A Hissing Noise

Though much of my life has been spent in foreign countries, the entire Japanese social scene and code of manners, from sushi to hara-kiri, still contains much that baffles me. Take crimes of passion, for instance. Too often, in a Japanese movie with this theme, a moment comes when the lead character makes that curious hissing noise like a kettle on the boil, stops arranging flowers or writing haikus and kills someone. What psychological or ethnic quirk, what dramatic convention even, I ask myself, does this represent?

Because “On Parole,” a novel by Akira Yoshimura, takes place largely in the mind of a paroled murderer convicted of just such a crime, I thought it might answer my question. Unfortunately, although Yoshimura presents a vivid picture of Tokyo life, he not only leaves the roots of the local crime passionel as mysterious as ever but adds a new puzzle in the shape of the idiosyncratic Japanese parole system.

Still, the plot of “On Parole” is simple enough. Shiro Kikutani is a former high school teacher of Japanese language and literature. When he marries Emiko, he is gauche, nervous and sexually inexperienced. Emiko finds her own more powerful urges aroused by their philandering friend Mochizuki and starts a secret affair. Alerted by an anonymous note from Mochizuki’s sister-in-law, Kikutani confronts the lovers, returning early from a fishing trip.

As soon as I read that “a storm raged in his body, and his head was filled with a hissing sound,” I knew what would happen. Kikutani catches them in bed, and the hissing is augmented by a scarlet blur in front of his face (“seeing red,” I take it, Japanese-style). After stabbing the lovers to death, he torches Mochizuki’s house, incinerating not only the two corpses but, unknowingly, Mochizuki’s old mother, who is asleep upstairs.

For this crime passionel, Kikutani receives an indefinite prison sentence. Though he may eventually win parole, he’ll remain under state supervision for life--unless he receives a formal pardon. But pardons, rarely granted, depend on evidence of true contrition, and the essential psychological fact about Kikutani is that he has no remorse whatsoever. He feels totally justified, regarding even Mochizuki’s mother as expendable for having produced so monstrous a son. He behaves himself and watches his tongue because he believes he’s entitled to parole. But he’s clearly a walking time bomb. You don’t need to be a psychiatrist to know that the least thing will trigger that scarlet blur again.

After 16 years, Kikutani’s clean record and low profile finally get him out of jail. By far the best parts of this novel are the chapters describing his slow and nervous reentry into society via a halfway house: the initial acute agoraphobia, the sense of naked vulnerability, the persistence of old jail routines, the confusing noise and crowds, the scrambling catch-up on change. But there are puzzles here. Kikutani is an educated man, a teacher of literature. Yet not one intelligent thought passes through his head, and the job he’s steered into, far below his qualifications, is one any peasant could do: charge-hand on a chicken ranch.

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One striking omission that will astonish Western readers is the complete absence of professional psychological evaluation. Kikutani’s two parole officers are decent, hard-working, conscientious amateurs, but they haven’t a clue about his telltale psyche. With blithe insouciance and never a killer profile in sight to warn them, they talk him into a second marriage--apparently to hasten his re-integration into society.

Never did a scheme come more disastrously unstuck. Kikutani’s new bride has her own ideas about rehabilitation and pushes him hard to play the repentant sinner. You can see the tragic denouement coming a mile off. The narrative, dexterously translated by Stephen Snyder, has a near-hallucinatory quality that carries the reader over a good many bumps: Even so, the suspension of one’s disbelief remains patchy. The chickens, however, both look and smell ultra-realistic.