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Crossfire by Miyuki Miyabe
A young Japanese woman, Junko Aoka, wields tremendous pyrokinetic power, being able to cause people to explode into flame with such force that she causes their necks to break first. This means they do not, as a consequence, suffer too badly. And those she chooses to kill are, she believes, perfectly suitable candidates for extra-judicial killing.
In the Tokyo at the fag end of the twentieth century (CROSSFIRE was first published in Japan in 1998), society seems to have stagnated, with innovation, drive and discipline replaced by delinquency and violent crime. Gangs of young men kidnap, torture and murder teenaged girls for no apparent reason than short term thrills and they are aided by their complicit parents. The police are handcuffed, figuratively, by a legal system that does too little to protect the innocent and too much to respect the guilty. Why should Junko not use her power as the weapon, the loaded gun that she believes herself to be?
So far, so good for another vigilante story in which we can expect a series of violent escapades leading up to the inevitable death of the heroine. Is there any more to this book than this? The literary judges of Japan seem to think so because they have awarded MIYUKI MIYABE the Naoki Prize, which is a leading Japanese prize for popular fiction. CROSSFIRE, as were her two other novels, Shadow Family and All She Was Worth, has been enormously successful in terms of sales.
It is also certainly true that her plotting and to a slightly lesser extent her characterization subverts expectations. The vigilante action takes place in the first third of the book and is then largely set aside as, instead, we follow Junko's seduction into a form of underground organization that presents itself as a new family for her. Since she has lived her life in intense loneliness after the deaths of her parents and her inability to form a relationship with any other people, the appeal of this group becomes irresistible.
Junko's progress is mirrored by that of a teenaged girl, Kaori, who also shows signs of being a firestarter and whose talents are slowly destroying the family around her. Junko's powers are much greater and, at a similar age to Kaori, she accidentally caused a young boy to be burnt to death. This incident becomes more important to the plot subsequently when the boy's relationship to another character is revealed.
All the while, Junko is being stalked, albeit at something of a distance, by the police and, notably, by the female detective Chikako. Chikako represents in some senses the dutiful servant of the state for not only does she pursue her police work with dogged tenacity but she is also a dutiful wife, accepting of her salaryman husband's typically Japanese behaviour. Her family is representative of all that Junko has missed, the gentle tedium of the bourgeois world and the absence of the flame of invention.
All of this is managed in an understated fashion and parallels and echoes only emerge after the initial rush of events has passed. Indeed, it would be quite possible to read the whole book as an adventure story without noticing anything else about it apart from the way that the action generally slows as the book continues.
Contemporary Japanese fiction frequently takes as one of its main themes the reidentification and reinvention of post-war society. The undertone of desire for strictly enforced discipline and order recurs as a common motif and there is a tendency to see all undesirable effects of the modern world as lending more credence to what would be the benefits of adherence to a semi-fascist, militaristic society. Those people able to see beyond this vision, which is magnetically appealing but very obviously disastrous to the soul of the country, are left rudderless and adrift. They represent society as a whole, of course, which many feel has, like Britain after the loss of empire, lost an identity and has yet to find a role. These considerations could be ignored while the Japanese economy was booming and the helter skelter pursuit of consumer goods kept people busy. However, the bubble has long given way to a slow and painful deflation. CROSSFIRE is representative of this post-bubble literature of malaise.
John Walsh
25/03/2006
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John Walsh is Assistant Professor at Shinawatra International University, Bangkok. |
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