Review of Parade by Shuichi Yoshida (Harvill Secker 2014, Japanese 2002)

Two young men and two young women share an apartment in Tokyo.  Koto barely ventures out into the world, waiting by the phone for her TV star boyfriend to ring.  Ryosuke attends a private college and is having an affair with his friend’s girlfriend.  Mirai manages a shop and spends her spare time either drawing illustrations or partying all night in gay bars.  Naoki works for a film distributor, is a long distance runner, and is frequently drunk.  One day Satoru, a homeless youth, turns up and moves in.  Nobody is quite sure where he came from or what he does, but he’s soon accepted as part of their world.  As they’re lives unfold, they speculate on the strange comings and goings from the apartment next door and the attacks against women in the area.

Parade is somewhat of a curious book.  It is marketed as crime fiction, with a tagline of ‘A masterpiece in tension’, yet crime is almost incidental to the story and there is practically no tension in the story or its telling.  Instead, Parade is a literary novel about alienation and estrangement in modern society; of not quite fitting in, of lacking direction and purpose, of desiring what cannot be obtained.  While the timeline is linear, each of the chapters is told from the perspective of five people sharing an apartment, each of whom has kind of drifted into living there.  Each is told in the first person, with the character reflecting on their own life – their history and ambitions, their relationships with others – and setting out their view of the world.  In this way, a wider narrative about the interactions and friendship between the five is examined, as well as Japanese society more broadly.  It was a sombre rather than tense read, a kind of literary soap opera of urban alienation which, for the most part is a thoughtful reflection on modern life.

Review of Villain by Shuichi Yoshida (Vintage, 2010; Japanese 2007)

Yoshino Ishibashi works as an insurance sales agent, lives in a company apartment, hangs around and bitches with her friends Mako and Sari, and dates men she meets on internet sites while pretending to have a rich boyfriend, Keigo.  After a night out with her girlfriends she leaves them to head to Higashi Park telling them she is going to meet Keigo, but is really going to rendezvous with Yuichi, a quite, serious young construction worker who has travelled over the sinister Mitsuse Pass, that connects Nagasaki with Fukuoka City, to meet her.  The next morning she is found dead on the Pass having been strangled, Keigo has disappeared, and the police launch a murder investigation.  They quickly unravel Yoshino’s double life, but their search for the murderer moves more slowly. 

Villain is a thoughtful and thought-provoking read that could have easily been titled ‘Victim’, since the two roles are thoroughly entwined in Yoshida’s absorbing tale of the murder of a young insurance sales agent.  The great strength of the story is its telling, characterisation, contextualisation, atmosphere and plotting.  While keeping the temporal structure linear, Yoshida tells the tale from multiple perspectives using both third and first person voices to detail the relationships between characters and their interactions.  It’s a technique that works surprisingly well, I suspect because Yoshida’s narrative has an understated style, avoiding any melodrama, and yet captures the subtleties of emotion and human relations.  He does a particularly nice job of detailing the relationships between friends and family members and their petty jealousies, awkward moments, lonely reflections, secret fantasies and encounters.  These are nicely contextualised with respect to the social relations of Japanese society.  The result is a layered, nuanced and interesting tapestry of views that thorough unsettles and blurs any notion of villain and victim, and a compelling plot that charts the aftermath of the murder and how the case unfolds to a resolution, but never from the perspective of the police.  In this sense it’s a kind of police-less procedural.  I especially like the denouement that threw up as many questions as it answered, creating closure but leaving the reader pondering the tale.  In my view an excellent piece of literary crime fiction.