That Kazushige Abe’s Mysterious Setting is difficult to read has nothing to do with the prose, which in Michael Emmerich’s translation is pacey and accessible, but is instead due to the novel’s relentlessly grim narrative. In a story replete with bullying, gaslighting and exploitation, the foreshadowing that often accompanies the end of a section becomes little more than a reinforcement of the obvious. We already know what to expect: yet more uninterrupted misery for the unfortunate protagonist, Shiori. And yet, for those willing to endure the relentless tragedy of this young girl’s plight, Mysterious Setting has a lot to say about the dissolution of truth and empathy in the modern world.
More than anything, Shiori loves to express herself through song, believing she is destined to become a troubadour who serenades the world. Her passion is problematic because anyone who hears her sing is confused or angered by what they deem her complete inability to hold a tune, and, more worryingly, because Shiori suspects there may be a link between her songs and the violent death of anyone who hears them. Her artistic expression not only isolates her from strangers, but from her own family. Her younger sister, Nozomi, is in fact so infuriated by her melodic outbursts that she on one occasion slices Shiori’s arm with a knife to make her stop.
Unlike her singing, however, Shiori’s crying seems to be music to everyone else’s ears. Nozomi is so enraptured by the sound that she intentionally makes her sibling’s life a nightmare just to hear it, resorting to emotional, physical and sexual abuse. When the parakeets in a pet shop that had become Shiori’s one solace all die in mysterious circumstances, she vows to never sing again, even as she moves to Tokyo to become a lyricist. This escape to a new setting does not improve her situation, and the narrator seems almost to take joy in informing the reader that “reality had even more in store for Shiori.” The majority of the book is taken up with that “reality”, which is less character-building than it is debilitating. When, through a series of unlikely events, Shiori ends up with the fate of the entire city in her hands, she must reconcile her latent optimism with the evident cruelty of society to finally decide whether Tokyo is worth saving.
Shiori is the young and naïve archetype taken to its extreme. She is continuously misled by the most bare-faced and simplistic of lies. Beneath that maddening obliviousness, however, is a message about how living in such a theater of lies can lead not only to alienation but to a misplaced sense of inward blame and castigation. No one is interested in the “truth” of Shiori’s voice because it makes them feel uncomfortable, and it is to accommodate their discomfiture alone that she self-accuses and self-censors. Like the characters in Natsuko Imamura’s recently translated Asa: The Girl Who Turned into a Pair of Chopsticks, Shiori is forced to forsake her own happiness to prevent others feeling ill-at-ease, her true character suppressed by the wrathful pettiness of friends and authority figures.
Peppered with mentions of conflict in the Middle East, bird flu and nuclear anxiety, Mysterious Setting shows how an ongoing stream of misinformation makes its characters feel disempowered and ultimately unable to trust even those who have their interests at heart. In this atmosphere, earnestness becomes unusual enough to be deemed fictional, and only someone as naïve as Shiori can commit fully to what she says. When she does, even those few who are receptive are so warped by the cynicism of the world that they view her heartfelt outpourings as little more than a game. This pervasive societal mistrust limits true human interaction and leads to a world in the novel that Shiori describes as one in which all “amble about, muttering to ourselves”. Those mutterings never interact and therefore never constitute true conversation.
Shiori’s polar opposite, her nihilistic sister Nozomi, represents the only truth deemed appropriate in that sphere: an anger-fuelled and intentionally-hurtful tirade that is dressed up as a form of cruel-to-be-kindness that supposedly readies Shiori for the greater evils of the world. In reality, her actions are merely a means to a sadistic schadenfreude that thrives on the misery of those cowed by her words.
Despite its exaggeratedly tragic tone, Mysterious Setting is entirely relevant in a digitally connected world in which every truth is questioned and every personal opinion attacked, until ultimately the only ones who are brave enough to speak are those most insidiously deceitful or incandescent with rage. The rest fear to utter a word. Like Shiori, they exercise a form of self-censorship that arises from being brutalised by a cynical view of the world, even if this view does not reflect reality at all. “She had a beautiful, beautiful voice,” says one of the few well-natured characters of Shiori at the end of the book. “So gorgeous you almost think it can’t have been true that she was tone deaf.”