Baracca (novel by Natsuo Kirino)
I’ve just finished reading the novel “Baracca” written by Natsuo Kirino. Natsuo Kirino is famous for her novels “Out” and “Grotesque”. Most of her books are focused on unhappy people, like a poor housewife, an ugly girl, a mother who lost her child by abduction, etc.
“Baracca” is based on the 3.11 Great Eastern Japan Earthquake in 2011. The girl named Baracca survived this disaster. She got thyroid cancer caused by the nuclear power plant in Fukushima. She was symbolized as the danger of nuclear power by people against it, but anonymous groups (it could be the Japanese government) tried to catch and kill her to hide the fact of the damage.
One of the key messages of this story is “cutting off the cause of your failure cycle”, which means if you were in trouble now, you need find the root cause and stop it. For example, if too much drinking is the cause of your family breakdown, you need to stop drinking. It is difficult to admit your own weakness and overcome it. In this story, even if people could get over their weakness, most of them heartlessly died in the end…
Baracca just wanted to survive and live with her family. She was betrayed by adults over and over again but didn’t become evil. On the other hand, most of the adults were cunning.
A woman who wanted to have a baby, bought a baby girl at the black market in Dubai. She abandoned the baby later because the baby never got used to her.
Her closest friend kindly introduced this black market, but her purpose was filming this fact. She tried to make a documentary film about this black market as a TV producer.
A man married to the woman who bought a baby at the market did not love her. His aim was to obtain her assets…
All adults in the story were selfish and calculating.
I am not sure why most of them are dead, but perhaps the story had an unhappy ending because of these calculating behaviors. But who can blame them? At least these people had some ego. The whole story was just heartless and cold. I questioned whether we would be able to be happy once we act with selfish motives?
