A youth of college age, his older mistress, friends--random friends,
they might be called--living near an American military base and
experimenting with drugs both hard and soft. 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.
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