Paromita’s Reviews > Lady Joker, Volume One > Status Update

And yet if people were admonished not to allow themselves to sink into such serene insensibility, then each and every one of them would be forced to engage in a lonely mental battle against the self.

Nowadays, there were no common concerns under which people could hoist a flag, no universal idea or framework to unite all mankind. What did exist was nothing more than small groupings of people with their everyday lives, inconsequential systems, and automated motions of production and consumption...

Did it make any difference in the end to rot from evil or to rot from hatred and cynicism? Was there any distinction between contributing to the contamination of society and the era he lived in, and spending his life abh

Shiroyama’s eyes drifted over the green public payphone beside the entrance, he suddenly longed to hear the voices of his family, but even that thought was fleeting. The only thing left was the vortex of hatred that swirled between himself as he stood at the entrance, wearing the façade of the victim, and the public who formed a barrier outside, ready and waiting for him.

Handa gazed up at the cluster of gleaming high-rises. Although he knew that each one was populated by workers who wore out their shoes trying to make an extra yen, he still felt nothing in common with them and, faced with another wave of alienation, he looked away.

In such slivers of time when the rhythm of his day was disrupted, Handa always liked to indulge in a certain daydream. Were he not to, the sliver would rupture into a deep fissure, which could transform into a torrent of anger that might destroy him.

What he ended up with was the singular, indeterminate emotion that was the uncertainty of life itself.

In such a demanding era, the character of the political world, not just banks and corporations, would be challenged to follow suit. The age in which corporations would be scrutinized about their social responsibility and morals before their pursuit of profit was just around the corner.

If he were to predict what would succeed this gilded era of mass consumption, it would be, in a nutshell, “petit-bourgeois fastidiousness.” The mentality of citizens that could be summed up in such key words as thriftiness, downsizing, simplicity, and individualism would drive them to abandon material wealth in favor of emotional fulfillment, and to insist upon “fastidiousness” in society.