Woman, Eating by Claire Kohda takes the vampire motif and applies it to a mixed race Asian woman in the UK, born to a Japanese human father and a Malaysian vampire mother, both women struggling to fit in with society and with feeling at ease in their "unnatural" bodies; to the extent that they start practicing self-denial and austerity because the more they consume what their bodies need them to, the further away they are moved from the status quo, being alienated by society. Relegated to something monstrous.
Mixed with the idea of vampirism is the idea of food. Food in the sense of something that nurtures humans, that makes them what they are, food as love, food as proof that things can be fed to the body to change its composition, to make it a malleable subject. To be denied this sustenance (for vampires can only leech off the blood of others, their bodies forever preserved and eternal) is to cling defiantly to hunger, to say I don't belong here with normal folks, this space is not mine; I don't suppose there is anything I can do about it–do I deserve to remain unsatiated?
Food is also cultural and local identity. In one scene, the protagonist watches a Korean vegan social media influencer speak about how she is shunned by her community because of rejecting meat: a staple aspect of Korean cuisine (interestingly, this exact idea forms the basis of the The Vegetarian the 2007 novel by Han Kang). She speaks, too, of how much prominence food plays in Asian culture–New Year noodles, rice-cake soup, beans and ceremonial dishes. Food is the most primitive currency of human life, a cultural language that gives places and people their identity. For a vampire, cut off from human meals, there is no tradition, no history. The only way a vampire can experience life is by stealing the lives of others, by glimpsing the memories that pass down through blood and DNA, as an outsider, a parasite.
The allegory of cultural disconnection/conflicted racial identity is mixed with the internalized shame of a body that cannot access the most fundamental of human experiences: to belong to a system, to consume, to be consumed.
I guess you could say it is a good book, and that I have been thinking about it. It is flawed, but still has something new and fresh to say about vampires, about different identities connected to different diets, and about loneliness and marginalization. It made me feel the same way Earthlings (Sayaka Murata) and Walking Practice (Dolki Min) did. Even if I hate the cover and think it is the most uninspiring litfic Caravaggio painting aesthetic, and the cover designer's note is absurdly reductive. Good read for a modern work, that turns vampirism as a concept on its head.
