You want style? Style we can do you. Style we got in spades.
Check 
out this artist, Beardsley's spiritual granddaughter. Large contrasting areas
of black and white, ravaged debauched faces, unexplained fancy-dress. The guy in the three
cornered hat is a butcher. The guy in the cassock is an engineer. It only needs a few
Pierrots and we'd be back in the Yellow Book. (Kusumoto even does her own version of
Beardsley's 'I have kissed thy mouth, Jokannon' illo from Wilde's Salome. A decadent high
point, that.) There's no sex here, and the relationships that we see are all heterosexual.
But this kind of style can make furniture look depraved. It's not necessary- in fact, it's
almost excessive- to draw erotica in it.
Then there's the plot. The plot is a Cocteau opium dream. Well no,
actually. If it was Cocteau's there'd be more muscled hunks. But it certainly belongs to
some early French surrealist. 'I get up every day at 9:30' the prologue begins in its flat
surrealist Japanese/French style, 'I get dressed, and I go from floor to floor of this
nine storey building collecting the morquefala.' The morquefala collector carries what
resembles a cigarette-girl's tray around his neck, and inquires in excruciatingly polite
Japanese if anyone has any morquefala they want to get rid of. 'My work never takes long.
But today the elevator was broken.' What are morquefala? You're not told. In fact, one of
the characters asks
the same thing later on, and if I'd known that I wouldn't have spent 20 minutes trying to
find the word in a shelful of dictionaries. You do get to see them. They look like large
bouncing bread crumbs.
The action proper begins as the funeral of K is winding down. A new
lodger appears to ask the way to the apartment/ boarding house they all live in. (It's
very European, 50's version. Sparsely furnished, antique plumbing, spiral staircase. I saw
it all when I was a kid spending the odd summer there. Kusumoto gets her details
frighteningly right, and I wish I could identify where she's getting them from.) The
newbie of course is moving into K's old room. K, as the engineer explains, is dead, but
they haven't been able to find his body. They bury him anyway.
The unnamed protagonist begins a spiritual search for the man whose
room he has taken and sort of incidentally an actual search for his murderer, if he was
murdered. No-one can agree on what sort of person K was. When his Bette Davis lookalike
lover starts talking about K's terrible loneliness, you begin to suspect the worst about
him. 'Terribly lonely' is young-male-first-novel shorthand for 'selfish little shit.' Of
course, Kusumoto isn't a young male and this isn't her first work. But given her eye for
foreign stylistic quirks, I suspect she's borrowing from some (probably French) fictional
source where some (probably French,
like Sartre) selfish little shit is talking about how wonderful and lonely and
misunderstood the Genius Me is while pretending to be talking about a fictional character.
No wonder he was murdered, one thinks.
Whatever, the story continues, all over the
map as surrealistic stories tend to be. In the end K's body is found. Or rather, a
body is found. We must wait for vol 2 (if there is a volume 2. Life can be surrealistic as
well) to find out whose. But it's reassuring to note that the morquefala collector's
broken elevator at the book's beginning actually serves a purpose in the plot and isn't
merely a throwaway device. Maybe there'll be a plot purpose to the guy in swimming goggles
whose apartment contains two bathtubs and nothing else, and who regularly accosts his
visitors with the Japanese set phrase 'Care to have one (tub)?'
