A Japanese Author
Yoko Kajihara
The Strange, the Ugly, and the Beautiful
Her Works
Yoko Kajihara has a unique sense of humor, a kind that lies halfway between black humor and satire.
In her plain but perceptive prose, she creates scenes that are absurdly funny and yet enlightened.
Her novel would make us think about the quality of human relations in a highly competitive and perverted metropolitan life in Tokyo.
She depicts its realities and taste of its strange and grotesque and sometimes beautiful postmodern sensation.
Her novel is like a dose of sweet poison.
It tastes good and works quite slowly, so it would be already too late when a reader notices it.
A Japanese Schoolgirl
Accident, suicide, or murder?
Your friend wants you to find who killed him
A sixteen-year-old schoolgirl Luna Suzuki lost her best friend Yukio.
No one knows whether it was accident or suicide, but she believes that he was murdered.
Looking for the suspect, Luna begins to uncover dark Japanese psychology lurking deep in her closest friends and encounters with a Japanese Kendo master, an American investment banker, a Yakuza boss, and a foreign researcher who is studying the untouchable of Japanese society.
Before long she faces unfamiliar scenes and learns there is only a thin line between sexual perversion and moral decency, cruelty and compassion, seduction and innocence, deception and honesty.
She then finds out that those closest friends are all connected with the death of Yukio, that they share some murky secret with the victim, and that they would do anything to prevent it from leaking out.
Driven by her insatiable curiosity to uncover the secret, Luna undertakes a dangerous mind game by which she takes all of her friends to the edge of self-destruction.
But the last truth sealed deep in the secret is still totally beyond the reach of her imagination.
This is a new breed of dark and funny satire about postmodern Japanese adolescence masquerading as a murder mystery.
Shinjuku Capsule Hotel Part 1
They have taught me that no one is perfect and that nothing is finished and that everything is transient.
“Alone on the Nightshift”
The first time I saw him he looked reserved.
The second time I saw him he was well-mannered.
The third time I saw him he was kind and gentle.
Then he became a regular at the spa.
…but he was not what he seemed.
“To My Dearest Mother”
He wore an expensive suit and tie.
He looked like he was in his 50s and he was shorter than average Japanese men, about 160 centimeters, and well-mannered.
He had been often stayed here for over 10 hours since he first checked into the spa. Then, sometime after we began to treat him as a regular guest, he started staying in the spa for more than 48 hours.
…but he became a problem when he started talking with his mother on the phone.
And there are five more episodes available to read.
Shinjuku Capsule Hotel Part 2
They were ordinary people, but also colorful people, regardless of age.
“A Man and His Mother”
Sometimes I accidentally got into a situation where I had no way of knowing what to do and how to get out. I knew I should have stayed away from it but it ironically gave me the excitement of risk-taking. It was like waiting in line for an extreme roller coaster ride. I could enjoy screaming freely, only without a sound.
“A Slice of Life”
I took a glance around for the assistant manager for help because I was still a new hire at that time. But he was nowhere to be seen. As other staff members were saying, he must have been the first one to fly away when trouble came his way. That might have been why he was always laughing without making a sound.
And there are five more episodes available to read.
Shinjuku Capsule Hotel Part 3
99 percent of regular guests were those who had nothing to do with the major television networks or murder.
“Hey There, Mr. Chaplin”
Then there were sandwich men and cosplayers hanging around the city day and night. And, of course, you were also able to spot street performers and enjoy their breathtaking skills if you had nothing else to do or felt like getting away from the rat race for a short while.
“Guess My Sexual Orientation”
On a Saturday, around 4:00pm, a young man with bleached blonde hair came to the reception desk with a furious look. He appeared to be in his late 20s and you could see that his lower front tooth was missing.
And there are four more episodes available to read.
Shinjuku Capsule Hotel Part 4
It rarely happened but when it happened
there was nothing we could do about it.
“The Headhunted”
After he had finished paying the admission fee and completed our usual check-in procedure, he took off his large wig. The way he proceeded it looked like he was performing some kind of a religious ritual and appeared as if he had lifted the upper half of his head to remove the whole head from the torso. He asked us to bring the special hatbox we had been holding in trust for him and he then slowly and surely put the wig into it. Until he checked out of the capsule hotel we kept his wig inside the box.
“He Can Smile”
The police told me that illegal immigrants would come to Japan by ship. No one would dare to sneak into Japan by airplane as the business-class passengers. As soon as they arrived at Yokohama port, they most likely to flee to the big city. Most of them would head for Shinjuku right away. It was because they knew it was the closest and largest metropolitan area and knew they would easily be able to blend in the crowd and hide.
And there are seven more episodes available to read.