Pink by Kyoko Okazaki

Terrible ending coda aside, Kyoko Okazaki’s “Helter Skelter” was an engrossing thriller that left me eagerly awaiting this story.  Described as her “representative work” on the back cover, “Pink” is entertaining fluff and light on its feet with its protagonist’s determined refusal to acknowledge life’s harder edges.  Interestingly enough, its quality proves to be the inverse of “Helter Skelter’s.”  Though the majority of it doesn’t have a whole lot of substance, “Pink” does feature a great ending that actually makes one of the most tired dramatic tropes work in its context.

Yumi is an office worker in Japan living at the height of Japan’s “bubble era” (read: mid-80’s), loves pink things, thinks crocs make the best pets and is something of a pathological liar when it comes to talking about herself.  She also works as a call girl on the side.  Why?  Because she actually has a full-grown crocodile as a pet and keeping him fed is a pain.  The fact that she’s a high-end hooker is only a small part of this story as we see how she blithely goes through life, finding happiness in her own whims.

Said whims lead her one day to checking out the man who her mother-in-law keeps on the side — described as a “manstress” by her thirteen-year-old stepsister Keiko.  She finds out that the man in question, Haru, is an aspiring novelist currently attending college and sleeping with the older woman for life experience as a writer.  After a rocky beginning, with some incisive contributions from Keiko, they wind up becoming an item and a quirky kind of happiness follows.

Whether or not you’ll fall under “Pink’s” spell will depend on if you find Yumi’s actions and personality charming or annoyingly self-centered.  As you can guess, my thoughts on her fall into the former camp.  She’s a person at ease with herself and who possesses a refreshing lack of angst about her life.  The young woman’s sexual encounters as a call girl are also represented in a plausible manner as she encounters her share of genial weirdos and hair-pulling brutes while she finds satisfaction and disappointment in unexpected places during these events.  Okazaki also writes the character to be quite funny as we see in the responses she gives to Haru when he quizzes her about her life, and in other little moments such as the time she has a close shave with dry lips in the morning after she nearly forgets to put lip gloss on before going to bed.  Fate of the world here people!  Of course, I can see how other people will find moments like these off-putting as they emphasize the character’s intentional superficiality.

As the story goes on it may seem like Yumi is only capable of sweating the small stuff.  Try as she might to avoid dealing with anything bigger than that, Okazaki has other plans for her protagonist.  There’s a revealing moment late in the book where Yumi reveals her outlook on life was defined by her mother who took her own life.  Yet the woman is so detached from the details she describes that you wonder if her whole personality isn’t some kind of by-product from the truama.  I’m inclined to believe that’s the case when we see her one real moment of unrestrained violence against the person who has wronged her greatly.  It’s clearly not a rational response and it shows her to be someone who ultimately can’t deal with adversity.

This also feeds into what I like about the ending as well.  Without giving too much away, Haru does wind up achieving some success as a novelist and he makes plans to go away with Yumi to a tropical island to live.  Then… something happens while Yumi is waiting for him at the airport.  At first this struck me as a gigantic contrivance almost as bad as the “Meanwhile, in Mexico…” coda that tarnished “Helter Skelter.”  

Then you look at that final page with Yumi and Keiko in happiness and realize that she’s ultimately won in the end.  Yes, we have enough information to speculate about what happens next, except that in the story itself Yumi will remain in that one moment of bliss at the finish.  The contrivance is still there, but Okazaki cleverly negates it in this fashion.  She shows that her protagonist isn’t entitled to happiness yet lets her remain there forever — having her cake and eating it too.  It’s an achievement I find easy to respect.

Though a good portion of “Pink” is focused on the everyday challenges facing Yumi, Haru and Keiko, it winds up revealing a good amount of depth at the end as they all have to confront their issues in one way or another.  Yumi’s feeling that happiness should be taken for granted and the blithe attitude towards life that she has for most of the volume is certainly an acquired taste, but one that works for me.  Between “Pink” and “Helter Skelter,” I can easily say that I’m a fan of Okazaki’s works.  Regrettably, these were the only two she published before a car accident ended her career.  As these two volumes show, this is clearly our loss.