data.î Akemi plays with language on a physical level, both by folding the paper it inhabits into other forms and by the visual rearrangement of the left-to-right reading/writing convention, Akemi warps the ìgrid,î literally re-presenting her thoughts in her own image, the outline of her icon. Nonetheless, the purely graphic does not fully erase the grid, the graphic line asserting its presence through its calculated absence.

      Akemiís warping exercise dramatizes the attempted revision of language and its capacity to depict abstraction, yet unwittingly insists on the tenacity of the grid. Akemiís note does not stand alone on the page, but ensconced within the doctorís analytical framework. In this way, her dynamic model of multiple constructions and deconstructions finds itself subject to psychoanalytical evaluation, itself a form of reading and historicizing. Akemiís note sits assembled on the page, surrounded by the doctorís written analyses. The note is written in many colors, as the doctor says: ìI had been giving her a different colored pen to use for a corresponding day of the week to simplify my records.î Instead, the doctor must draw arrows towards differently colored segments in order to discern/assert chronology (blue Monday, purple pen SaturdayÖetcÖ), so that she is, in a sense, disassembling the note into its constituent parts once

more, despite the psychologistís efforts at recombination. Moreover, each origami segment has its own individual three dimensional character, a communicative and creative aspect that is lost when reshaped into a flat note. This page creates a sense of a desktop, a picture of Akemi and the original origami butterfly taped to its surface. There exists then a visual juxtaposition between the real and its representation, neither having any interpretive primacy. In this way, Mack problematizes simple reading, the process of reading deflected to the entire transformative space offered by origami. In this page, reading and writing become conflated, the reader complicit in the creative process. Moreover, Akemiís note must be created in terms of its component fragments with the secondary hope of assembly, a practice manifesting Mackís creative project. At the end of Skin Deep, Mack publishes some of his rough drafts and scripts: his script exposes the nature of his writing process. He uses different colored pens for speech accorded to different characters, fragmenting sentences on the script to depict caption breaks between different images. Both Mack and Akemiís psychoanalyst rely on color as a means of separating and categorizing. Akemi subverts the psychoanalystís color-coding schema, making her initial plan for order completely unworkable. Fracture seems inbuilt into this project, but itís uncertain if consolidation is viable. Not only is Mackís original means of organizing character internally unstable, he may not have the capacity for holistic representation, relying on another letterer to produce Akemiís handwriting. Moreover, his control over that which he reveals suggests his script segment to be more of a performance of exposure rather than an actual risk of unguarded expression. Shunned vulnerability infuses this text, upending the hope for an altered state of expression.

     While the nature of origami tugs writing into a problematic space, there exist a limited number of permutations this language system can undertake. In his afterword, John Sayles says:

One of the keys to Davidís work here is the nature of the kanji carved on Kabukiís face. Kanji are Chinese derived calligraphic paintings that represent things, actions, concepts, carrying a multitude of cultural and personal associations ‚ in some ways more pictures than words. As Kabukiís story progresses David creates new kanji ‚ an adolescent boy holding a samurai sword, a masked woman dressed in a Japanese flag, the keys of a pianoÖWhat David has accomplished is to make his principle characterís thought, literally, graphic. (3)

While Sayles identifies the proliferation of a new graphic semantics in Kabuki, he simplifies these historical markers into easily distinguished categories of language. Saylesí mention of kanji offers a means of thinking about recurring symbols in the text, but does not address the shifting textual bodies that attempt to represent Kabuki. Confounded graphic syntax confers the capacity to attempt representation in manifold forms of description. However, these multiple approaches become entangled without order, only capable of partially representing character.

potentials finally empty themselves of meaning, evading semiotic cohesion.

     In Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism, Jerome McGann discusses the work of Robert Carlton (ìBobî) Brown. In the first page of his poem ìLa Vie Americaine,î Brown addresses God in a poem (ìYes God/ Iíve looked around/ Seen the quaint devices and/ Funny commonplaces you bragged aboutÖî). On the lower left hand side of the poem, an unremarkable black smudge emerges under careful scrutiny to be Godís cryptic poetic response (ìI, who am God,/ Wear lavender pajamas and/ Pure poetryÖî). It ìrequires either an eagleís eye or a magnifying glass to be read, tell[ing] its story simultaneously as a lexical and typographical message.î(4) Brown believed in words as dramatically mobile, his smudge here, a barely discernible sign, containing an entire performance of meaning. Yet this meaning emerges only on close inspection, conceivably nonexistent without an active search for it. Brownís effort to construct semiotic value in ìLa Vie Americaineî emerges from a desire to exert control over all existing signs in a text. In this way, Brownís use of multiplicity in his poem would serve as antithesis to Mackís, who uses multiplicity to undermine the very notion of semiotic value and representation.

for different characters. Buddha, an enigmatic, ostensibly psychic inmate, rearranges the tiles that Kabuki has put in her pocket, spelling out: ìon he b eye retina escape,î alluding to the glass eye one of the inmates has exchanged with an unwitting orderly that, subject to retinal scan, will allow Kabukiís escape. In this fashion, words serve as liberators, driving narrative action forward. However, in the very same chapter, when Kabuki and Angel exchange the necklace tiles that label inmates, they inadvertently become meaningless through rearrangement, ìIBAKUKî not some obscure cipher. Overinterpretive reading, or a belief in the fiction of fully determined signs, does not necessarily yield meaning.

     The same semiotic conflict emerges with iconography. Kabukiís first exposure to Akemiís character arrives in her simplified self-portrait, an icon that accentuates the other pictoral signs in the novel. The Masks of the Noh agents serve also as icons, though they lack distinctive senses of character. Kabuki has no icon, nor can she create one; her struggle for self-representation expressed in the dichotomy between her face and her mask. Moreover, Akemiís icon retains its status as a sign through the novel, but slowly empties itself of symbolic meaning through her development as a character. In Part 5, Akemiís iconized image proliferates into a graphic multitude, her face represented in sixteen different artistic genres: her icon no longer enough to contain her.