Lately I read Tetsu Ogawa's novel "The Kingdom of Games" (ゲームの王国).
Set in Cambodia under Pol Pot, it was fairly interesting. Lots of Cambodian names and characters, so reading was a bit hard. Busy with parenting, some days I couldn't read, and restarting meant many "who was this again?" moments.
Theme and character setup felt outstanding, but the unfolding and parts of the story left me a bit unsatisfied. It's long (two volumes); personally I wouldn't strongly recommend it to others. I've read other Ogawa works and like them, so if recommending, it'd be another book.
By chance I recently also read Miyuki Miyabe's long mystery "The Copycat" (模倣犯) and had almost the exact same reaction.
Theme and character setup are extremely interesting (Miyabe seems a genius at character — even bit parts get dense story that makes you empathize), but it's very long, some parts feel redundant, and for this one the ending disappointed me a bit.
Miyabe's books share dialogue and scenery so vivid they could be TV scripts — easy to read — but that also means a TV-drama-ish quality, or a subtle lack of realism, that can cool you while reading.
Still, for "The Copycat," I'd spotted it in bookstores since high school thinking "long but looks interesting — someday," so finishing it felt like clearing a life task. Among Miyabe I've read, "Reason" (理由) was the most interesting.
Back from Miyabe to "The Kingdom of Games": there was an interesting passage. I've forgotten fine detail, so only the gist.
A Japanese NPO staffer visits a village in then extremely poor Cambodia.
A young Cambodian woman has large debts and can barely pay monthly interest.
Unable to bear it, the Japanese staffer offers to repay the whole debt from their own pocket money — hoping she'd gain time for school and better living quality.
Visiting later, she hadn't put the money toward the debt; she'd bought a TV and thanked them: "Now I have one more daily pleasure."
The staffer reflects with words like:
"They have too many things they have to think about themselves."
Meaning: even if supporters / outsiders advise "go to school and raise literacy" or "go to the hospital for basic disease prevention," the person is already in a state of "too much to decide alone," and their subjective life priorities differ greatly.
Fiction, yes — but very convincing, likely true in reality, and extensible to many topics.
Abstracted, it's short-term vs long-term viewpoints.
In business you often see emphasis on "having a long-term view," sometimes with the nuance that managers focused on the short term are incompetent.
But short-term views shouldn't be neglected — and if you ask for whom they're good, it depends on the viewpoint. This was a chance to notice that again.
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