Abstract

Amid the hustle and bustle of the Big City, the main characters of the seven stories that compose the book, start to think about distant and even dream places. Facing crucial issues such as the emptiness and the sense of loss that many people harbor deep in their hearts in some way, the Author poses questions to the reader with subtle philosophical touch with the intention to approach crucial human concerns like death, loneliness, and rebirth, all of them taking place in the city of Tokyo.

Summary of the stories:

The picture of an ideal Moon
‹‹I», the main character, a musician, receives the visit of a man who has lost his daughter. He asks him to produce a CD with the music the girl always liked. Completely at lost at the beginning, he starts to create the music inspired by objects and photographs of her. Little by little the life of this unknown girl gets unveiled for him thanks to all the things she liked when she was alive. That’s the way for ‹‹I» to create his music, as if possessed by her spirit, in a deep contemplation of life and death.


The Pilot and the Forest of Rain in Tokyo

For some reason ‹‹I» becomes interested in Wales when reading a secondhand book about the History of the Aviation in the country that happens to pick up by chance. The book was written by someone named the same as a college classmate. An alumni reunion gives him the opportunity to ask his friend about that and so he discovers the book was written by his father, pilot in Wales for some years. The story of his family brings out one of loss, separation and meeting occurred in two different and distant places.


The city and its outskirts

The crossing fates of a man and a woman, intertwined people’s relations put together and separated, lives woven only by chance, serves the author to wonder if life is really in our hands or beyond our reach. The life of people narrated as a succession of coincidences and depicted with a slightly distant perspective as seen from above.


Lonely place

The main character, Tetsuo, lived with his father and mother, but lost them in quick succession and fell into poor health. Hospitalized for about three months, after being discharged, he feels uncapable of returning to work and begins a kind of stand-by living. His taste for lonely places and his hobby of taking pictures of these environments keeps him busy. His attraction for such places is not only due to a strong anxiety for his own life. Somewhere deep in his mind he superimposes something forgotten, something outside the time but strongly rooted in him. Questions about himself do not bring answers.


String

‹‹I» meets Murauchi, a friend, in a bar for the first time in two years. He tells him about a scene recently witnessed and how this succession of images was actually inside his head since childhood: a threatening string hanging from the ceiling. What is the meaning of this threat? Only after putting himself in a dangerous situation due to the unbearable hardships of his life, he understands the origin of this hanging string that always reminded him the proximity of death.



Soft Rock Fever

Ike has a part-time job at a bookstore for almost a year, but in past he played guitar in a band increasingly popular. The success, the competence with the band leader, the business focused only on sales and profit, takes him apart little by little from his passion for music which has turned into suffering. One day, unable to jump out of the bed, he decided to quitt the band and turned away from music. Chance plays his role eventually and he is invited to play guitar again in a duo. The joy of music reborn and he starts to understand what means for the people being a gifted artist and what really means for him: the discovering of one’s own path.


Slave

Fumiko comes up with the idea of buying a slave. With that purpose in mind, she visits a slave center and start searching in internet but find herself incapable of matching what she wants. Eventually, she decides to visit a slave market recommended by her husband. There she buys one, a young handsome man. Her new life promises a lot of happiness, but five days later the slave run away. Since then Fumiko spends her days realizing the void left by him after his break.

Author’s Information

Ken Nishizaki was born in Aomori Prefecture in 1955. Writer, translator, and Music Label owner. In 2002 won the 14th Japan Fantasy Roman Prize for his work The Garden at the End of the World. He is also the author of The Chronicles of Bandon and Yumini Town Guidebook. As a translator he has bring in Japanese language Virginia Woolf's Short Stories and Hemingway Short Stories, among others.