しゃぼん玉

乃南アサ

「女性や老人だけを狙った通り魔や強盗傷害を繰り返し、自暴自棄な逃避行を続けていた伊豆見翔人は、宮崎県の山深い村で、老婆と出会った。翔人を彼女の孫と勘違いした村人たちは、あれこれと世話を焼き、山仕事や祭りの準備にもかり出すようになった。卑劣な狂犬、翔人の自堕落で猛り狂った心を村人たちは優しく包み込むのだが……。涙なくしては読めない心理サスペンス感動の傑作。」

Even if I were to write out an intricate, detail-by-detail plot summary of しゃぼん玉, I wouldn’t really be able to capture exactly what made しゃぼん玉 as magical as Nonami Asa made it. I remember how spooked out I was by 7月24日通り and having to sort my thoughts out because of how overwhelmed I was by its jarring ending; that was my idea of a “strong impression”… ある本の印象が傷みたいに脳裏に刻まれたこと等. しゃぼん玉 doesn’t bruise. But as I had been warned everywhere—from the blurb on the back to reviews plastered on the internet—it makes you gush tears, and you’ll remember why very well. I think it has to do with Nonami Asa’s style. We’re first of all dealing with a story that feels like it should be super cliched—a bad-to-good story of a criminal who sees the light because someone was finally nice to him. But we see that Izumi Shouto is very complicated—not in a philosophical way, but in a very down-to-earth way that makes him real—and the people he encounters are much more than they might seem to be, and in just the same way Shouto is. We can say things like “Shige-jii is a tough old villager with strength and spirit,” but only through Asa’s ability to make him alive do we understand things like “Suma-jyou thinks he’s kind and gentle, but Shouto doesn’t really see it.” or “He’s an old man, and Shouto knows he could probably kill him if he really tried.” or “Shige-jii is the kind of person Shouto imagines would wake him up by pointing a gun at him.” or “Shige-jii is proud of Shouto sticking through the tough work on the mountain, even though Shouto almost abandoned him.” or “ぱっ、ふうっ. Shige-jii makes those noises when he smokes. Nobody else makes as much noise as him.” It’s hard to highlight who these characters are in isolation, too. Everyone is related to someone somehow, and everyone shows a slightly different side to them—such are real people, and such are the characters in しゃぼん玉.

But we begin the novel with Shouto having just (probably) killed someone. It was always ambiguous, I think, but Shouto (subtly) convinces himself over the course of the novel that he killed that woman whose stuff he’d stolen. He’s a nasty fellow, really. We see that Shouto’s a purse snatcher and robber who preys on the weak—old people and women—and attacks them from the back. He lives on their money and eats cup ramen. He has nowhere to go, really, but away. I don’t remember the details perfectly here, so I’ll skip to Shouto hitchhiking after he crossed a prefectural border on the (auto)bike he stole and threw away all the stuff he didn’t need. The sequencing is out of order in the book, but it’s written kind of well. The way I first imagined it was that Shouto somehow ended up on the road with a couple of broken bones and such while somebody is shouting above from a two-story building about “being treated really badly even though all he’d been was nice,” but rereading it, I think you are supposed to get that this is somehow related to Shouto. But as Shouto recalls, he gets on a truck he liked at a truck stop (drive-in?) and follows the guy to where he’s going. Shouto doesn’t really know where he’s going, of course. When we see him settle down to eat with the old man along the way, the old man learns about a landslide up ahead and says he’ll stop in Hyuuga, even though he intended to go to Miyazaki. Shouto is insistent, though. He wants to go to Miyazaki. (Shouto doesn’t even know where that is! 四国の市？町？かわからねえ) The truck driver tells him that it’s unreasonable… and so, Shouto threatens him with a knife. He threatens him all the way past Hyuuga—where we see an interesting scene where they pass a police box and Shouto goes ballistic thinking the truck driver will try to get off and use it—and they take this detour up a mountain. No cars, no lights… it’s totally empty. The truck driver tells Shouto that that’s a valley they’re passing. Shouto’s had a long day, of course, so he naturally starts falling asleep. Obviously, the truck driver takes this opportunity to kick Shouto out of his seat—and Shouto goes tumbling down into the valley. At this point, of course, we love the truck driver and hate likely-murderer Shouto. Well-deserved.

Shouto can’t see a thing and can barely move. It’s pitch black outside, so I’m guessing it’s also a new moon. Spooky and miserable. He tries to find a place to sleep, but he ends up camping against some bamboo grass, but is way too broken-up to sleep. I forget why, but Shouto is in an awful state and we get a very detailed picture of the sun slowly coming up and serving as ultimate relief for Shouto. He decides that there’s nowhere to go but back down that road he came up with the truck driver, hoping to find a car to hitch a ride with. But nothing’s there. Until…

He finds a Super Cub. It’s a scooter, I think. (I looked it up, and it explains a lot.) Lucky—he thinks, but he then sees a face peek out of the vegetation. It’s an old person wearing flower-patterned clothing (scarf and something else, maybe a jumper) with blood trickling down from their forehead. It’s an old woman, and she’s beckoning Shouto to help her after Shouto finally gets the Cub running again. Shouto wanted to leave her to die, but the circumstances are kind of inconvenient. He lets her on… somehow. This was described as a kind of difficult process, and it involved the old woman’s Cub basket. Looking at what a Super Cub looks like, I finally understand.

They get to the old woman’s home in this really old, sparse village. She goes to the hospital… oh, this will take forever.

Listen, it’s a great story. Read it. Share it with a friend. I remember too much to properly write out a summary, and I can express so little about how intricate the characters’ relationships are. I hope you enjoy しゃぼん玉 as much as I did.