Blue Spring (Blue Spring)

Rating:
Summary: Summer, boredom and dead end lives
Review: Well, that was interesting. I am still digesting the experience, not sure what to think of it. Blue Spring is a collection of short stories, all centered around high school guys, mostly thuggish and poor, and on the boredom and frustration of their pointless existence.
"If you're happy and you know it clap your hands" is about a game in which boys will hang over the railing on the school roof, let go of the railing and clap before grabbing it again. Whoever does the most claps wins, and if one of them screws up he'll fall to his death.
"Revolver", my favorite story and the longest in the bunch, concerns three guys who get their hands on a revolver and three bullets, and what they do next.
"Mahjong Summer" is about highschool baseball players discussing their loss as the play mahjong, "Suzuki-san" is about a boy's initiation into the Yakuza, "Peace" is about murder, "The Family Restaurant is our Paradise" is about the pointless, neverending squabbles of a group of friends in a family restaurans, and "This is Bad" is a pointless but kinda fun chase sequence story.
From all the stories I get a sence of nihilism and quiet despair, of boredom and the sence of lives that have no purpose and are going nowhere. Matsumoto is a master of setting the mood, you can feel it drenching you. So why only 4 stars? While the book definetly affected me emotionally, it was a difficult book to get through. In order to convey boredom you have to show it, and certain parts were hard to slog through. Also, Matsumoto can sometimes be too surreal for his own good. the various random grunts, non-sequers and plain weirdness can make reading his stories a confusing experience - you loose the thread, all the white noise drowns out coherence.

Overall, if nothing else this book is a unique experience. Flawed, but effective.


- Quick revision - just wanted to add that the author of this book is Taiyo Matsumoto, the author of "Black and White" and "No.5", not Joe Smith as Amazon.com indicates.