In rapidly sketched scenes gliding from the everyday real to the hallucinatory, the author has used what he himself calls his "narrative zoom lens." The novel is all but plotless, but the imagery is tellingly vivid, "the literary equivalent of genre painting," according to one critic.
The participants seem caught in their hard-rock scene, sadly unfree, having neither the will nor the energy to break away. And over all there seems to hang the heavy shadow of self-destructiveness, not only in terms of their present situation but with regard to what the future holds for them--and the question is inescapable, for human society as well? In this mirror reflecting the present, personal relations deteriorate, violence of the moment erupts, and communication inches slowly towards nullity. One asks, eventually, if the hallucinations, whatever their source, are so very far from the vague misgivings and hopeful imaginings of the man in the street.
The author coolly and unsentimentally distills from this morass a feeling of something pure and unsullied. His technique, with its lack of taboos, of moral condemnation, and of the superfluous, comes very close to the insouciance of cinema verite, in which there is also a touch of surrealism.
Representing a sharp and conscious turning away from the introspective trend of postwar Japanese literature, this work polarized critics and public alike and soon attracted international attention, a sign of winds of change, if not specifically of things to come.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
All the time, since I didn't know when, I'd been surrounded by this whitish curving.
The fragment of glass with the blood on its edge, as it soaked up the dawn air, was almost transparent.
It was a boundless blue, almost transparent. I stood up, and as I walked toward my own apartment, I thought, I want to become like this glass. And then I want to reflect this smooth white curving myself. I want to show other people these splendid curves reflected in me.
The edge of the sky blurred with light, and the fragment of glass soon clouded over. When I heard the songs of birds, there was nothing reflected in the glass, nothing at all.
Beside the poplar in front of the apartment lay the pineapple I'd thrown out yesterday. From its moist cut end there still drifted the same smell.
I crouched down on the ground and waited for the birds.
If the birds dance down and the warm light reaches here, I guess my long shadow will stretch over the gray birds and the pineapple and cover them.
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