Hata's Black Sun: The Melancholic and the (Gendered) Morbid Bodies in A Gesture Life

This study approaches the novel from psychodynamic perspectives, where the narrative is woven into the strands of traumatic memories and past. Deriving from Julia Kristeva's discussion on melancholia, this paper discreetly examines Hata as a melancholic, who is unaware of what he has lost and even that he has lost. Racially abject but in defiance of his separation from 'the mother,' Hata introjects loss as his own subjectivity. The insoluble void causes him to wander through the bravado of belongingness, which he eventually transforms into Sublimation. This paper reads that Hata finally faces his own black sun, deviating from his earlier gesture life; thus, the novel becomes a successful case study of the melancholic. However, female bodies are at stake, subsumed under Hata's sexual perversion. The novel renders trauma behind the fragmented narrative of an Asian American man at the expense of consuming morbid 'feminine' bodies physically and psychologically.