The 1st Selected Works
TITLE
The Cage
(Ori)
(Ori)
AUTHOR
Translator
ENGLISH / Paul Warham 
Originally Published by:
Shueisha (1983)
(1987) (pb)
KEY POINTS
- The supreme hard-boiled masterpiece of Kitakata, whose works have been nominated for numerous literary awards
SYNOPSIS
Your body is progressively absorbed into the darkness where beasts are stirring…
Kazuya Takino used to belong to a small gangster group, but the group broke up on the death of its leader. Having taken the opportunity to extricate himself from the yakuza world, he is now the manager of a small supermarket, living peacefully with his wife.
A series of unpleasant incidents have been occurring at Takino's supermarket for the past month. First a frozen mouse corpse emerged from the frozen foods showcase. Then some foreign matter was injected into milk cartons with a syringe. The damages have amounted to a considerable sum and a detective is staking out his supermarket, but the criminal is still unknown. Now a small-time thug is starting to harass him.
Takino learns that the owner of a local pachinko pinball game parlor is seeking to buy his supermarket and begins to think that the pachinko parlor owner may have some kind of involvement in the series of unpleasant incidents.
The complicated problems caused by the acquisition proposal are starting to wake up Takino's wild side—a side he thought he had consigned to permanent oblivion long ago. Takino beats up troublemakers several times, and he also gets beaten up more than once. Discarding the "cage" in which he has been living a happy, peaceful life, Takino goes to meet an old buddy and ends up returning to the old battlefield.
Kitakata's supreme masterpiece of hard-boiled fiction vividly portrays the aesthetics of a man's destruction.
GENRE: Hard-boiled fiction
Awards: 2nd Japan Adventure Fiction Association Prize
(Given for high-quality adventure and hard-boiled fiction)
