the doll collector

a group of women, one man, & a boy on a bridge, katsukawa shunchō

after a difficult couple of years, which included the dramatic renouncement of his career, the end of his first adult relationship,¹ the formation and dissolution of a utopian group house, long labor on a major artistic project, abandoning that project unfinished after someone he respected told him he was on to something, an arduous retraining for a new career, & integrating back into the workaday adult world, it was understandable that he would fall prey to a dependency. that was how his friends explained it to each other when they talked about him, worried about him, because there was no other explanation. if one crush on an egirl spirals into an obsessive dm back-and-forth, then phone calls then video then even gifts, forever will-they/won’t-they when it comes to actually meeting, it’s fair to tell the sufferer, “you live nowhere near each other, you haven’t met, you have no idea what she’s like really, don’t keep telling us how bad it makes you feel & how complicated it is, just stop.” but once the spiral has happened a few times, one must suspect that it’s working for him somehow. and the question is what is the shape & structure of a problem that could have this as a solution.

of course the girls didn’t know about each other. he had never been addicted to the practice of liking selfies, & he didn’t have a ton of followers—just the right number, in fact, to pull this kind of thing off; enough that he looked like a real person & not insane; not enough that they would suspect any other women of being moved by his clout. also his initial approaches were so intense and emotional that in our casual age it simply did not occur to our girls that he would do this a lot. when as time passed he spoke to them more reasonably, they thought they’d calmed him down, that now, with emotions not at quite such a height, they could reasonably test each other out for a potential relationship. in fact what it usually meant was that he had begun another cycle. but he never gave one up once he hooked her. it wasn’t that he coldly, calculatingly strung them along; he just got so nervous as he saw their avatar slide lower & lower down the ranks of his dms—and more importantly, imagined the same thing happening on their end—that he had to speak to them again.

they say that casanova was so successful with women because he fell in love with every woman he tried it with. our hero had the advantage on casanova because his girls were so distant from him, so mediated & so full of gaps, that they existed to him as even-more-imaginary than our crushes usually are. and his game was totally suited to the medium. he liked its literary qualities.

as different as the women were—and he liked each of them to be in some way the opposite of the one before, this one a foodie who mailed him home-cured salami, that one an iced-coffee-and-cigarettes type who wanted to talk about houellebecq—he had an uncanny knack for picking ones who would balk at actually meeting him. he complained bitterly about this but his friends helplessly agreed w each other that this must somehow too be on purpose. maybe it was even good. he’d always been prone to relationship drama. maybe this was methadone. enough girl-stimulus to keep him from looking for more girl, to let him focus on his new job, his new apartment, to find his footing.

so his friends understood & even shared his apparently-paradoxical panic when he ran across one of the girls in real life.

some people look much more appealing in real life than in their pictures. some optimize themselves so much for pictures that the opposite happens. she was directly in the middle. not always at her best angle, not quite so smooth skinned, but that was balanced by her presence, her movements; it was uncanny to see this image become solid; he felt like a reverse pygmalion, helpless as the woman he imagined took on an unexpected life.

it wasn’t a stalking situation (as they were kind of afraid it was at first). she was legitimately there on a business trip. she didn’t know he lived there either & was at least as scared as him. despite both of their reservations, under the circumstances it seemed silly not to hang out.

she was restrained & self-contained & our hero hoped & feared that her business trip would spin out without too many developments in their relationship. she certainly felt that she was in the power situation, which meant she didn’t make too many demands of him, unwilling to upset the balance. and the episode could have ended with the same balance & faded away, if she had not seen the notification from one of his other egirls on his phone.

it was insane for her to be jealous. but the notification totally upset her understanding of the situation. she demanded to look at his phone. god knows how she justified it to herself. god knows why he gave it to her. she scrolled through conversation with egirl after egirl. suddenly the chase reversed. she had enjoyed her sense of power over it & suddenly losing that sense of power she was compelled to try to gain it back—or gain it for the first time—in any case to show him who was boss. but she needed more than just his simping to prove it now. six months later they were posting pictures from the courthouse. a dozen other women privately compared themselves to her, each thinking she was the only woman doing so.

1. to her credit or otherwise, this happened deeper into his period of unemployment than you are guessing