Zekkyo Reading Notes: The Inescapable Dependence on Others
Zekkyo Reading Notes: The Inescapable Dependence on Others
Misaka10013I recently finished Zekkyo (絶叫) by the Japanese writer Akira Hamanaka. It wears the label of a “social-school mystery,” yet it offers none of the pleasure of puzzle-solving—it simply lays out, in unsparing detail, how a person is pushed step by step to the edge of life. Reading it was suffocating, but after I put the book down, some questions kept circling in my head. Let me organize my thoughts.
The Story First: Yoko’s Life (Spoiler Alert)
⚠️ Spoiler Alert: The summary below contains the central twist of the book. If you haven’t read it yet and care about the reading experience, I strongly suggest you read the novel first and come back later—once the suspense is spoiled, the pleasure is gone for good.
Suzuki Yoko was born in 1973 in a small Japanese city, an ordinary girl whose name her parents picked almost carelessly—“the most common girl’s name there is.” Her mother favored sons over daughters, pouring all her love into Yoko’s frail younger brother Jun. When Jun—bullied at school because of his developmental disorder—left a suicide note and took his own life, the mother refused to accept reality and instead dumped her anger on Yoko. After the economic bubble burst, her father, drowning in debt, walked out on the family. Yoko went to Tokyo alone to make a living: she worked as a call-center operator, reunited with and married her first love, only to be pressured into divorce when he had an affair. Drifting into insurance sales, she was played by her boss in the name of “love,” slept with clients to meet her sales quotas, and was fired when it came to light. Burdened with credit-card debt, she slid step by step into working as an escort. Starved for affection, she ended up supporting a sweet-talking, violent host-club boyfriend. After being raped by a yakuza thug, it was she who proposed a “way to make money”—using the know-how she had picked up in the insurance business, she registered a marriage with her boyfriend, took out a policy on him, and had him killed in a staged “car accident” to cash in a fortune in insurance money. After that, she became the tool of a gang that specialized in “insurance-fraud husband killings,” marrying two more “husbands”—homeless men nobody cared about, taken in by the gang’s shelter—both of whom died in eerily identical “accidents.”
The truth is only revealed at the very end: the “Yoko” corpse found in that apartment at the start of the book, eaten by cats, was actually her former colleague from the escort agency. After killing the gang boss who controlled her, she strangled her old colleague, took her identity papers, killed her own mother to erase the last evidence, and had plastic surgery to change her face—making “Suzuki Yoko” completely dead, while she herself walked away with the money under a new identity, vanishing without a trace. The novel runs on two parallel tracks—a female detective investigating the “lonely death” case, and a second-person narration that coldly looks back over Yoko’s life—until the two lines converge on a truth that sends a chill down your spine.
1. The Writing Is Excellent
The writing is excellent. It tells the story of a woman named Yoko and how life pushed her, step by step, to the brink. The author is skillful: the hardships of women in Japanese society—favoring sons over daughters, no decent jobs to be found, men you can’t rely on, never enough money—are all brought to life vividly through Yoko’s story. You can’t help feeling the reality and the suffocation, and empathizing with her. Because it really does reflect genuine problems in society.
2. The Real Root Cause: To Live, You Must Ask Others
The book presents social phenomena in abundance and lets readers truly feel the problems, but it never spells out the fundamental cause.
The real root cause is this: to live, human beings must ask others for things.
Yoko needs food and survival, so she must work—and thus depends on employers who exploit her and organizations that fleece her.
Yoko needs affection, so she depends on a cold family and faithless men.
Yoko needs recognition, so she depends on empty consumption and the eyes of others.
Wherever human needs exist, dependence arises; and where dependence exists, inequality and oppression are never far behind. This is a universal structure of power and inequality that grows inevitably out of our mutual needs as human beings.
Yoko is a pitiable woman oppressed by men, by bosses, by society. But the men who oppressed her are, in their other relationships—with their own bosses, their own clients—equally “oppressed.” This book tells the story of a woman’s predicament, but in truth, “people asking of people, people crushing people” is a predicament that can befall any weak person who ends up at the bottom of a chain of dependence.
The most chilling part of the book is this: Yoko, driven to the edge, does not end up as a “good person.” She turns from victim into perpetrator—deliberately scheming murder for insurance money, becoming a new oppressor higher up the chain. The positions of victim and perpetrator are swapped, but the structure of “people asking of people, people crushing people” stands utterly unmoved. That is the most hopeless part: what crushes her is never one particular villain, but the chain of dependence itself.
3. Why Can’t This Problem Be Solved?
On reflection, it’s because human needs keep “upgrading,” and dependence keeps shifting.
Even if society develops to a higher stage where everyone’s basic needs are guaranteed, people will then want bigger houses, nicer cars, emotional care, great achievements… Needs change endlessly; there is always something more advanced that can only be obtained by relying on someone else. So today you swallow humiliation for a meal; tomorrow you might be smiling through business dinners for a respectable job; the day after, you might kneel and pledge allegiance to reach a stage called “success.” As long as we still long to get something from others or from society, the balance of power can tilt—and the humiliation and unease of “asking” cling to us like a shadow. In this sense, what the book depicts is not the ailment of one particular society, but a “system setting” that humans cannot escape in organized existence.
4. Making People See the Symptoms and Think About the Root
The value of this book is precisely that it lets people see the symptoms and begin to think about the root cause. It has already fulfilled its task.
As for a solution—there is none. Reasoning further, this question of “needs and dependence” transcends gender, transcends social systems; it seems to be a fundamental predicament of human organization itself. That’s why, no matter where you are, you can’t dodge this problem.
Most people’s advice comes down to this. On the personal level: stay clear-eyed, stay independent. Much suffering comes from an “excessive craving for feedback from others.” Independence of mind, awareness of one’s desires, self-reliance in one’s abilities—these cannot sever every dependence, but they can give us a measure of clarity when we have no choice but to “ask,” a little less self-loss, and a hold on the autonomy and dignity at our core.
On the social level: although human organizations cannot escape the basic setting that “people ask of people,” we can still try to build fairer rules for “asking.” For instance, society can underwrite the basic needs of survival for everyone. That can’t eradicate the problem, but it can leave the Yokos of this world a little more room to live.
