3 ideas
Kenji, a twenty-year-old who guides foreign men through Kabukichō's sex clubs, is hired for three nights before New Year's Eve by Frank, an American with strangely artificial-looking skin who lies constantly about himself. News of a murdered schoolgirl and a burned homeless man coincides with his arrival.
Kabukichō sells a simulation of connection: pubs, peep shows and schoolgirls doing compensated dating for brand goods. Buyers and sellers leave as isolated as they arrived. Frank's violence is presented as a grotesque mirror of this, an entity with no inner self drawn to a place where everyone performs closeness without having it.
Frank is a foreign killer who delivers blunt verdicts on Japanese passivity, purposelessness and loneliness. His accusations force Kenji to look at his own society, and at himself, from outside. Because the observer is a monster, his criticisms cannot be dismissed as ordinary prejudice. The reader has to weigh whether an inhuman gaze sees what locals have trained themselves not to see.