GOLD RUSH
By MIRI YU
Translated by Stephen Snyder.
New York: Welcome Rain Publishers, 2002. 288 pages, $25

reviewed by Robert J. Fouser

Contemporary Japanese fiction comes in two shades, light and dark, and of these, light is the more popular. For most recession-weary Japanese readers, dark, psychological fiction forces uncomfortable realities to the surface, while light fictionmost common in the form of mysteries and mangaoffers escape to the world of ordered fantasy. Miri Yu, the darkest writer to appear on the Japanese literary scene in years, is thus an odd candidate for literary stardom. Since her novel Family Cinema won the prestigious Akutagawa Award in 1997, Yu's work has come to epitomize the zeitgeist of decay and decadence in Japan in the 1990s.

Ryu Murakami, another popular writer on the dark side, still holds out hope that the "lost ten years," as he calls the 1990s, can somehow be recovered. Miri Yu, however, is clearly beyond such hope, as Gold Rush shows so starkly. The novel is a curious choice to introduce Yu's work in English because Family Cinema received more media attention, sold more copies, and was made into a film in 1998. The French translation of Family Cinema in 1997 marked the first time one of Yu's novels appeared in a Western language. Published in 1998, a year after Family Cinema, Gold Rush represents a crescendo of violence and rage in Yu's work, which has since faded as she has branched out into other genres, such as essay writing.

The protagonist in the novel is Kazuki Yuminaga, a fourteen-year-old boy from a broken home whose father had become wealthy from a chain of eight pachinko parlors. Within the novel's first few pages, Kazuki snorts cocaine with his buddies, then turns violent as he joins a gang rape. For Kazuki, violence is a way of being that is justified by the world around him. Seeking to take over his father's pachinko empire, Kazuki kills his father by hitting him over the head with a vase and cutting him up with a samurai sword. He hides the body in the basement vault of the family home that is stashed with gold bars. Consumed by bursts of guilt and growing paranoia, Kazuki attempts to gain control over his father's business, but fails after several bad business deals. As the tension builds, Kazuki falls in love with the new housekeeper, Kyoko, and ends up confessing the murder to her. When the police start investigating the murder, Kyoko fears that she might be viewed as an accomplice if they catch Kazuki. To save herself, she urges Kazuki to turn himself in, but he refuses. At the end of the novel, Kazuki, Kyoko, and Kazuki's older brother, Koki, take a trip to the zoo. Soon after they arrive, an earthquake strikes and frees the animals from their cages, suggesting that Kazuki is ready to turn himself in.

The rest of the family is peripheral to the plot, coming and going as stage props in the drama of Kazuki's troubles. Koki has Williams Syndrome, which has left him naive and unprepared for life in the "real world." Blaming the disease on wealth and greed, Kazuki's mother, Miki, joined an ascetic religious cult when Kazuki was three and lives apart from the family. His older sister, Miho, a victim of her father's sexual abuse, runs away from home and becomes a prostitute, even though she is still in high school. She has few contacts with her family, except when she needs money.

The family as a collection of indifferent, and at times hostile, strangers grinds through Gold Rush as it does through Family Cinema and as it has through Yu's own life. Born to parents who were resident Koreans (ethnic Koreans who were born and live permanently in Japan), Yu grew up in a broken home, which carries social stigma in Japan, and she spent her teenage years running away from home and school. As a resident Korean on the run, Yu saw firsthand the violence and despair that places social dropouts and outcasts in such peril in Japan's tightly wound society. The depth of Yu's pain gives her work an authenticity that distinguishes it from works that address contemporary social issues from a perspective of commentary rather than from personal experience. The voice of Kazuki near the end could well be Yu's own:

The translator, Stephen Snyder, captures the plot and characters well, but has trouble at times capturing the range of formal and informal speech in Japanese, particularly in informal conversation. The translation would have benefited from a translator's preface to place Miri Yu and her work in context and to explain the choice of Gold Rush to introduce her work in English.

The violence in Gold Rush may come as a surprise to readers who are familiar with modern Japanese classics by Yasunari Kawabata and Junichiro Tanizaki, or to lighter contemporary works by Haruki Murakami and Banana Yoshimoto. Miri Yu has succeeded in revealing the intensity of desire and pain in superficially placid Japan in a richly authentic voice that more than makes up for the use of characters that seem too convenient for the plot. Gold Rush expands the range of Japanese literature available in English translation and is the first novel by a resident Korean writer to appear English. It raises hopes that more of Miri Yu's work and that of other resident Korean writers will appear in English.