Edge

Suzuki Kouji’s Edge is about Saeko Kuriyama, a freelance journalist who has been brought onto a project to do a TV special about the missing Fujinuma family. The Fujinuma case had captured national attention a few weeks prior, when they appeared to have vanished into thin air. They were a perfectly normal family—father, mother, son, daughter—and the state of their house implied that all four members disappeared in the middle of a perfectly normal evening. Despite the intense national scrutiny, absolutely no dark secrets or typical causes for disappearances (such as debt) came to light, and in fact no evidence or testimony of any kind was obtained. Even though this is Saeko’s first time officially working on a missing persons case, she has plenty of experience since her own father disappeared without a trace 18 years ago and she investigated his whereabouts thoroughly (to no avail).

Although the driving thrust of Edge is a disappearance, don’t mistake it for a fair-play mystery. If you allow me a video game comparison, this is much more Zero Escape than Ace Attorney. We aren’t investigating crimes; we’re logically diving into bizarre happenings with regular metaphilosophical tangents and a hefty slice of horror. (Suzuki also wrote Ring, by the way.)

I don't really 'do' the horror genre, but a reader of this blog was kind enough to buy this book for me and it has a mystery slant, so here we are. And, fortunately, I found Edge's approach to horror non-traditional and fascinating. Edge employs cosmic, existential horror. But rather than simply making up great and terrible entities beyond mortal comprehension, a la Lovecraft, Suzuki uses actual scientific concepts to highlight human insignificance, how little we actually know, and how fragile our reality might actually be. You know Cthulhu isn't actually lurking at the bottom of the sea. But black holes and anti-matter? That stuff is real.

That being said, I didn't actually find Edge that scary; the closest it got was a couple of suspenseful passages. I'm not going to suddenly doubt or start to fear for the fabric of reality just because a book gives me a metaphilosphical physics lecture.

As I just wrote, I don't really do horror stuff, but one time my friend dragged me into a haunted house. While I don't have much experience to draw from, it didn't feel like a particularly intense experience—yet my friend acted extraordinarily jumpy and squeamish, which surprised me. He was the one who wanted to do it in the first place, and hasn't he done plenty of these before? When I asked him why he was reacting so strongly, he told me that he purposefully psychs himself out and gets into the mood whenever he does things like haunted houses. After all, the purpose of those attractions is to get scared, and they aren't fun if you don't.

My point here is that the vast majority of times you experience a horror story it will likely be from a place of safety, whether it is from the other side of a screen, within the pages of a book, or in a controlled theme park environment, and you will know it. It's easy to dispel your fears with the knowledge of that safety, if you go in with that mindset. So in order for the horror genre to work, you need to meet it halfway. And... I'm not sure I did here. Perhaps it's not Edge's fault, and if I had read Edge with a less skeptical mindset, I would have found it freakier.

So, in the end, how do I feel about Edge? It’s… kind of hard to say. But I suppose I have to give it my best shot.

To me, Edge can be divided into three parts. The first part comprises the vast, vast majority of the book—probably the first 95% or so, everything from the intro up through the middle of the climax. It’s weird, tense, and engaging. We start off with just the Fujinumas’ disappearance, but other issues pop up, and freaky stuff happens, and character drama develops…. Saeko is intelligent and naturally curious, and always approaches problems by trying to rationally analyze and think them through. It’s enjoyable watching her—that is, someone who is not an utter idiot—try to navigate everything that happens. Saeko’s personality also causes the book to consistently take detours into science, philosophy, and history (in large part due to her father’s influence), so hopefully you aren’t sick of them from Zero Escape. (The fact that the characters aren’t sitting around giving these lectures while in the midst of a time-sensitive death game should hopefully make them a bit more palatable. Also, while I generally did like the lectures, there was one at the end that was based on what I know to be a common misconception. This is pretty unfortunate, since it suddenly caused me to doubt all the previous discussions where I had simply taken the book’s word for the facts it was asserting. It’s very possible that the character was mistaken about this fact while the author was not, but the book doesn’t do anything to suggest this is the case, so... there is nothing to quell the doubt.)

Suzuki also does a good job preventing you from seeing exactly where he’s going. The constant intellectual discussions strongly imply that the explanation for whatever is going on will be scientific. Yet a character who claims to be psychic is introduced relatively early on, and her powers are strongly implied to be real, which means the possibility of a fantastic solution will always be hanging in the back of your mind. The story also constantly bends in a way where you can’t be sure whether it’s some”one” or some”thing” or just some sort of natural phenomenon behind everything.

The last part of the book is the resolution. The final scene, where everything comes together. (Or falls apart, perhaps?) Edge sets a massive task for its finale. The book’s scope only grows bigger and bigger, and the constant discussions on the mysteries of the universe set the reader’s expectations up for something profound. And I think Edge delivers. No, Suzuki has not unlocked the meaning of the universe or anything, but… the book has a fitting end that provides closure and feels right.

And so the issue is the remaining part of the book. The moment in the middle of the climax. Or really, two moments. The moments that prevent my feelings on Edge from setting into anything expressible.

In short, there was a moment in the middle of Edge’s climax that knocked me out of it. And I don’t mean “knocked it out of the park.” I mean, knocked me out of the immersion. A moment that caused me to reread the passage to ensure I hadn’t misread or misunderstood something, and then made me put the book down and simply ponder whether this book, which had clearly so much time and effort put into organizing its plot and researching the various scientific concepts that undergird its story, was actually going to seriously try to explain everything with this. And the answer was yes, it was. It was going to try to explain the reason behind it all as, of all things—

What makes it worse is that this plot point comes totally out of left field, when it could have easily been clued or established much earlier in the narrative. Also, immediately after this moment was another plot twist that wasn’t as flagrant, but that I still found a bit silly, mostly because it seems like something Saeko should have seen through it, and there isn’t much talk about how it was actually pulled off.

Still, I just have no idea how to process these moments. Especially the first one. It’s an anomaly. Do I completely disregard the entire book for taking me on its entire journey and then justifying itself with [gaaaaaaah]? Or do I ignore the outlier when analyzing my feelings? I don’t know. I like the vast majority of the book leading up to the climax. I like the resolution. But this one element of the solution… I can’t forgive, forget, or accept it.

When I discussed the last segment of the book, I said that Edge’s ending had a difficult task, since the book had set up so much for itself. Maybe the reason the resolution was able to succeed was because the climax stumbled so hard. It almost feels to me that for the climax to work, it had to be based on some grand, unknowable Truth—a Truth that could never be delivered through a mere mortal vessel like Suzuki, and that perhaps could not even be comprehended by us lowly humans. So maybe the book decided to use a ridiculous, obviously wrong gag in the place where the Truth would have gone in order to make it clear that it wasn't even making an attempt at conveying the Truth.

Who knows? I don’t.