The End of the Moment we had
Book review:
This award-winning novella consists of two short stories by Japanese playwright and theatre director Toshiki Okada, exploring themes of solitude and alienation.
Told in a hyper-realistic, flowing stream-of-consciousness style with shifting narrative perspectives, Okada provides snapshots into the lives of low-wage Japanese people in the early 2000s, when Japan was in a period of economic stagnation following the burst of the economic bubble. In depicting the indifference and ennui felt by young Japanese men and women of the generation, Okada plays with heavy underlying themes of loneliness and disconnect between people.
The first and titular story is a reworking of Okada’s play ‘Five Days in March’. On the eve of the Iraq War, a man and woman meet at a nightclub and go to a love hotel in Shibuya. They spend five days together, trying to ignore the passage of time, shut off from the rest of the world, never turning on the TV and venturing out only to eat, while antiwar protests go on in the background.
In the second story, ‘My Place in Plural’, a woman calls in sick to work and spends the day in bed alone in a dank, mouldy apartment, browsing internet blogs and contemplating life while her husband works his second job at a drugstore.
The fragmented and nonlinear storytelling gives the stories a dreamlike quality. The unconventional form in which the stories are written can be hit-or-miss for readers. A quick read at 122 pages, Okada captures fleeting moments in time.
Shelf: 913.6 OKA
[Watashitachi ni yurusareta tokubetsu na jikan no owari. English].
The end of the moment we had.
by Toshiki Okada ; translated by Sam Malissa.
London : Pushkin Press, 2018.
122 pages ; 20 cm.
First published in Japan in 2007.
Translated into English from the Japanese.
Winner, Kishida Kunio Drama award.
ISBN: 978-1-78227-416-2
Table of contents:
- The end of the moment we had.
- My place in plural. “Interpersonal relations.
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