With One More Step Ahead: A novel.

摘要

This story's protagonist is Lulu. She is a Japanese woman with dementia, and the entire story is shaped as her bizarre monologue about her own life in today's Japan.; In her monologue, Lulu confesses that she is "imprisoned" alone in a tiny lightless cell of a "nursing home" in Tokyo for a variety of therapies, tied up and gagged in bed. She adds that all she can move freely in her body is her eyeballs. She says that she is "writing" a letter to some "Hawaiian girls" she happened to know when she spent some days on the make-believe "Manchurian Island," which she believes exists among the Hawaiian islands. She believes that the "girls" reside in a "heiau" and still "nurse" a Japanese man whose name, "Mr. Onishi," is the same as her deceased TV-documentarist husband's. "Mr. Onishi" is in a "vegetable" state owing to an obstinate disease, and all he can move freely in his body is his eyeballs.; The gagged Lulu continues to "talk to" the ghost-like "girls," a group of which she believes communicates with "Mr. Onishi" by reading the subtle movements of his eyeballs, just as she used to read the eyes of her "vegetable" husband until his strange death. To those "girls" (each with a mask which looks like Lulu's face), she exposes how she discovered in their "heiau" a manuscript entitled in Japanese With One More Step Ahead (whose author seems to be "Mr. Onishi"), and why she chose to translate it into English solely for the "girls," risking mistranslation.; The manuscript of "Mr. Onishi" is about a Japanese man's surreal retrospection on his past love affair with a Japanese woman named, again, "Lulu." Its main character (again, "Mr. Onishi") is a man who chose to resign his job as a TV-documentary director and began to major in literature in a grad school in Tokyo. During his TV-station years, he had first met "Lulu" in a secret group-sex club named "Banyan Tree Society," and lived with her for a few weeks. His long retrospection ends, when he meets her again in an otherworldly way.