Mysterious Setting

Mysterious Setting

Cover of the 1st Japanese edition
Author	Kazushige Abe
Original title	ミステリアス・セッティング Misuteriasu Settingu
Translator	Michael Emmerich
Language	Japanese
Publisher	Asahi Shimbun, Pushkin Press
Publication date	2006
Publication place	Japan
Published in English	2024
Pages	222
ISBN	9781805330486

Mysterious Setting (ミステリアス・セッティング Misuteriasu Settingu, 2006) is a novel by Japanese writer Kazushige Abe. It originally appeared as a cell phone novel before being published in book form.

Background and composition

Abe has stated that in Mysterious Setting he intended to create a modern-day version of Hans Christian Andersen's "The Little Match Girl", while also parodying Justine, or The Misfortunes of Virtue and Juliette, or Vice Amply Rewarded by the Marquis de Sade. He chose the cell phone novel format so as to "reset his writing style" because he had found it difficult to do so after focusing on novels for more than a decade.

Plot summary

The story is preceded by three introductory elements: an explanation of the title ("A sophisticated jewelry-making technique in which princess-cut jewels are set without the gold or platinum prongs that typically hold stones in place, allowing their inherent beauty to shine forth to the fullest extent."), a clip from The Asahi Shimbun bearing the headline "Arab Newspaper Says Al-Qaeda Bought Nuclear Weapons From Ukraine in 1998", and a short piece entitled "Where are the Suitcase Nukes Now?"

An unnamed narrator relates how he and his friends feel drawn to play in a local park, and while there, they listen to an old man who is telling stories.

One story involves a girl named Shiori who loves to sing and has and dreams of becoming a troubadour. However, her singing causes a negative reaction in anyone who hears it, except for the birds in a local pet store, with whom she feels a bond. Shiori is bullied by her little sister Nozomi over her singing, and when she gets her first boyfriend, her sister disparages him. Shiori is distraught when her boyfriend tells her she is tone-deaf, and then finds out that the birds at the local store have mysteriously died. Devastated by the idea that she may have caused their deaths by singing, she takes several days off from school. When she returns, she is treated strangely. Nozomi forces Shiuri’s friend to confess that she had been spreading rumors about Shiori and was going to steal her boyfriend.

After high school, Shiori finds a way to continue her love of music by going to a music school in Tokyo to study songwriting. The other students find her strange because of her refusal to sing and she ends up feeling very isolated. She makes several email friends in order to feel less lonely: Z, a boy who is homebound due to health problems; and Manuel, a Portuguese man who is in a band. She ends up meeting Manuel and his band and they talk her into being their manager, which in practice means running errands and buying things for them. Around this time she hears that her family’s business is going under and there will be financial difficulty, but her parents tell her to stay in college.

Manuel comes over her apartment and says that he is sorry that the band was taking advantage of her and that he is leaving Japan. During his visit she dozes off, only to awake and find that he has departed but left his suitcase behind. Manuel has sent her several emails, admitting that he has lied about his identity and that the suitcase is actually a suitcase nuke, one called a “mysterious setting” that looks like a normal suitcase. Shiori tries to give the suitcase to the police, but they won’t believe that it’s a bomb. She begins hearing the suitcase speaking to her and takes it on trips around Tokyo, but is afraid of leaving it anywhere in case it is in fact a bomb. Stressed out by the responsibility of deciding what to do with the suitcase, she consults a member of the band who had dated Manuel to get insight into whether he is telling the truth about the suitcase. His ex-girlfriend tells her that Manuel was constantly lying and had gotten the term “mysterious setting” from an article about jewelry in a magazine she had.

Immensely relieved, Shiori decides to take the suitcase on one last outing, to Tokyo Tower. While there, a suspicious man tries to steal it. That night, she gets a call from Manuel, who tells her that electromagnetic radiation can cause the suitcase bombs to malfunction and go off. Shiori notices that the suitcase has indeed started counting down, presumably from the radio waves at Tokyo Tower. She relates her predicament to Z, who suggests that she find a deep subway station to leave the suitcase in so that it will kill no one. Shiori cannot find a way to abandon the suitcase at the station without being detected so she pulls it down the tracks to a secluded room that she finds. While Z is contacting the police, she leaves him a farewell message, after which the bomb explodes.

The old man telling the story shares that he is Z and that the area of the park is over where the bomb exploded, where, due to Shiori’s actions, she was the only one who died.

Reception

M.A.Orthofer writes in The Complete Review: "Shiori's sad sack story can make for a bit heavy going at times, but there's enough else to Mysterious Setting to make it consistently compelling and ultimately a success—a rather odd but also strangely haunting one."

Christopher Corker writes in the Asian Review of Books: "Despite its exaggeratedly tragic tone, Mysterious Setting is entirely relevant in a digitally connected world in which every truth is questioned and every personal opinion attacked, until ultimately the only ones who are brave enough to speak are those most insidiously deceitful or incandescent with rage. The rest fear to utter a word. Like Shiori, they exercise a form of self-censorship that arises from being brutalised by a cynical view of the world, even if this view does not reflect reality at all."

External links

• Mysterious Setting's page on Pushkin Press