Parade

As I continue linking books from one to another, I am going to keep riding the mystery train. This book is not so much mystery, but more of a slice-of-life. Parade really was not bad and I would definitely recommend reading it.

Four young people live in a two bed/ one bath apartment in Tokyo: Naoki works in entertainment and has lived in the apartment longest; Mirai came second and works at a bar, slowly letting alcohol consume her life; Ryosuke came next and is a college student who falls for his best friend’s girlfriend; and Kotomi, who ran away to Tokyo to be with her TV actor boyfriend. Over the course of a year, little things begin to happen, like: what sketchy business is happening in the apartment across the hall; who is Satoru Kokubo, the teenager who came home with Mirai one night; and will the person attacking women be caught??

From what I have seen online, Parade gets mixed reviews, a lot of it being that the book was labeled as a thriller/mystery, which from what I got from reading probably should not have been categorized as such; like I said earlier, it comes off as more of a slice-of-life, or regular fiction. When you take the label off and read the book without that expectation, you get a pretty decent storyline that involves twenty-somethings, which is nice for its change of pace and character list. Some people did not see the point in the book, or it did not have a whole lot of depth to it. I found it interesting as a character study. You have four roommates who get along pretty well and you add in a random teenager who is in a situation where he was made to mature really fast; the newcomer makes it known that he holds a temporary place, but he still becomes involved in everyone else’s lives by just sitting and observing. Nobody knows a thing about him, and it disturbs some of them. It starts to throw the dynamic of the apartment out of whack yet there is still harmony whether he is there or not.

I liked that every character had something relatable. Working in an area you are passionate about even if you are completely stressed out from the weight you carry there, working in a place where you know you are settling yet you are still content, working in a place where you feel trapped yet you want to escape, working toward something better, sitting and waiting for things to get better, living in the moment, unknowingly spiraling, helping someone because they are in legal trouble because you also are involved in legal trouble yet you are not someone who judges, and on and on. Even with all of the relatability, the only negative thing about reading Parade is that it ends kind of on a cliff. I want to know how things resolve and whether some of the listed above conditions change. I got caught up with everyone and I want to know.

Parade is a shorter read, I finished it in about a week with the work schedule I have, but I enjoyed the canoe ride that it felt like. I would say give it a try without the labels on the cover. Coming around full circle, I would say go get this book and read it in a day, ha-ha. If you want to do that, you can find Parade here.

9/10