A review by paul_cornelius
Villian by Shūichi Yoshida

5.0

Disconnection drives this story. Children disconnected from parents and grandparents. Workers disconnected from their colleagues. Sisters, twins even, disconnected from each other's lives. It reminds me of an Antonioni film. Not only that, but the theme determines the form as well. Shuichi Yoshida creates a modernist masterpiece with this work that shifts its points of view as well as its perspectives in time. Enormously complicated, the character sketches lead into dead ends. Deliberately. For throughout the story evades a centering. Even the final pages turn away from the seemingly sentimental and satisfying ending it looked like the reader was going to enjoy. Instead, everything and everyone is thrown right back into their compartmentalized, separate worlds. Fittingly enough, perhaps the main character (only "perhaps"), Mitsuyo goes back to her job in a department store. Departments. Compartments. What's the difference. The villain here is the disconnection each and every character endures without hope of changing.