Extract: Kitten, by Olive Nuttall

Rosemary, a trans girl, has many conflicting qualities. She’s super smart but flawed, polyamorous but timid, promiscuous but inexperienced. She’s surprising, and surprised by herself.

A call that Rosemary’s grandmother is dying puts her on the bus from Te Whanganui-a-Tara back to Kirikiriroa. There, with her mother, half-sister, and other family and friends, she remembers the damage of her past. And then Thorn – Rosemary’s long-distance daddy – shows up.

Often wildly funny, and with a tender, matter-of-fact closeness to the enigmatic Rosemary, kitten has the wisdom that nothing in life is straightforwardly good or bad. It is a novel for readers who want to be seen and understood, or to see and understand.

For all its darkness and hurt, kitten is a wholesome and consoling love story.

Extracted from kitten by Olive Nuttall, published by Te Herenga Waka University Press, RRP $38.00. I lifted my arms, and John wrapped me in a tight hug. I had to tiptoe. Thank gods I’d never outgrown him.

‘Good job. You made it.’

John let me go, and then there was Fi. I hugged her tight. Fi’s body is small and strong. She complains all the time about her so-called broad shoulders. Apparently, she’s tall for a woman, but she isn’t taller than me. In my arms, she felt light and architectural.

Now Fi stepped back. She had the same deep-set gothic eyes as me, but where my hair fell into fine ringlets, hers was thick and wild. When Fi got home from the hairdresser, it would be flat and compliant for as long as she could hold off from washing it. I think Fi preferred it like that, before the first wash, but to me she looked most herself at the end of a day’s work in the kiln-shed: clay on her overalls, earth flaking from her fingertips up to her elbows, jaw set with determination, and hair pulled back into two mud-streaked pigtails.

‘It’s good to have you here.’

I smiled, unsure. I was starving.

We sat around the table in the soft light of a floor lamp. Fi reached out and pulled a dusty oil heater closer to her. Me and Hannah ate from the half-empty pots on the table. Moosewood-esque dal and nutty brown rice. Very cheap. Very delicious. Like everything Fi cooked.

John nursed a jug of homebrew. He’d taken up homebrewing at the height of the craft beer craze, learning from Coopers home kits. These days he brewed from scratch and even grew his own hops. The beer, he insisted, tasted much better than the stuff they used to drink when he was a kid and it didn’t even give you the shits. At this point, I guess you would have called his tool shed a microbrewery? As far as I could tell, the salient fact was: a microbrewer, who regularly sampled his product, was an artisan, or at least a passionate hobbyist, but a regular guy, who knocked back a sixpack of Lion Brown every night, was something else entirely. John stretched out on the floor beside the low table and quietly passed out. Hannah poured herself a beer from John’s jug.

‘Are you going back to school next year? Or are you going to stay on at the café?’ Fi presented it as a neutral question. Like both options were equally good.

But they weren’t really, were they? I knew what she wanted for me. I also did actually want to go back to uni, so I launched into an explanation of my thesis as if I’d already been accepted into the master’s programme.

Fi doesn’t watch anime, she doesn’t laugh at memes, and she certainly doesn’t know what a catgirl waifu is. This made it a little challenging to illustrate the links between anime, modern orientalism, and the trans feminine aesthetics that I wanted to study. It didn’t help that I hadn’t really fully developed a cohesive idea of what those links were myself. I pulled up an image of an anime catgirl on my phone and Fi squinted through her reading glasses at it. The catgirl wore a skimpy sailor-style school uniform, and had impossible tits, a tiny waist, huge sparkling eyes, heavy pink blush, cat ears poking through her long purple hair, and a tail.

‘This is the beauty standard for trans girls!’ I sighed. ‘It isn’t enough just to be a woman; we’re supposed to look like some sweaty gamer boy’s wet dream. It’s ridiculous.’

Fi looked from the picture to me and back again. ‘So you don’t want to look like this?’

We both looked down at my short tennis skirt, crop top, choker, and fishnet tights.

Hannah laughed.

‘Okay, okay.’ I shrugged. ‘But I don’t just wanna write about beauty standards. The catgirl thing is one part of it, but more importantly, anime girls, especially magical-girls, are just, like, very appealing to trans girls and queers in general.’ I rummaged through my tote for my hand-translated copy of Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon #29. ‘This high school girl, Usagi, transforms by magic into a beautiful intergalactic warrior! And she’s feminine and powerful and ditsy and heroic, and she has a whole team of other magical girls who support and fight with her, and it’s all written by a Japanese woman, in like, the nineties.’

Fi had kind of a blank look, but I wanted her to get it, so I pushed on. ‘See here, there are even explicitly queer characters! There’s a butch/femme lesbian couple in this volume, and like, in the later ones, there’s a team of galactic soldiers who pretend to be schoolboys but transform into their true form, magical-girls, when it’s time to do battle.’

Fi flicked through the manga. ‘They’re still wearing those tiny little skirts though, aren’t they?’

I closed my eyes. I knew I’d lost the thread of my argument. To be honest, I wasn’t quite sure what the argument I’d been trying to make was, but I also really really wanted Fi to understand why this was all so important. ‘When they dubbed the anime for the US, they edited all the dialogue to try and turn the femme and her butch into like, uncomfortably intimate cousins instead of lesbian lovers—because obviously that was preferable to having dykes on TV. When you watch the US version, it honestly just looks like incest, which is, coincidentally, one of the most frequently searched keywords on porn sites over there.’

I opened my eyes. The silence was uncomfortable.

Hannah looked from Fi’s face to mine. ‘So did you study that in the English literature half or the Japanese language half of your BA?’

I sighed. ‘Neither.’

‘Well, I’m sure it’s very interesting,’ Fi said. Kitten is available in all good bookstores now.