Crossfire

Junko Aoki¹, the protagonist of Crossfire, was born with the power of pyrokinesis, the ability to create fire using only her mind. This paranormal "gift" has blighted her life, making it impossible to have any normal relationships. As a child, any negative emotions she had were instantly translated into a fiery attack whether she willed it or not. It was only thanks to her parents, who knew that her powers were inherited from her maternal grandmother, that she learned, with much effort, to control her power enough to blend into society. When we first meet Junko, she has been living on her own for some time, supporting herself on a small inheritance left by her parents and part-time jobs. She has come to terms with the isolation and loneliness of her situation in a unique way:

"She'd been born with a power few others had, which meant it was something she was supposed to use. This was the correct path in life for her. I am a loaded gun. My mission is to hunt down monsters who live only to consume and destroy innocent lives. For Junko, this conviction was a sanctuary, its foundation solid in a special place within her heart."

When the novel begins, Junko is at the tail end of a relatively quiescent period in her life, when the power is becoming restless again, wanting to be used. Waking from a troubling dream of fire, she bikes off in the darkness of a cold winter night to an abandoned factory nearby. There she has earlier discovered a holding pool of cool, black, oily water perfect for radiating her heat into. As she is about to let go at full blast and achieve the ecstasy of full release, four young toughs enter, dragging a man's body. When they notice her, they drop their victim, who is nearly dead, and turn to her with sadistic anticipation. Terrified and yet exhilarated, she uses her pyrokinetic power to incinerate three of them. The leader escapes, managing to shoot her as he does, but in spite of her own wound, she turns her attention to the victim, begging him to hold on. All he can do is gasp out a few details and the name of his girlfriend—"Natsuko"—before he dies. He has said enough for Junko to realize that he and the girl had been kidnapped, he to be disposed of first and the girl to be kept and slowly tortured to death. Mingling his blood with her own, she vows to find Natsuko and avenge them both, thus beginning a string of murders that form the skeleton plot of the novel. But before these subsequent events, in the momentary quiet, the narration pauses to take in the surrounding scene:

"For the moment, there was no change in the hush of the night enveloping the abandoned factory. Surely someone had heard the gunshots, but to the people of this neighborhood, used to peaceful nights, connecting a sound they had only heard in movies or on TV to something in real life would be difficult. Even if awakened by a loud noise, they would probably assume it was a car backfiring, or they'd frown, thinking it was neighborhood kids again, and burrow back into their beds.... That's what set Junko apart from other people. She knew that this city was a battleground."

The American poet Marianne Moore famously defined poetry as the depiction of imaginary toads in real gardens. Her image could also describe this novel, with its larger-than-life paranormal heroine living in an all too real world of sadistic thugs, evil do-gooders, and ordinary people who just want to get on with their lives. The twist here is that the real garden, with very few exceptions, refuses to see the toad in its midst. Most of those who dwell there behave as if they had a vested interest in denying the power of the supernatural. As Detective Chikako Ishizu says with sad wisdom near the end of the novel: "There are many things in life that are better left unsaid."

The narrative alternates between Junko Aoki and the female Detective Chikako Ishizu, going back and forth in chapter to chapter. Although Chikako has no direct contact with Junko anywhere in the novel, through her level-headedness and all-embracing sympathy she bridges the two major divides, one of paranormal /normal, the other of male/ female (the world of this novel is thick with sexism, in guises both humorous and lethal). Experienced in cases of arson, Chikako is baffled by the murders. All involve fires, but none have traces of the accelerant that is necessary to ignite one. Not officially assigned to the case, she cannot let it go. After her maverick partner Detective Makihara tells her about pyrokinesis and why he believes that the fiery murders were caused by it, she is amazed but unbelieving. Back home, she indulges in a long and comic revery about what it would be like to be a pyrokinetic.

Fittingly, given her function as a bridge, her revery unrolls from the point of view of a member of the opposite sex, namely her husband (he is sitting at the kitchen table as she washes up). It also makes a seamless transition, through its imagery of hot water, back to the world of Junko. Chikako's last thought before she slips into bed, realizing she is more tired than she thought she was, is of how convenient it would be if she could heat the water for her husband's bath by just thinking about it. Then come a few lines of blank space on the page, and the narrative begins again, with the words: "Steam filled the bathroom. " Another bath, another place, another reality.

Without a blink, we are back in Junko's apartment, with Chikako having provided the unknowing link between the two worlds whose parallel realities are the warp and woof of this story. Junko is the protagonist but Chikako is there as her sympathetic mirror in the real world, what one would call, in noh, the shite-tsure, the main character's companion. (In fact, come to think of it, Crossfire would make a wonderful modern noh play, preferably of the fourth or fifth category, since those are the most dramatic ones, often with supernatural creatures squaring off against us denizens of the "real" world.)

Crossfire is a rich novel, with an almost Dickensian gallery of characters. It can be read on several levels and in several ways. But if the reviewer who called it a "paranormal police procedural" that "examines the dark side of Japanese society" is right, then Oliver Twist is a happy-end saga about child exploitation in Victorian England. Certainly Crossfire is a great read, a thriller-cum-detective story. But the reason one feels fuller at the end than at the beginning is that there are grand and universal themes driving it: the eternal battle of good versus evil; sexism and misogyny; love and loneliness. These serve to ennoble the figure of Junko Aoki, who embodies them in her person as she becomes more and more disturbed by the devastation she is wreaking and less and less certain that her mission is as pure as she had thought. The novel begins by being about fire, but in the end it is about those caught in the "crossfire," not the least of whom is Junko Aoki herself.

Miyabe combines a seamless intertwining of the real and the super-real, a gift for character and mesmerizing description, and an empathy and warmth that pervade even the darkest moment s of her tale. The novel's last words describe the flowers reflected in a young girl's eyes at a location I cannot disclose without giving away the plot: "They looked like stars. Like love itself." Hopefully, those tantalizing lines will make you want to read this admirable book.