Villain

A gripping thriller about the dark heart of Japan. Now a major motion picture

Yoshida has been compared to Stieg Larsson for his pairing of lurid crime and social critique, but his tone is less sensationalist, more melancholic...Yoshida exposes cruelty and alienation at all levels of Japanese society

A gripping psychological thriller which shows a very different Japan from the neon-lit Tokyo we are more used to

It isn't hard to see why it has caused a sensation among readers and critics in Japan. Villain is a superlative crime novel with intriguing twists

A novelist of truly international stature

A complex and powerful exploration of the lives of a victim, killer and their families and friends... Villain is a moving and disturbing novel about loneliness, lies and the gap between expectation and reality. Highly recommended

The interest for a British audience will lie in the chilly details it reveals about contemporary Japanese society...what comes across so forcefully is the rootlessness and alienation of the youth in Japan

Shuichi Yoshida was born in Nagasaki, Japan, in 1968. He is the author of numerous books and has won many Japanese literary awards, including the Akutayawa Prize for Park Life, and the prestigious Osaragi Jiro Prize and the Mainichi Publishing Culture Award, both of which he received for Villain. Several of his stories have been adapted for Japanese television, and a film based on Villain was released in 2010 in Japan as Akunin. Yoshida lives in Tokyo.

A young woman is brutally murdered on a remote mountain road. A young construction worker, Yuichi, is on the run - but is he guilty? 
 
This is the dark heart of Japan; a world of seedy sex hotels and decaying seaside towns; a world of loneliness, violence and desperation. 
 
As the police close in on Yuichi and his new lover, the stories of the victim, the murderer and their families are uncovered. But these men and women are never what they appear to be...

Shuichi Yoshida

A sharply observed slice of urban alienation

Imagine if Friends had ended with the revelation that Chandler was a psychopath – and that Joey, Monica, Ross, Phoebe and Rachel weren't bothered by it. Yoshida locates horror less in violence than in the kind of atomisation that would permit it

Unsettling, prosaic, effortlessly profound… Yoshida creates a Tokyo both mundane and chilling, a metropolis not of neon and punk but of small rooms in which people who live with each other may as well just be passengers on a subway train, marking time until a stop that never comes

Startling... It is a fascinating story of how five people can co-exist, written in each character's own words... The unexpected, if almost inevitable conclusion brings things to a brilliant end

An authentic exploration of everyday life in contemporary Japan

Four twenty-somethings share an apartment in Tokyo. In Parade each tells their story: their lives, their hopes and fears, their loves, their secrets. 
 
Kotomi waits by the phone for a boyfriend who never calls. Ryosuke wants someone that he can’t have. Mirai spends her days drawing and her nights hanging out in gay bars. Naoki works for a film company, and everyone treats him like an elder brother. Then Satoru turns up. He’s eighteen, homeless, and does night work of a very particular type. 
 
In the next-door apartment something disturbing is going on. And outside, in the streets around their apartment block, there is violence in the air. From the writer of the cult classic Villain, Parade is a tense, disturbing, thrilling tale of life in the city.

Shuichi Yoshida

Praise for Parade

A sharply observed slice of urban alienation

Imagine if Friends had ended with the revelation that Chandler was a psychopath – and that Joey, Monica, Ross, Phoebe and Rachel weren't bothered by it. Yoshida locates horror less in violence than in the kin ...

Unsettling, prosaic, effortlessly profound… Yoshida creates a Tokyo both mundane and chilling, a metropolis not of neon and punk but of small rooms in which people who live with each other may as well just be passen ...

A sharply observed slice of urban alienation

Imagine if Friends had ended with the revelation that Chandler was a psychopath – and that Joey, Monica, Ross, Phoebe and Rachel weren't bothered by it. Yoshida locates horror less in violence than in the kin ...

Unsettling, prosaic, effortlessly profound… Yoshida creates a Tokyo both mundane and chilling, a metropolis not of neon and punk but of small rooms in which people who live with each other may as well just be passen ...

A sharply observed slice of urban alienation

Imagine if Friends had ended with the revelation that Chandler was a psychopath – and that Joey, Monica, Ross, Phoebe and Rachel weren't bothered by it. Yoshida locates horror less in violence than in the kin ...

Unsettling, prosaic, effortlessly profound… Yoshida creates a Tokyo both mundane and chilling, a metropolis not of neon and punk but of small rooms in which people who live with each other may as well just be passen ...

Books by Shuichi Yoshida

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