Speedboy

• by Maijo Otaro
• published by Kodansha Box

The more Maijo writes, the less constrained he is by conventions of narrative logic. All trappings of the mystery genre he initially tried to force himself into are now gone, all pretense at a beginning, middle, and end abandoned.

The seven chapters here roughly tell the story of Naruo, the fastest boy in the world, and his battle with these mysterious white balls that appear before him as he breaks the sound barrier.

Each of the chapters taken alone is a perfect slice of Maijo's mind -- I don't know if they actually work as short stories, but there is a satisfying wholeness to them, a completeness to whatever it was he was trying to get across.

The fact that these stories blatantly contradict each other does not seem to bother Maijo in the slightest.

Much as I hate to try and drag him down to my level, I think the book would have been more satisfying if the stories did not ostensibly feature the same characters. Each of them works perfectly on their own, but grouped together and called a novel I kept searching for strands that connected them, some sort of ultimate meaning behind the repeating motifs. Ultimately I felt like I was analyzing Maijo's dreams rather than reading a novel.

But if that bothered me much I wouldn't be reading him in the first place. Speedboy is easily his best work since Ashura Girl, and the more he writes, the more purely his distills what is in his mind, the more impressed I expect to be.