in an office. This second reality that Pierre ends up in, in my mind, functions to flesh out the first half of the novel by contrast. Pierre keeps revisiting his memories from before the office with, not quite longing, but a kind of indeterminate regret. At least his the fruit story didn’t “lay like a constant spectre over him” the way the office does.

I have complex feelings when I read/hear other people talking about their days working as cashiers. I think back to when I worked the night shift at 7-Eleven. I was a bit younger than Pierre was working at the fruit store in the novel, and the circumstances behind my living conditions were a little different. My dad had moved to Boston after his divorce, and I ended up living on the sofa of his studio apartment for a year, getting a 7-Eleven job. Unlike Pierre, my issues with working there didn’t really involve random customers judging me. The only person who asked me about why I wasn’t in school was a French guy who seemed astounded at the idea of a 20-year-old not being in school, and who was also astounded when I didn’t know any of the contemporary French authors he tried to talk to me about. My main anxiety was instead about being incompetent. The narrator describes Pierre as generally being comfortable with the actual duties of his job, knowing what he’s doing, able to help customers find good fruit and so on. I can't help but be a little jealous of this fictional character. When I was at 7-Eleven I felt absolutely clueless. People would come in asking for obscure cigarette brands or complicated lottery ticket orders and even after months working their I’d mess them up. People were always stealing things or throwing cups of coffee at me and I had to yell at them and threaten to call the cops. When normal people came in, I felt like I wasn’t giving them a particularly good customer experience. In general, I felt like I was very bad at my job, and one of these nights the whole store would inevitably be burned down (or maybe I’d just accidentally sell cigarettes to a minor working for the police) and I’d get fired.

A few months after quitting my 7-Eleven job to go back to school, I was talking with a friend about “the things I saw in that convenience store.” He told me there was this Japanese book I’d love called Convenience Store Woman about a lady who loves working in a convenience store. I started the book but was only able to get through the first pages, because the way she passionately described intense dedication to creating the perfect convenience store experience pained my heart. It felt like a condemnation of who I had been — and since I no longer worked at the convenience store, it was impossible to redeem myself. What came to mind was the time a middle-aged regular who announced one evening that he wasn’t going to see me for a month. “I’m going to Japan!” he told me. “They have convenience stores there too, you know. The convenience store’s there are amazing! They do all the things you guys do, but… with more enthusiasm! They really care about their convenience stores there!”

The opening pages of Convenience Store Woman seemed to be screaming at me that “You don’t care! You may have worked at a convenience store, but you weren’t a Convenience Store Man! There was no passion in what you did!” This was clearly my own guilt speaking, not the book, but it was still too much for me to read on.
 I wonder how Pierre would feel reading that book. I have no clue about where it goes with its premise, but from the first few pages it seems like it holds that working at a convenience store is a grand mission, something you can be proud of and take satisfaction in. If that’s so, then why not a fruit store? Throughout the first half of the Pierre and the Ambiguities, Pierre gets into imaginary arguments with his parents and customers where he effectively states that, but he can never quite convince himself.

One of the quirks of his personality is that he seems to admire people even when they’re performing objectively worse than him at their job. There’s this business hustle guy Pierre runs into that used to work at his store but got fired for always taking calls and never doing anything unless being forced to. Part of Pierre wishes he could have a grind that he was committed to. When Pierre starts working at the office, he inexplicably get’s promoted to team leader, yet he still sees himself as less of an office worker than one of his subordinates, a guy with a beard who thinks of this job as a tremendous opportunity. Both of these guys are kind of schmucks, but Pierre has a way of convincing himself it’s the schmucks who have it right. They want more than what Pierre wants, and even if that desire of theirs makes them worse at their jobs, they’re still superior than him simply for having a clear desire, or at least being able to come up with some nonsense explanation that makes their desire seem clear.

The novel frames Pierre as someone "doomed" to observing other's lives, and in turn our third-person narrator is observing Pierre and his thoughts. The personality of Pierre and of the narrator and this double layer of observation allow for imaginative and strange descriptions of the world. Part of this lies and the psychological/vaguely-fantastical elements I mentioned when I summarized the opening of the book. These sorts of things are probably what people would think of when I say “imaginative.” But what impressed me more is the minutiae of Pierre’s everyday life. There’s a scene, for instance, where a rainy day seems to slow down the flow of time, and Pierre finds himself the fruit store to have changed in some way, to have become a place where people come in and stand for twenty or thirty minutes at a time staring into the depths of the fruit, then finally approach the register with baskets of incongruous purchases that should never be paired. A lot of the book seems to float back and forth between reality, and reality ever-so-perturbed, just barely edging towards something else that can’t quite be called unreality or even surreality, but which feels fundamentally different from the reality we’ve lived in up to now.

Back when I used Twitter and was regularly bombarded with opinions from strangers whose names it would be impossible to remember, I encountered one take on the Bad Art Friend "scandal" (which I'm only mentioning for people who have heard of it — there is no need to look it up) that went something like this: "MFA-type literary fiction writers get to act like they're 'real artists', but all they're doing is plagiarizing from reality. It's us Fantasy and Sci-fi authors who are actually doing the hard work of making something, relying on nothing but our own imaginations." I was of course very frustrated when I read this, but I was nothing more than a lurker, having never once tweeted with my account, so it wasn’t not like I could reply. All I could do was stew about this. (So much of my life in those days felt like dreams where someone placed me in a humiliating position and I had something to say as a rebuttal, but no matter how hard I tried I just couldn't open my mouth and make sounds come out.)

I suppose I’m thankful for that tweet because it gave me this phrase “plagiarizing from reality” to describe what someone might think autobiographical fiction is doing, and to contrast with my own view of fiction, autobiographical or otherwise.

Life is impossible to plagiarize, simply because life is not words. When you put into words a memory of your own or one you heard from someone else (in Pierre’s case, my understanding is a lot of the narrative came from Balckwell interviewing his friends with office jobs, not necessarily his own experiences), you’re fundamentally transforming it. The written piece exists in parallel to the memory of the experience, and to someone who has access to both it’s clear how incomparable the two are.

It’s only for the person who has nothing but the written word to work off, unaware of all the decisions leading an event being described the way it is from a particular vantage point, that a piece can seem like a straightforward depiction of reality. My guess is that when someone like that Twitter user says a work is “plagiarizing from reality”, they’re referring to when not enough work has gone into moving beyond the obvious ways of turning memory into words. Yet a work can be just as grounded in reality and feel completely new if the author uses every word they write as an opportunity to exercise their imagination.

What I’m trying to say is that Pierre does an excellent job of transforming mundanity into something very strange. Putting down the book feels like waking up from a dream, to proceed through my own life much like the office building Pierre finds himself in, imbued with a new shade of strangeness.

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