Raja Iblis

## — A Reader’s Guide —

Fantasy, Genius, Legend Zhang Xiaosen

This is an essay about Kotaro Isaka, but first allow me a brief digression: the 134th Naoki Prize, in 2006. The great event of that year was, of course, Keigo Higashino winning at last with The Devotion of Suspect X after five defeats. It fulfilled a long-held wish and set a crowning touch on the twenty years since his debut. The story of five nominations and five losses in a row set a rather bitter phrase circulating quietly between Japan’s popular literary world and its readers: the “Keigo Higashino route,” meaning a writer nominated again and again, rejected again and again, until he has passed the age at which one is supposed to win the Naoki Prize. On his sixth nomination Higashino finally stepped out of that shadow of misfortune—unflattering on its face, and yet only a step away from becoming legend. Behind the happy fact of his win, however, there stood another exceedingly strong candidate for the “Keigo Higashino route”: the subject of this essay, Kotaro Isaka.

Kotaro Isaka was born in Chiba in 1971 and graduated from the Faculty of Law at Tohoku University in Sendai. In elementary school he read all sorts of children’s books, like any other child. As he grew older he began reading the homegrown entertainment novels then in fashion—works by Michio Tsuzuki, Baku Yumemakura, Masakazu Hirai, and others. In high school, after reading Soji Shimada’s The 2/3 Murder of the Northern Evening Crane, he became a devoted Shimada reader. Also in high school, a collection of art criticism titled What Is Painting led Isaka to believe that one could use the imagination…

## — The Demon King —

“Anyway, the times are changing.” — “The Times They Are a-Changin’,” Bob Dylan

“The times have not changed in the least. It feels a little absurd.” — “An Irksome Almanac,” Osamu Dazai

The man hunched his back. His cheeks hung slack, his eyelids were puffy, age spots covered his forehead, and sparse white hair was combed flat back over his scalp. He gripped the handhold. Whenever the subway swayed, his legs, thin as wooden sticks, trembled without stopping, as if he might topple at any moment. When the train’s speed settled again, he bared his teeth and snarled, “What gives you the right to sit there so grandly? Think you’re the emperor? Bastard!”

Wrinkled all over like a piece of wind-dried fruit, the old man let out a roar that threatening. I went rigid from head to foot.

1

Twenty minutes earlier I had walked out of the museum connected to JR Tokyo Station, pushed through the milling crowd, finally passed the subway ticket gate, and jumped onto a Marunouchi Line train pulling into the platform.

I found an empty seat and was about to close my eyes and rest when I suddenly heard, “Aren’t you Ando?” A college classmate stood in front of me. We had not seen each other since graduation, and in only five years his hair had been cut so short he was almost unrecognizable. That was why I did not know him at once. “Shima!”

At one in the afternoon the car was not especially crowded, though in every carriage a few people still stood holding the straps. The seat beside me happened to be empty, and Shima sat down as a matter of course.

“So you’re the culprit?” I said.

“Who greets someone like that?”

“Because your hair…”

## — Breath —

Before I could even say “Lights out,” I seemed already to have fallen asleep. I woke in the middle of the night and looked at the quilt covering Junya’s upper body.

He hasn’t stopped breathing, has he? I was uneasy. I could not take my eyes off him. Junya was asleep on his stomach, his shoulders outside the quilt.

I looked at the clock. It was one in the morning. The curtains were drawn tight, but the light in the corridor had been left on, so the room was not pitch black. Junya’s eyes were closed, his nose pressed to the quilt. The pale brown quilt slowly rose, like a swell of ground, then sank again. Without noticing, I fell in with his breathing: in, out, in, out.

Junya and I were both naked. A few hours earlier we had made love on this double bed, our bodies twined together, and fallen asleep content.

I had heard that Sendai was colder than Tokyo. It was true. It was already April, and yet there was no scent of spring at all.

I had gone to sleep naked and woken in the night from the cold. I rummaged on the bed, found my underwear, and put it on. On the way to the bathroom, a photograph on the china cabinet caught my eye.

It was a picture of me, Junya, and Junya’s older brother. The place was an amusement park in Tokyo, taken before his brother died, when the three of us had gone there together.

His brother stood in the center of the photo; Junya and I stood on either side. I held up two fingers in a victory sign. Junya was trying for a fighting pose, fists loosely closed at his chest. Scissors and rock—if it had been rock-paper-scissors, I would have lost then, too.

“Shiori. Junya is always saying such dis…”

## — Commentary —

If you could choose, which side would you stand on? Qu Chen

You may say I’m a dreamer. / But I’m not the only one. — lyrics from “Imagine”

When I saw that photograph, I felt it had to be deliberate.

In the picture are two little boys. The boy on the right is slightly taller. Both of them, with a childish, artlessly sweet look, grin at the camera, each cradling a baseball bat against his chest, the bats stretching in different directions to form a V.

It is a photograph chosen for the feature on Kotaro Isaka in the April 2007 issue of the Japanese reading magazine Da Vinci.

The boy on the right is Kotaro Isaka. The one on the left is his younger brother.

Seeing a pair of brothers holding baseball bats, any reader of Kotaro Isaka, I think, would recall that exquisitely spare, unforgettable opening line: Haru leapt from the second floor.

That is the pair of brothers in Gravity Clown, Izumi and Haru. They carry an extremely sorrowful fate, and yet the novel still flies lightly, like a clown heedless of gravity.

This time Kotaro Isaka brings forward another pair of brothers, and what they face is a gravity far more total than fate.

Before the novel Maou was published as a book, it was serialized in Kodansha’s magazine Esora. When the author was writing “The Demon King,” however, he seems not yet to have been aware that “Breath” existed, and so, when the book was assembled, he revised extensively to fit the idea of “one book.” Under those circumstances, I cannot help noticing the difference between the two stories…