Meet Kenji, a young man unofficially working as a sex tour guide in Tokyo’s entertainment district - Kabukichō. He is 20, has a 16-year-old girlfriend Jun, and his new client - an American called Frank.

The novel is split into three parts that follow a steep narrative arc. In the first part, we meet Frank - a strange American guy whose stories do not match each other, altogether a suspicious specimen, especially given recent murders around the area of the city where Frank is staying. This, of course, immediately points to Frank as the main suspect in the eyes of Kenji and the reader. There are some mystical parts about him - he is able to hypnotize, and he also gives an eerie feeling that he is able to read the minds of other people. With every new detail, it becomes more and more apparent that Frank is a very good candidate for a murderer, but there is never direct evidence. So, ambiguity on the edge. This state of intuition split - being sure and unsure of two mutually exclusive things to be true simultaneously at the same time, the possibility of both being so evident. This is the pinnacle of the first part of the novel to me and, in a way, of the whole novel too. Only once have I experienced similar ambiguous tension - in the film “The Wailing” by Na Hong-jin. Then you have this splat of a bummer - Frank says that he is missing part of the brain. Well, it can explain some things - strange behavior, but not others. I still hesitate why this specific aspect is there: shock value? Ploy to move the reader’s attention sideways to prolong the ambiguity state?

The second chapter is a climax of sorts. Yes, Frank is a murderer, a vile one, very professional. It is revealed after a long, annoying conversation with one of the hostesses of a bar. Frank ends up killing every person in the bar apart from Kenji. Being the most violent, this part reminds me of a part of an essay by Susan Sontag about pornographic imagination - pornography constrained to a limited number of actions, hence repetition and frequent transgressive elements. This scene is violence that is constrained by being an act of a serial killer, it is not an act of passion, it is a drug dose of an addict that makes its user feel again normal, not providing any surplus enjoyment. For Frank, it is business as usual. Kenji is in shock, the description of his confused state and actions in it is the pinnacle of the second part of the novel.

The third part is a journey into Frank’s history, a resolution of all the tensions and mystical suggestions created through the first two parts. We see that Frank is troubled (of course), and he has a good understanding of what he is and why he is like that. At least he provides a good explanation. Being a serial killer is his destiny, his essence. Strikingly, when you think that there is nothing human about this person, he hits you with the next rationalization:

I see myself as being like a virus. Did you know that only a tiny minority of viruses cause illness in humans? No one knows how many viruses there are, but their real role, when you get right down to it, is to aid in mutations, to create diversity among life forms. I’ve read a lot of books on the subject—when you don’t need much sleep you have a lot of time to read—and I can tell you that if it weren’t for viruses, mankind would never have evolved on this planet. Some viruses get right inside the DNA and change your genetic code, did you know that? And no one can say for sure that HIV, for example, won’t one day prove to have been rewriting our genetic code in a way that’s essential to our survival as a race. I’m a man who consciously commits murders and scares the hell out of people and makes them reconsider everything, so I’m definitely malignant, yet I think I play a necessary role in this world.

Everyone needs a purpose. The purpose of a successful serial killer - to help humanity evolve. Nothing short of Nature itself.