Sunakawa Bunji 砂川文次. Burakku bokkusu ブラックボックス. Kōdansha, 2022.
Published in book form in 2022, but it appeared in a magazine in summer 2021; it won the 166th Akutagawa Prize, for late 2021. The author has been writing professionally since 2016, and had been an A-Prize finalist twice before. He was in the SDF, and most of his work seems to draw on that experience in one way or another – the protagonist of Black Box was also in the SDF.
Like the previous winner, this one appears to have been conceived as a Covid novel – it really speaks to the moment. The first half of it, anyway. It’s split neatly into two parts, and the first chronicles a day in the life of a Tokyo bicycle messenger. Of course bike messengers predated Covid, but here the job seems an apt way to capture the period in 2020 and much of 2021 when the streets belonged to delivery people, while those who could stayed home (the protagonist also spends some time riding for Uber Eats, an even more sign-of-the-timesy job).
The story focuses on Sakuma, a guy in his late 20s who has ended up as a bike messenger after failing at several other jobs (including the SDF). We join him in mid-ride, on a rainy autumn day in downtown Tokyo, just in time for a Mercedes to cut him off at an intersection. Sakuma wipes out, wrecking his bike and his run – he has to call someone else to finish the job. Since he’s paid by the job, this is going to hurt him financially as well as physically. Sunakawa’s writing is at its best here: highly specific and vivid descriptions of what it’s like to ride a high-performance road bike in Tokyo traffic, and of what the bike messenger’s job entails. This all makes the crash all the more (yes) impactful, as we’re taken from the graceful speed of the ride to a slow limp back to the office, lugging a useless piece of machinery. This opening perfectly captures the sense of precarity so many were experiencing (and all of us were feeling) at the height of the pandemic. If we hadn’t already crashed, we knew we could at any moment.
The rest of the first half takes us through Sakuma’s day as he negotiates a return to the office, a hasty bike repair, a desultory lunch, and a forced return to the road so he doesn’t lose a day’s income. Finally we follow him home to his housemate/girlfriend/whatever. The vagueness with which that relationship is defined is clearly intentional: Sakuma is someone who, we learn, does anything he can to avoid introspection. Bike messenger is the perfect job for him, because it forces him to concentrate on his body, the bike, the road, traffic, and the rest of the details of his immediate moment, leaving him no time for thinking.
Thus, despite inhabiting this guy’s head (the novel is in the third person, but so tightly limited to Sakuma’s perspective that it might as well be first-person), we come to know surprisingly little about him in the first half. But we understand that this is mainly because he’s a stranger to himself – puzzled by why he does what he does, and how he has ended up where he has. This is part of the “black box” of the title: his own motivations are a mystery to him. But then, so are the motivations of others. The other memorable image in the first half of the story is him on his afternoon run, standing in a doorway to pick up a package. He knows what the company does, but not how they do it, and most of all not how they feel about doing it; he’s on the threshold, never invited in, and never wanting to look in.
All of this changes in the second half of the book. Suddenly he’s in prison, and instead of the strict chronology of the first half we get seemingly haphazard jumps in time, with various moments of his jail stint interspersed with flashbacks to moments that explain, sort of, how he ended up there.
Sakuma has what might be termed an anger management problem – something else that seems timely, as the pandemic was (is) a time of people snapping, losing it – self-control proves just as precarious as employment and health and the social fabric. As in many recent A-Prize works, the roots of his mental state are barely hinted at – there’s nothing like a diagnosis here. Instead, we get the effects. He loses his temper and gets violent, and it loses him job after job, and now his freedom. In fact for much of the second half he’s in solitary confinement, because he snapped one too many times.
What this does is force him to examine himself, precisely what he’d been avoiding his whole life. Which seems like the set-up for a story of self-realization. But this isn’t that kind of novel. It’s not clear that he learns any lessons at all, or understands himself any better; his focus at the end seems to be what it was at the beginning. Do the time, one day at a time, just like pedaling and gearshifting through traffic in the rain. Concentrate on the moment.
The Prize committee seems to have seen this book as a neo-Naturalist work, with its focus on the grim and grimy details of a dead-end life, and its refusal to construct a triumph out of it. This is an unfashionable mode – the committee members noted how old-fashioned it seems – but it has such a noble literary pedigree that a decently-executed specimen of it is always welcome. And on that level it works. As a pandemic-era work, though, which is how I couldn’t help but read it, I felt the first half was more effective than the second. It was the second half that reached toward a more universal vantage, by shifting the focus from social precarity to mental, but it felt less focused and intense.
To say that the story might have been more effective at half the length might lead to the observation that the Akutagawa Prize stories have gotten noticeably longer in recent years. What started out as a prize that largely went to short stories ultimately settled into something like a novella prize. I assume that this is because while the Akutagawa goes to stories originally published in literary journals, it’s books where publishers make money, so they want to have stories long enough to publish as books while the Prize is still recent news. But as recently as a few years ago it was still common to have prizewinning stories average a hundred pages or so, and for the books that contained them to include another short story or two to round things out. But those days seem to be gone; the last several prizes have all gone to stories that, when they show up as books, stand alone at a hundred and fifty pages or more. It’s a de facto book prize now, only the book doesn’t materialize until after the fact.
(Go here for an explanation of my Akutagawa Prize project, if you’re curious.)