200 words about Yukiko

Also: sex dolls, noms de plume, sailing.

Yukiko is a sex doll. She's custom-made from a rubber that feels like skin, and through some feat of engineering like bones and musculature too. She has a seam running down her side and a cheap wig on her head, hair like a stuffed horse's mane over her crotch and under her arms. Yukiko is also Sensei, a bow-legged man inscrutable in sunglasses like silver moons. "She is a projection of himself and everything she is derives from his will." Later on, we find out she’s an actual woman too. Nearly every character in this book has two or three identities. Names travel in the air like pollen. MacDonald Harris is always pulling maneuvers like this in his fiction, cleaving and transmuting people before finally gathering them into a single prismatic self. He lived his interests. Harris is Donald Heiney, a sailor and literature professor. It’s not like he’s the first or last guy to invent a nom de plume but he came by it as honestly as anyone ever has, obsessed as he was with who we are and what we become, the meaningful differences between the two. Yukiko is unmistakably his creation: a sex doll, and everything else.