PARADE
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Four twenty-somethings share an apartment in Tokyo. In Parade each tells their story: their lives, their hopes and fears, their loves, their secrets. Kotomi waits by the phone for a boyfriend who never calls. Ryosuke wants someone that he can’t have. Mirai spends her days drawing and her nights hanging out in gay bars. Naoki works for a film company, and everyone treats him like an elder brother. Then Satoru turns up. He’s eighteen, homeless, and does night work of a very particular type. In the next-door apartment something disturbing is going on. And outside, in the streets around their apartment block, there is violence in the air. From the writer of the cult classic Villain, Parade is a tense, disturbing, thrilling tale of life in the city.
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A group of four young people share a flat in Tokyo. To the outside world, they have varying degrees of success, from a young film company executive to the girl who sits at home all day waiting for an inattentive boyfriend to ring, but they all seem to be rootless and drifting. One day a mysterious younger man appears in the flat, is soon accepted into the group, and becomes the catalyst of what plot there is. It's like Friends if Friends had more despair, ennui and male prostitution.
I picked this up after watching the film adaptation (which isn't referenced anywhere on the blurb, so consider this a PSA if you enjoyed the book) a few years ago. Both share the same sense of hopelessness and of lives lived waiting, but the book has the edge in providing a little more background to the characters, helping us to understand how they came to be what they are. It's a quick read, less than 250 pages, but it lingers in the mind. Well worth a read.
