Spent Bullets by Terao Tetsuya, translated from the Chinese by Kevin Wang, HarperVia, 2025
In his now-ubiquitous essay “The Myth of Sisyphus,” Albert Camus compares Sisyphus to an office worker. “The workman of today works every day in his life at the same tasks, and this fate is no less absurd,” Camus claims, comparing middle management to his titular hero. Now, in Spent Bullets, a dystopian, propulsive short story collection, the Taiwanese writer Terao Tetsuya renders Camus’s absurd workmen as a contemporary group of computer scientists, whose extraordinary brilliance belies the banality of their striving. (“Terao Tetsuya” is the pen name of Tsao Cheng-hao, taken from the names of manga characters Koichi Terao in “Over Drive” and Tetsuya Kuroko in “Kuroko’s Basketball.”)
Spent Bullets contains nine interlocking stories, following its central characters from junior high school to National Taiwan University to Silicon Valley. They are loosely constellated around the suicide of the impossibly gifted Jie-Heng, who, after reaching the upper echelons of a Californian tech firm, throws himself off a balcony in Las Vegas. The core cast of characters is rounded out by Ming-Heng, a college classmate and juvenile Go champion, and the Machiavellian Wu Yi-Hsiang (the only character given a family name), lover and tormentor of Jie-Heng. Other characters float at the periphery, including Hsiao-Hua, a classmate whose botched suicide attempt leaves her paralyzed, and Hsin-Ning, a lesbian classmate with whom Jie-Heng enters into an engagement of convenience.
Each of the stories—narrated in the first person by Jie-Heng, Ming-Heng, or Wu Yi-Hsiang—is a universe in and of itself, a crystalline snapshot of a life. The identity of the narrator is often unclear until midway through, through Terao occasionally leaves it ambiguous until the end, creating a sense that the characters’ predicaments are in some sense universal. Presented non-chronologically, the stories sketch the outline of Jie-Heng’s life and afterlife, starting with his ill-fated attraction to Wu Yi-Hsiang in a cutthroat Taipei junior high school (“Flatworm ∀”), and ending with Ming-Heng and Wu’s yearly pilgrimage to the casinos of Las Vegas, the site of Jie-Heng’s suicide (“Interstate 5” and “Las Vegas”). The rest of the book fills in the details of the intervening decades, from their drug- and anxiety-addled tenure in the computer science department of National Taiwan University (“Healthy Sickness”), to Jie-Heng’s early-career struggles as a gay Taiwanese man in the Bay Area (“Flatworm ∅” and “Some Kind of Corporate Retreat”), to the inevitable disappointments of professional success (“Flatworm ∄”). The brilliant, tortured Jie-Heng, and the complexity of his relationships to Wu and Ming-Heng, are the core around which the book rotates, and the stories that deviate from the exploration of these relationships sometimes feel tacked-on, despite adding color and backstory; “The Avalanche Joseki” depicts Ming-Heng’s deliberate sabotage of his Go career in response to his father’s jealousy, and “Hian-Tsai Si Hit Tsit-Kang” details a trip to a San Francisco protest in support of Taiwan’s 2014 Sunflower Movement.
Terao’s view of the tech sector and the Taiwanese education system is either clear-eyed or pessimistically Hobbesian—in his writing, one can detect more than a little resentment toward the Silicon Valley milieu in which the author himself was ensconced before abdicating in favor of literature. The characters not only seem to care little for each other, but also view their own lives as expendable, having internalized the perceived interchangeability of tech workers. As early as junior high school, Wu Yi-Hsiang is depicted with the calculated malice of a dictator. “He never got his hands dirty,” Jie-Heng narrates in “Flatworm ∀”: “He usually delegated the work of tormenting me to subordinates.” At the end of the story, the two play video games in the air-conditioned opulence of Wu’s Taipei home; Jie-Heng loses spectacularly, and Wu tells him: “A person like you can’t survive in the world.” These twelve-year-olds already possess an instinct for the way that power and domination can disrupt and reorder the presumptions of meritocracy. When Jie-Heng is first in his class by a wide margin, Wu steals his ranking by wielding his popularity to intimidate Jie-Heng into giving him his homework.
