Word: kazuki
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...Kazuki Yuminaga is a 14-year-old boy from a wealthy, deeply troubled Yokohama family. Mom abandoned the home years before on the advice of a fortune-teller. His brother suffers from a genetic disorder called Williams syndrome which, among other things, leaves him literally without a sense of direction. Kazuki's older sister, Mohi, is even more rudderless: the extent of her ambition seems to be part-time prostitution. At the head of this clan is Hidetomo, the almost comically loathsome pachinko-chain owner and abusive drunkard who views his children as "nonperforming assets." Hidetomo's malevolence goes unnoticed...
...setting is the dystopic Japan we've become familiar with, both in recent films like Ichii the Killer and Battle Royale and in novels by Ryu Murakami and David Mitchell. In the Koganecho back-alley brothels and sleazy bars, Kazuki and his pals pass the time doing cocaine and working on their fake tans. When Kazuki becomes a passive participant in the gang-rape of a young girl, his father insists he resume classes at the prestigious Hosei Academy. (The rape is a side issue. Dad has made a large donation to the school and wants to get his money...
...Further violence unfolds with a detached, unsettling inevitability, and by the time Kazuki kills Hidetomo, you're almost relieved. After the murder, he descends into a surreal, Oedipal nightmare of guilt and paranoia, eerily coming to resemble his dead father as he struggles to run the household and the pachinko business. Kazuki is so frazzled he can't even get around to disposing of the corpse; as his mind begins to unravel, he desperately concludes more killing may be necessary to conceal the dead body rotting in a vault filled with gold...
...Gold and death: Yu links Kazuki's personal meltdown to the decay of a Japanese society in which money is all that matters. Tellingly, Kazuki's dad owes his fortune to pachinko, an utterly mindless form of low-stakes gambling that annually rakes in some $250 billion, is linked to organized crime and sometimes inspires zombie-like trances that have caused Japanese mothers to leave their babies to suffocate in overheated cars. As in real life, the cops in the novel enjoy a cozy relationship with the gaming industry, routinely looking the other way in exchange for high-paying post...
...Kazuki Takahashi, the creator of the comic series, and games producer Konami appear to be following the Pokémon formula to fuel the Yu-Gi-Oh craze. Like Pokémon, the animated TV show brings the characters and plot twists to life. Like Pokémon, Yu-Gi-Oh demands careful strategy to decide which cards to pit against one another. Because you need 40 cards to play the game (players download characters into a Game Boy by inserting the codes printed on real cards), it also plays to kids' penchant for collecting. And though the Game...