A review by pilesandpiles
All She Was Worth by Miyuki Miyabe

4.0

File this under "great genre fiction of late capitalism"?? Tokyo, 1992. A young woman disappears. Her fiance turns to his uncle, a police detective, to track her down. Uncle Detective seems to be on her trail ... then discovers that the woman he's been sniffing out is a completely different person with the same name and legal existence. Two human beings, a single record on paper. When did one end and the other begin? From this point on, the book is impossible to put down!! JK, I drank a lot of coffee before writing this. But it is a totally absorbing novel if you're interested in debt and credit, what makes legal personhood, and how a flesh-and-blood person can slip in and out of visibility in the eye of the state. There is even a whole 10-page treatise on the debt and credit system and its evils that Miyuki Miyabe only thinly disguises as dialogue. This is not a character-driven novel; none of the characters are particularly interesting in themselves. That feels intentional -- in the end, All She Was Worth implies the impossibility of fashioning a true, free self in a society where everyone is constituted by the intersection of consumer culture and state-defined personhood.