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In On Parole, Akira Yoshimura charts a tightly directed plot over a very basic premise -- a man gets out of prison on parole. Of course, the sheer simplicity of the story proves easier said than done for the parolee, Kikutani, a former high school teacher released after being imprisoned 16 years for murder. In this novel, Yoshimura gives us no sense of release, of happiness, or of freedom. Instead he describes an insurmountable series of emotional and psychological conflicts that eventually opens up into a broad portrayal of modern human life.
As with many Japanese novels, the limited focus allows for an abundance of detail that reveals quirks, oddities and anxieties of everyday life that normally go unnoticed. The novel starts in prison, where we see the rigidly controlled life a prisoner endures. With Kikutani's release into the hands of a parole officer and halfway house, the complexity of not being controlled comes into sharp, ironic contrast.
Everything from deciding when to wake up to buying a pair of shoes is a burdensome and enervating task for someone who has made virtually no decisions in 16 years. After purchasing a heater in a Shinjuku department store, Kikutani tries to calm down. "Nothing to be afraid of, he told himself; you simply hand over the money, and they give you the goods." This adrenaline-provoking indecision of his first major purchase exposes the normally unspoken anxiety in consumer psychology. We are used to it, but he is not. Maybe we shouldn't be, Yoshimura slyly, indirectly suggests. Little by little, we watch Kikutani become like us and we notice our situation is perhaps ultimately not so different from his.
The adaptation to the phenomenal change in Tokyo is highly disturbing to Kikutani. Driving into the urban center of Tokyo that he has not seen in 16 years, "Kikutani stared at the tranquil, creeping line of cars in wonder. A moment later, he was enveloped in thick, overpowering odors. Food, gasoline, chemicals, paint, perfume - his head was filled with a complex cocktail of smells. He grimaced, feeling suffocated." Who hasn't felt this way?
But little by little, he becomes desensitized, finds an apartment, a job at a chicken farm, and even companionship. Getting paid, watching TV, shopping all become surprisingly pleasurable, once he gets accustomed to them. Celebrating his first payday, he buys a beer and slugs it down alone in his new apartment.
Laughter came welling up in his throat: he had supposedly made some progress getting used to life again, but it amazed him to discover that it took only a sip of beer to make him drunk. The sixteen-year void in his life seemed huge to him now, and he realized how hard he would still have to work to bury those years, to make his life indistinguishable from other people's. If he drank a lot, eventually he'd get used to it again! A kind of euphoria enveloped him, and he sat in the middle or his room, laughing and laughing.
This is the one, single note of humor in the novel, however. Human interaction, of course, proves more difficult for Kikutani than any of the physical or emotional challenges. Regulated interactions at work, with shopkeepers, with his parole officer, are easy compared to facing what his crime meant to those involved. Simply put, the past catches up with him.
Tokyo's immensity fails to provide shelter, anonymity or distance. It's as if the city has become too big for an individual to live comfortably. Even when Kikutani returns to visit the small town in Chiba where he had lived, he finds more confusion than nostalgic comfort.
He could barely make out the names of the stations as his express flew by, but he was amazed to see how many sleepy little whistle-stops had become bustling forests of big buildings. The transformation was so complete that he worried that he had somehow got on the wrong line.
Or that Tokyo is on the wrong line, or that modern life is. Here, Yoshimura's strategy of focusing on the life of one former prisoner opens up into a broad metaphoric sense of critical generalization. Kikutani's problem becomes ironically, and fatalistically, ours.
This approach to story-telling is similar to Yoshimura's Sparkles in the Darkness on which Shohei Imamura based his recent award-winning film "Unagi." Kikutani even has fish instead of an eel. On Parole is also similar to the story of the ironic workings of fate in his previously translated novel Shipwrecks, about a feudal-era fishing village that considers shipwrecks, like fish, as bounty from the sea. Both novels, like the film, evoke haunting, powerful images of ordinary lives playing out highly determined patterns of revenge, repetition, and inevitable consequences.
On Parole captivates. In one simple, direct, very human story, Yoshimura carefully and accurately creates a detailed picture of the claustrophobic anxiety of life in Tokyo, where space, people, prices all serve as imprisoning walls.
Reviewed
by Michael Pronko, April 2001
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