Tōno Haruka 遠野遥. Hakyoku 破局. Kawada Shobō, 2020.
This shared the 163rd Akutagawa Prize, for early 2020. Tōno (son of a rock star) debuted in 2019, and this was his second book; born in 1991, he’s evidently the first Prizewinner to be born in the Heisei era.
Hakyoku 破局 can be translated as crisis, or even (in the literary sense) catastrophe; or breakdown or rupture, and as such is sometimes used to discuss the collapse of a relationship. Both senses seem appropriate here. The book traces the breakdown of several relationships: a guy and his girlfriend, the guy and his next girlfriend, the same guy and his best friend, the same guy and his rugby coach/mentor. As it works through these changes, the story is inexorably moving toward some sort of violent conclusion, which when it comes feels both unexpected and inevitable. It’s a neat and well-constructed book in that sense.
It’s narrated by and centered around Yōsuke, a senior at Keiō University (not named but strongly implied). Yōsuke was a high school rugby star; he’s not playing in college but is advising his old high school team, working with his old coach. He’s getting ready to graduate, taking the entry exams for government service, a path he’s evidently been on his whole life, as he has no plan B. He has a girlfriend who’s aiming at a career in politics, and a best friend who’s trying to break into stand-up comedy. Over the course of the story he breaks it off with the poli-sci girlfriend (Maiko) and starts a relationship with Akari, a freshman he meets at his friend’s farewell stand-up show. 
Over the course of the story each of these relationships sours. At first it seems like his former coach is a kind of life-mentor, a role that we might imagine Yōsuke is set to play in the lives of his own players, but by the end he and his former coach are drifting apart, while we learn that the high school players resent Yōsuke for driving them too hard. The comic friend, struggling with a choice between getting a real job and pursuing his stand-up dream, is present mostly in the form of one-sided phone conversations to which Yōsuke contributes nothing. Maiko is becoming more distant as she spends more time with the older politician she’s interning with. And while things start promisingly with Akari, by the end she has developed what appears to be a sex addiction, and she leaves Yōsuke when she learns he slept with Maiko behind her back.
This summary makes it sound like a pretty fully-populated book, but it’s crucial to the author’s aim (I think) that all of these secondary characters are kept at a distance. Yōsuke’s narration focuses entirely on his own experience of these situations, with very few expressions of interest in what these other people are going through. He’s self-centered, to say the least; a lot of the book is taken up with descriptions of his daily routine – how he works out, what he eats, when he masturbates. His friends seem at times to be no more than parts of his routine.
The question is, why?
The book is being sold as a kind of existential examination of contemporary college life; this makes it sound like a millennial answer to Nantonaku crystal, and it’s possible to read it that way. This makes Yōsuke’s lack of empathy into a comical/horrifying take on modern social alienation (to use an older term for it). A friend my age once sat in the same room with his teenage son, alone, and had a whole conversation with him by text messaging, because that’s How the Kids Communicate these days. Everyone has stories like that; Yōsuke’s blank narcissism captures some of that.
But it’s not just about communication and cocooning, it’s also about an emptiness within the personal bubble. Yōsuke’s decisions seem to be guided by two things: what feels good, and what he knows is expected of him. His narrative is curiously inarticulate about both of these. Sex feels good; meat tastes good; his friend’s jokes are funny or aren’t funny. There’s no deeper reflection than that about what he wants or doesn’t want or why. But his concentration on his own appetites is tempered by a constant reference to social norms. He won’t force himself on a woman, for example, because his father told him to treat women kindly, and because if he forces himself on a woman he may get arrested. He doesn’t buy alcohol for Akari because she’s underage and it would be against the law, and he’s aiming for a career in government service. He laughs at a friend’s joke because he knows the situation calls for laughter. Conspicuously, he never expresses himself in terms of what he personally feels is right or wrong, what he aspires to or finds repugnant; instead, it’s as if he’s sincerely but somewhat ineptly trying to live by a set of rules he’s memorized but doesn’t quite understand.
Read like that, the violent catastrophe seems like the moment when this atomization is revealed as a mask for sociopathy. It goes like this: Akari breaks up with Yōsuke after several days and nights of no-food, no-sleep sex that have left him weak and frazzled. He chases after her, and a bystander intervenes. The rugby player’s instincts kick in and Yōsuke scuffles with the guy. The book ends with the bystander unconscious or perhaps dead on the street and Yōsuke in handcuffs. The point being (perhaps), we always knew that Yōsuke had this in him; and it’s true that a slight Patrick Bateman vibe pervades the story. And what makes it a generational commentary (in this reading) is that the guy Yōsuke fights at the end is almost a mirror image of himself: a muscular college-aged rugby player.
Another way to read the story is as an exploration-from-within of an atypical psychology. Like Murasaki no sukaato no onna and Konbini ningen, it presents a character who the reader begins to suspect has an undiagnosed condition, perhaps on the autism spectrum. But because the characters are high functioning, and because they are allowed to narrate their own story, the reader experiences the condition with complexity and ambiguity. Here too the language of medicine makes no appearance; we may wonder if Yōsuke should be getting help, but all the story tells us – all he tells us – is that this is what he feels and what he does. Some readers will find that this technique leads to rich metaphorical possibilities – such as the satirical reading I’ve just described. Others will find it problematic – if Yōsuke really is neuroatypical then it’s not right to present him as a metaphor for 21st century solipsism.
But solipsism it is. That’s why the presentation of all the secondary characters I mentioned at the outset is so important. Each of them is in the middle of their own struggles, which Yōsuke has every opportunity to notice and maybe even offer support in – but he’s completely oblivious. There are strong suggestions, for example, that Maiko is being sexually harrassed by the politician she interns for, but Yōsuke doesn’t process the hints. Most revealing in this regard is a powerful scene where Maiko spends several pages recounting a home invasion she experienced as a child. Just as she’s getting to the point of the story, a friend stops by and interrupts her. The reader is left hanging – how did she survive? And what’s she trying to tell Yōsuke with this memory? But Yōsuke doesn’t even register that the story is incomplete. Nothing is required of him; so he moves on.