Remembering Technology

This short fiction is from the collection The Woman Dies (Europa, 2025), Aoko Matsuda’s feminist tales from Japan that blend humor, surrealism, and sharp social critique.

Your first ever technology tastes just like melon soda. It’s the exact same luminous green as the melon soda that is dispensed by those technological devices. A shade that barely seems real, like the neon-colored emeralds on the flyers for the jewelry stores my mom used to look at. When I bring the cup up to my mouth, technology pops and crackles, jumping up beneath my nose. I put technology to my lips. Technology fizzes and flies in my mouth. I reel witth delight at how it tastes. The flavor barely seems real. The smell barely seems real. With my teeth, I crunch the bits of ice that have been crushed into identical shapes by a technological device. If I don’t finish it quickly, the paper cup will grow floppy. The outside of the cup is already soaked with condensation. Hurriedly I drink the technology down. I feel the power of technology welling up inside me, filling my entire body.

Technology fizzes and pops. Technology is a beautiful color. It’s always like that. I tilt my head up and shake the small bag above my open lips, and technology crackles and jumps inside my mouth like fireworks. I use the magic wand of technology to refine technology, over and over again, like the witches on TV showed me how. When you refine technology, it changes color. It changes taste. It tastes even better. With a big grin on my face, I lick technology from a plastic spoon. I pour water onto technology, and a stream of tiny bubbles goes rising up, then technology comes cascading out of the cup in all its lurid glory. Technology dyes our tongues in an instant, and makes them go numb. We poke out our tongues at each other, examining their new strange colors, then cackle with insane laughter. Technology inflates. Technology sets. Technology dissolves. Technology glows. Technology flows. Technology festers. Technology knows no limits. Technology bewitches like magic does.

I put technology to my lips. Technology fizzes and flies in my mouth. I reel with delight at how it tastes.

For as long as we can remember, we have been obsessed with technology. We adore it. After all, we are the children of science! We always will be, however old we get. Just imagining a life without technology makes us want to die of boredom. An existence like that is unthinkable. We remember technology fondly. We think back to the various things with which we used to share our lives that have since disappeared, and we feel a sense of nostalgia. We love the new bits of technology that appear before us unconditionally. We are good friends with technology. The bonds that tie us are ever so strong. Way, way stronger than those we have with history or whatever. And they say we’ve descended from apes! From those shaggy old things! That we used to live in caves! Please! All that stuff has no relation to us. It’s just stuff you learn in social studies class. Just stuff to fill in on tests. With the pencils that technology has bestowed upon us—mechanical pencils! Remember those rocket pencils, with all those little lead sections whose order you could change around? They were the product of technology too. Though of course, those rockets couldn’t actually fly. Unfortunately.

We couldn’t give a toss about history and past ages and all that tedious nonsense. We really don’t feel there’s any need to “take the broader view” with any of this stuff. You can leave that crap to the guys with too much time on their hands as far as we’re concerned. We’re going to live the lives we want. We want to really feel technology—with our own eyes, with our own minds. Our very own technology. The technology that brings a twinkle to our eyes like nothing else. Then it will become part of our memories. Our most precious memories.

Even as we speak, we’re walking around with technology in our hands. We listen to technology as we smell technology. We get on technology, and enter technology. We choose the very best technology. The technology we choose is so slick it makes us swoon. We show off our technology. We boast about it. We size it up. We stamp our feet in frustrated envy at our friends’ technology. We compete with our technology. Bang! Crash! Boom! Our technology explodes. We use our technology to start over, overwrite what was there before. We plead with our technology: Make me win, make me win, make me win, make me win. Our lives are made of technology.

We walk alongside technology, we delight in technology, we grieve over technology, we are saved by technology, we bemoan technology’s limits, we feel gratitude for technology’s power, we lie down surrounded by technology, and close our eyes for eternity. We are chosen by technology. Technology burns our bodies, buries us in the earth, then quickly moves on. Technology is busy. Technology doesn’t have time to look back to the past. Technology has no need for our memories.

Translation from the Japanese