Salaryman Unbound by Ezra Kyrill Erker
Guest review by Kate
Vane
Salaryman Unbound is a stylish, darkly comic novel of
psychological suspense.
It tells the story of Shiro, a Japanese IT manager with a
midlife crisis. He has considered the conventional responses to his sense of
ennui – an affair or an unsuitable hobby – but in the end settles on murder.
From this starting point, the novel follows Shiro’s attempts
to implement his plan and its consequences. He turns out to be a fairly inept
criminal. His ideas about detection are based on what he’s read in the papers
and crime dramas on TV. He has an almost adolescent idea that he will become sort-of
famous as the unidentified perpetrator of an ingenious unsolved crime.
He wants to commit the perfect murder by choosing a random
victim but when these attempts fail he adapts his plan. He settles on an
attractive but unhappy neighbour, Sayuri, as his victim.
There are some shocks in this novel for the reader but much
of the pleasure comes from irony. Shiro, caught up in his conspiracy, is unable
to see what we can. His murderous fantasy keeps brushing up against the
constraints of the real world. His interactions with Sayuri and his wife Naomi
are particularly well observed. They continually undercut him with their
cleverness and practicality.
Shiro’s behaviour is both absurd and totally believable. It is
also menacing. We are not quite sure what he is capable of, and who might get
hurt.
The Japanese setting gives the book an additional dimension.
The life that seems so banal to Shiro will be unfamiliar to many Western
readers. We learn about the texture of the characters’ daily lives – what they
eat, what music they listen to, where they go at the weekend.
More profoundly, we see how Shiro’s marriage is changed by
Naomi’s return to her career and the irreverence of his children as they fail
to show the respect he showed his parents. Shiro’s business trip to Thailand
and his interactions with his Thai subordinates give an insight into the
changing economy. The Japanese salaryman is being challenged on all sides.
There is a further irony. As Shiro’s plan progresses, he
steps out of his normal world. He takes risks. But paradoxically, he misses
opportunities to make bigger changes. There is a pleasing ambiguity in this –
his obsession is both changing him and making him fail to see what he really
needs to do.
The only thing that jarred for me slightly was that the
book, while mostly written from Shiro’s point of view, sometimes makes abrupt
shifts into another character’s voice. This breaks the spell as we are suddenly
outside Shiro’s crazed vision. One of the strengths of Shiro’s narration is
that we can see his effect on other characters even when he cannot.
However, this is a small point. This is an absorbing and
atmospheric novel with a satisfying twist at the end.
Kate Vane writes crime
and literary fiction. Her latest novel is Not the End.
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