Review of Solo Dance by Li Kotomi

*Solo Dance* by Li Kotomi, translated by Arthur Reiji Morris (2022). Published by World Editions.

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m coming across in the world.

For three years I worked professionally as a film critic, and while going to all of the film festivals and interviewing directors and actors was cool for a while, but I wanted to reclaim my time and watch movies I wanted to watch. Sometimes watching all of the new releases is great, and behind ahead of the curve, but I feel like I was falling so behind on movies I was genuinely excited about.

So I quit and decided to focus on this blog, and fell back more into literary criticism. I also randomly fell into a period of unemployment because of unexpected circumstances, and I took a long and hard look at my finances and realized I had enough to take time off. I did end up doing that, traveled for a bit, applied to jobs, and found myself working on the blog now more than ever.

Long time blog readers are probably going to recognize what I’m typing next. One of my favorite ways to find new books is to wander my local library branch and see what they have to offer, even if it’s something that’s way outside of my usual comfort zone. Reading diversely has been something very important to me for years, so this is a way to find new books.

I was in the new fiction section when I spotted both Solo Dance and Miss Kim Knows, which is the last blog post I put out on the site. This happened a hot minute ago at the time of typing this, so due to my blog scheduling with posts, this is probably coming out in September 2025 unless something changes. Anyways, I picked both books up when I saw them, as they were titles I wanted to read anyways, and within two weeks of selecting them at the library I was done with both.

Let’s get into the review! I don’t want to keep going on and on in the introduction, as I know it’s not what people are often here for.

A Taiwanese woman living in Japan grapples with her sexuality and ongoing conflicts in her life.

Our main character in this novel is Cho Norie. She’s 27 and starting a new life in Tokyo, as she is from Taiwan, but by the time we begin this novel we see how she has settled in and began a comfortable office job there. She’s pretty conversant in Japanese, and is able to hold her own in this new country, but she can see easily how she’s not exactly like her Japanese coworkers.

While they have concerns about the way Japan is going and how the society functions for them as natives, Norie is thinking a lot about how exactly she came Japan. We learn the details of what happened in Taiwan later in the book, but something awful happened to her because she’s not straight.

We dive a lot into her background throughout the course of the novel and her school years in Taiwan, as well as the people she had crushes on (or didn’t) back home. When she arrives in Japan, she has to form a new community, and she does just that as she finds her people. Some are expats from Taiwan, others lesbians looking for kinship in a massive, vibrant city in Asia.

However, as we see from the events of the novel, you can’t truly run away from everything in life, especially when people from your past show up in the same circles in a new country. Norie has to confront the reality of her situation then, as well as what happened to her, exposing some broader mental health issues due to her fascination with death and its implications.

As someone who generally reads a lot of East Asian literature, especially from Japan and South Korea, I find novels like these to be fascinating. Li Kotomi is a trans woman from Taiwan living in Japan, so I did wonder how much of her personal experiences she was drawing on to write this, as I imagine most ordinary people don’t ever consider people like her and their perspective in their daily lives.

Which makes the writing to be compelling to me as well. Although I could not personally relate to Norie’s experiences throughout the course of the novel, I could really have sympathy for her situation and what led her here to Tokyo. I felt immersed in her world, and she was someone who felt real.

Overall Thoughts

I already touched on this a little bit, but this is a novel that touches on the lives of people on the fringes of society. We don’t often get LGBTQ+ books in translation from East Asia, so when we do get these kinds of books translated, then it’s definitely an incentive to check out the book if you’re curious about these kinds of experiences.

Overall, I enjoyed this book and found it to be quite memorable. I don’t know if I would return to it in the near future, as I wasn’t what I would describe as a huge fan, but I am quite glad I read it for now.

I say if you’re interested in the synopsis or perspectives then pick it up at your local library or indie bookstore and give it a chance. It’s definitely something worth trying to read, even if you don’t finish it.

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