Phantoms of the past

Exploring dysfunctionality and human darkness, Japanese style

July 08, 2017 04:00 pm | Updated 04:00 pm IST

It is curious how sometimes the memory of death lives on for so much more than the memory of the life it purloined,” writes Arundhati Roy in her Booker-winning The God of Small Things . The four protagonists of Kanae Minato’s novel must agree. They spend 15 years of their life collectively haunted by the death of their friend, Emily.

This blood-spattered bildungsroman of sorts, begins in a small rural town in Japan, one best known for its “sparkling clean air”. It is Obon, the annual Japanese day to honour the spirits of one’s ancestors, because of which the school grounds are mostly empty and the pool is closed.

Sae, Maki, Akiko, Yuka and their new friend, Emily, a transfer student from Tokyo, are playing volleyball together when a stranger walks up to them asking for some help. Emily goes with him, and does not return alive.

Her grieving mother, Asako, turns her rage towards the four young girls who have seen the killer, but unfortunately cannot identify him. She blames the four girls for the death of her daughter. “Emily was killed because she played with idiots like you. It is your fault. You’re all murderers,” she tells them.

And unfortunately all of them grow up into being exactly that, killers. The phantoms of their past seep into all their lives: from Sae who murders her husband to Maki who shoots an intruder, Akiko who slaughters her once-beloved brother and Yuka who pushes her brother-in-law (and lover) down the stairs. While the four nurse their guilt and confess their crimes to Asako, she comes up with a sudden revelation that frees them “from the curse that’s held you in its spell for so many years.”

The epistolary format of the novel lends itself brilliantly to the narrative: you slip in and out of every character’s skin, leading their shattered lives, witnessing their macabre crimes. The flat, matter-of-fact tonality of each character’s narratives contributes to the overwhelming sense of dread that pervades this admittedly amoral book.

Like a Ruth Rendell or Jonathan Kellerman novel, this is a whydunnit rather than a whodunnit: it is the motive that is more important than the crime itself.

Minato knows how to dissect dysfunctionality, explore human darkness and weave in impending doom with an expert hand, Japanese style, of course. Think Gone Girl trapped in Norwegian Wood. In short, eminently unputdownable.

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