Joy in a Closed Box
A review of Kenji Takemoto's Loss of Joy in a Closed Box (匣の中の失楽).
Personal rating: 3/5
Recommended if you like:
- Inception
Unlike its title, this book is quite a joyful experience: seeing the nested story slowly unfold, one wavers between different perceptions of (in-story) reality, deliberating the meaning of truth itself — until the grand reveal near the end of the book.
Like many other Japanese detective thrillers, the book borrows knowledge from a wide spread of areas — mathematics, physics, chemistry, color science, magic (illusion), mysticism, and more — to make a surge of information and spice up the story's atmosphere.
The structure of the story makes it feel like a labyrinth. You can choose to follow the main thread of the narrative, or track down one of the branches and explore one specific event, or simply wander around and enjoy the view.
Spoiler
The story features a cast of colorful characters; they look like ordinary people, but the author magnified a different quirk in each one of them — a bit of strangeness that each human might have — and let these peculiarities freely react into an ornate tragedy. Each selfish desire — prank, excitement, revenge, self-seeking — gradually builds up inside the character, making them a murderer, knocking down the next domino in a sequence of kills.
The moral of the story, which I don't fully agree but can resonate with, is that the Self is a perilous closed box. Subjective experiences, also called qualia, cannot be shared; no two souls can never have the same feeling, not even twins who are each other's shadows. So until mind-sharing becomes possible, humans are doomed to repeat the same mistakes, always scheming inside this box against each other, and watch the fierce wind rage in the mess that is the human world.