"All I wanted was to be part of an underground world where the sun doesn't shine, there are no serenades, and the sounds of children's laughter is never, ever heard."

Lui, the main character in Hitomi Kanehara's "Snakes and Earrings," is engaged in a quest that takes her into a dark and marginal world of snakes, dragons and the mythical Kirin. All tattoos, they represent her primal desire to be free and to find the love she never thought she deserved. Body piercing, too, is a central image in this modern Japanese novella; each chapter is introduced not with a title or number, but a gray dot, the symbol of the size of the piercing in Lui's tongue, which enlarges in size as she stretches the hole to produce a fully split forked-tongue. This ritual seems a bit extreme (and, under her ever-hastening execution, blood-drippingly painful), yet it represents her will to change something about herself. As the story progresses, we follow the gray dot, growing along with her courage to change.

"I wondered if changing myself like this could be considered an insult to God, or an act of pure ego. I thought of how my life had no real possessions, no emotional ties, no hatred. And it made me feel that my tattoo, my forked tongue, my future, were all empty of meaning as well."

To be able to change, one must first recognize the problem at hand, and her problem is literally staring Lui in the face. Her violent and underage boyfriend, Ama, whose forked tongue attracted her to this path in the first place, dedicates himself to her fully, so much so that his love stifles her growth and impedes her independence. As the story develops, even his desire to help her overcome her alcoholism becomes a reason to resent his efforts.

Through Ama, the also-underage Lui meets the tattoo artist Shiba-san, who ignites her wild side and with whom she starts a passionate love affair during the process of getting her dream tattoo. Ama and Lui live together in a semblance of domesticity-he holds a job, and when he comes home to her every night, they go out to dinner together-even though she doesn't even know his last name, but it's Lui and Shiba-san's powerful sado-masochistic encounters that leave the characters and the reader enthralled and excited.

We learn early on that Ama is in trouble, and we can deduce the inevitable outcome. Even as Lui tries to protect him, her life spirals inward dizzyingly faster, leaving her questioning her own choices, whether they be pursuit of Shiba-san's desire or the body-alterations. Staring in the mirror, she wonders, "Was this really what I had been chasing after? A useless, empty hole surrounded by raw flesh that glistened with spittle?" Often, one does need to find that deep hole inside in order to have the courage to climb back out of it. The final scenes of this book leave us with some hope for Lui and this twisted love triangle.