Me Against the World [Paperback]

A jaded journalist inherits an abandoned manuscript penned by an old acquaintance who has recently passed away. The writing???a collection of ruminations on the nature of existence by a fifty-three-year old businessman who, as far as the journalist remembers, was a kind and gentle soul???is nothing short of shocking. In it, this apparent everyman???whom we know only as Mr. K???writes that he has a son, daughter, and wife, but has no love for them. He claims that humans are like cancer cells, destroying Mother Earth with their unrestrained propagation. He looks at our mortal destiny with an unflinching honesty and turns to psychic mediums for clues to the afterlife, wondering what immortality???if it were possible???would mean for our spiritual well-being.Me Against the Worldtakes the reader down the rabbit hole of the raging mind of this man, who only rejects the world in order to save it from itself.Has a brilliant opening narrative frame that reads like Kafka or Sebald where the ???author??? discovers the papers of his friend, Mr. K., only after the friend???s sudden death. These papers comprise the book we ultimately read.Like with several of Kazuo Ishiguro???s novels (An Artist of the Floating World,The Remains of the Day), it laments, in hindsight, the unlived life. As with Ishiguro, Shiraishi refuses to imagine something better in its place. Unlike in Ishiguro, however, delicate nostalgia is replaced with hardened bitterness. It???s a testament for youth, by a 53-year-old who grieves his own but has no wish to return to it. It will be of most interest to 18-25 year olds.