According to local Hokkaido legend in Japan, the story of marimo is one about love; a tribal leader’s daughter and a commoner fell in love and were separated by their disapproving families; tragically, the two lovers drowned in Lake Akan. Subsequently, they transformed into velvety moss balls, reunited in the afterlife on an ancient lakebed. Every autumn, the indigenous Ainu and surrounding communities celebrate the Marimo Festival, Marimo Matsuri. As I explain in “Author Interview with Herself,” published by Your Impossible Voice, this novel is about an obscure poet and dumpling-maker who lives with a pet moss ball, Marimo, in Alphabet City; their love is not romantic in a traditional sense, but rather, a platonic sort of companionship rife with questions about human agency and the moral imagination — rather than forbidden love, there are forbidden words; is the mute Marimo a merry sidekick, confidante, or spy? The protagonist, Zinger Zingiber, serves as the Minister of Loneliness under a futuristic regime governed by the Bureau of Misidentification, riddled by forbidden words, and plagued by absentia:
Zinger’s companionship with her pet moss ball becomes an allegory for cohabiting with grief and stillness. The moss ball is emblematic of a small, rolling consciousness — one that absorbs light and time with patience. In a world silenced by a plague of absentia, she takes on the role of Minister of Loneliness to tend the unseen afflictions of separation. The position is imaginary, but its compassion is real: it teaches her, and by extension us, to hold life tenderly because it may dissolve without warning, a breath away from erasure.
This allegory of bureaucratic erasure in the information age was inspired by the failures of modern recordkeeping — a metaphor for the vanishing self amid algorithms and automated systems:
Zinger’s deletion from the Registry mirrors how identity today can be reduced to indexing, metadata, and error codes. It satirizes the bureaucratic logic that confuses silence for compliance, misidentification for reality. When the Registry erases her name, what remains is the echo of a question that bureaucracy cannot recognize: Who decides which lives are legible?
By writing around “forbidden words” implanted in little poems interspersed throughout Marimo, Mon Amour, I wished to recover intimacy with verbal expression itself as a way to refresh language and meaning through circumlocution. “Absentia” names not only physical absence but a spiritual and linguistic silence — the vanishing of daily clarity in human contact. Here’s how I describe this in my interview: “The redaction of ‘forbidden words,’ then their subsequent inclusion in the little poems dispersed throughout the novel, was not imposed from outside but chosen from within — a voluntary silence that mirrors the novel’s meditation on absence.”
If I could state the novel’s central premise in one sentence, here it is:
Intellectual freedom begins where interrogation is permitted.
If I could add another distillation, it would be:
Imagination, for me, is a moral practice — a way of seeing beyond self-preservation toward empathy.
Karen An-hwei Lee is the author of the novels Sonata in K, The Maze of Transparencies, and Love Chronicles from the Octopodes. Her book of literary criticism, Anglophone Literatures in the Asian Diaspora, was selected for the Cambria Sinophone World Series. Lee has also authored several poetry collections, most recently The Beautiful Immunity. Her novel Marimo, Mon Amour, winner of the 2025 Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize, is out now from FC2 with an introduction by K-Ming Chang.
