A Race Against Time

"That belongs in a museum."

"Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade"

The first time I ever heard of the Klein bottle was through developers' comments of the Ace Attorney game series actually, where the village of Kurain (Klein) was named after it.

The Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book Uesugi had written for a publishing contest had exceeded the page limit, so Brain Syndrome was disqualified, but to his great surprise, he was contacted by a game company called Epsilon Project, which wanted to purchase the rights to make video game out of his gamebook. Uesugi is thrilled and immediately signs the contract, but months fly by without any real contact from Epsilon. When they finally do contact Uesugi however, he's in for a surprise. Epsilon Project's adaptation of Brain Syndrome wasn't "just" a game: it would be real revolution in game technology. Using unexplored virtual reality technology in the form of the machine K2, the player is submerged in a tank while playing the game, where both audiovisual and full-body feedback give the player the feeling they're really fully immersed in the game world. Uesugi is asked to test-play the game adaptation of Brain Syndrome, together with the part-timer Risa, and both not only find the virtual world of K2 amazing, they also slowly grow closer to each other. But one day, Risa suddenly disappears after a day of work, and then Uesugi slowly starts to harbor doubts about Epsilon Project, as in hindsight, it's a bit strange that he and Risa are driven in a blinded van every day to the secret location of K2 all just to test a videogame, not to mention the other over-the-top security measures taken. Uesugi decides to look for Risa, but the answers he finds are not the ones he had expected in Okajima Futari's Klein no Tsubo ("The Klein Bottle",1989).

Okajma Futari was the pen name of the duo Inoue Izumi and Tokuyama Junichi, who were active between 1981 and 1989. Last year, I reviewed Soshite Tobira ga Tozasareta, which I didn't like particularly, but they still had a few interesting titles in their bibliography I wanted to read. Klein no Tsubo was the last novel published under the Okajima Futari name, as they officially disbanded after the release of this novel, and most of the book was actually written by the Inoue half.

The historical lens is something you also often use when reading fiction, as ideas, tropes and customs all change with time, and what might be a brilliant concept at the original of release, might literally be old-fashioned in another time. The same with the mystery genre of course, where many ideas seen in the Father Brown stories seem rather unoriginal nowadays, but that's because everyone in the century after their release has been borrowing ideas from them. Concepts that were groundbreaking at one time are very likely to be commonplace some decades later. And that is definitely the case with Klein no Tsubo.

In 1989, I am sure that virtual reality and related fields were still quite original and not deeply explored yet in mystery fiction. But nowadays, even the smartphone in your pocket is capable to do some form of VR. Haptic feedback, super-realistic AI and words created in a digital realm: it's not uncommon anymore in this world. Movies about virtual worlds that seem realistic to the protagonists have been quite common since the 1990s, and especially since the 2000s we've seen countless of movies and series about people finding themselves in super-realistic virtual game worlds that seem almost real.

Reading Klein no Tsubo in 2019 (okay, I read this novel in 2018. It's only the review which is published in 2019) sadly enough offers far too few surprises. As a mystery thriller, it does absolutely nothing you haven't seen before if you have been around and consumed popular culture the last two, three decades. Mind you, Klein no Tsubo does nothing wrong at all and can be an entertaining read (don't expect a puzzle plot mystery though), but the times have already gone far beyond everything done or discussed in this novel. Some of the plot twists in Klein no Tsubo might genuinely have been shocking and creepy in 1989: but by now even something like a Treehouse of Horror episode of The Simpsons will have not only used those same ideas, but gone beyond that. Nothing Klein no Tsubo as a thriller does, can possibly be a real surprise to someone now.

I think thematically,  Klein no Tsubo is a strong novel, and to repeat myself, it's a perfectly fine thriller that is competently written, but this is an example where you can really feel how time, and Zeitgeist, has made this novel not only outdated, but perhaps even obsolete, as the things the novel accomplishes, have become part of the bare basics of what a modern reader would expect from this specific theme, so you're left with a feeling of "Oh, was that everything? That wasn't just the set-up?".

Original Japanese title(s):  岡嶋二人 『クラインの壷』