This display of scorn for one’s peers doesn’t end in adolescence. Later, in college, Wu helps his classmate Hsiao-Hua climb over the guardrail at the edge of a roof, watching placidly as she attempts suicide, which leads to her paralysis. Jie-Heng has violent fantasies about torturing the other party to a car crash he causes. The characters talk cavalierly about how much their life insurance policies will pay out upon their deaths. Most notably, Jie-Heng’s sexual experiences, particularly those involving Wu, are depicted with violence. Jie-Heng craves submission, and Wu is happy to provide, calling him a “worthless worm” before subjecting him to his desired form of sexual humiliation. All the while, relentless competition and the slog through the trenches of the tech world saps their joy.
The fatalism with which the characters view their own lives is complicated by their lack of regret. Hsiao-Hua is completely paralyzed but for her left eye, with which she uses an infrared eye tracker to communicate. She laboriously types that she has “Not— a— bit— of— regret— I— have— not— a— bit— of— regret.” Later, on their annual trip to Las Vegas, Wu asks Ming-Heng, “You’re still saying that if you could do it all over again, you’d choose the exact same life?” Ming-Heng answers that he would. The central contradiction of this fatalism and lack of regret is difficult to square: Why would the characters again choose a life of misery, a life that they themselves seem to view as disposable? Moreover, why do the characters covet such an empty form of success, relentlessly accumulating money only for the sake of having more of it? The answer lies in Terao’s author’s note at the end of the book, in which he entreats the reader to behold “the sacred, crystalline beauty of their striving forms.” Stating that he intends the experience of reading this book to be “above all, aesthetic in nature,” Terao claims not to make “social commentary or indictments.”
The act of imbuing struggle with beauty has a precedent in tongzhi literature, a form of LGBT writing that originated in Taiwan in the 1990s, which tends to focus on the identity-related struggles faced by LGBT people. (Tongzhi, literally translating to “comrade,” is a colloquial Mandarin term for LGBT people, often used by queer activist movements in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau.) The choice of Wang as a translator also underscores a reading of Spent Bullets as a part of the genre; Wang has translated the work of literary icon Chi Ta-wei, whose 1996 novella, The Membranes, is often cited as a prototypical example of tongzhi literature. “Flatworm ∅,” in which Jie-Heng alternates between attending a support group for Bay Area Taiwanese gay men and sessions of Christian conversion therapy, is the story most clearly situated within tongzhi writing—yet the throughline of Jie-Heng’s relationship with Wu, a push and pull between love and violence, between care and degradation, is also reminiscent of the doomed affairs that proliferate in other classics of tongzhi literature like Qiu Miaojin’s Notes of a Crocodile and Chu T’ien Wen’s Notes of a Desolate Man.
Suicide, in tongzhi literature, is a trope so common that it would take many pages to list the works in which it is present. In the afterward to his translation of Qui Miaojin’s Last Words from Montmartre, scholar Ari Heinrichs writes: “. . . in East Asian societies, suicide has a different range of cultural meanings distinct from the familiar pathologized, criminalized, or theologically proscribed models in the West . . . we should try to understand [suicide] . . . as a kind of speech act, as the ultimate means of sealing the connection between art and life.” To view Jie-Heng’s life aesthetically, as Terao requests, entails seeing his suicide as a kind of coda: by dying in his prime, after having achieved the height of his aspirations, his life can be viewed only as ascendant. He will never age or fall from grace or become unremarkable. At one point, on a tirade directed at the young son of an immigrant colleague, Jie-Heng cries: “Life has no point once you’re better than everyone else. Life still has no point once you’ve managed to please everyone else.” His suicide, in the context of the tongzhi suicide trope, can be understood as returning meaning and purpose to this meaningless life, an interpretation that redeems Terao’s request to view Jie-Heng’s struggle as beautiful.
Camus, however, does not view suicide as redemptive, famously arguing that suicide “does not represent the logical outcome of revolt” against life’s absurdity. Sisyphus does not die as he approaches the summit of the hill, but must again descend and struggle back upwards. At the end of Spent Bullets, Ming-Heng and Wu Yi-Hsiang are still alive, paying tribute to Jie-Heng by getting wasted at Las Vegas strip clubs and making offerings of yogurt cups pilfered from corporate snack bars to Jie-Heng’s ghost. They never see beyond the pain of their own striving. One ought not to regard Jie-Heng and his friends as absurd heroes; we, the readers, are. We become aware of the beauty of their struggle in seeing their lives depicted on the page, and in doing so, are able to see the beauty that such striving may give our own lives. As Camus wrote of Sisyphus: “The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory.”
Maya Rubin is an MA candidate in Foreign Languages and Literatures at National Taiwan University. Previously, she was a Fulbright Scholar in Taiwan. She holds a BA in Philosophy from Wellesley College.
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