How Poverty and Manipulation Meet in Fool Night

 

This week, I finished a book named Fool Night by Kasumi Yasuda. The story takes place in the distant future— a time when the sun no longer shines, and all plant life dies as a result. Despite the major setback, a scientific discovery was made that saved humanity: a seed that, when injected into the human body, turns them into a plant by a process called transfloration. However, there are many drawbacks— the biggest being the person must be alive and stay alive for the transfloration to occur.

The main character, Toshiro, is a poverty-stricken man who works minimum wage in the hopes of one day getting a higher education. Unfortunately, he has to pay for his mother's expensive medication, and every bill in the house— and eventually, does not have enough money to even pay for food. However, after learning about the process of transfloration (and the hefty reward of ten million yen— about 65,000 dollars— for doing so), he decides that even if he dies in agony a year or two from now, it would still be better than living the rest of his life homeless and starving. He purposely poisons himself so that they cannot deny him the transfloration process when he asks for it, and is injected with the transflora seed.

However, an irregular complication begins to show itself as the process progresses: suddenly, Toshiro can hear noises coming from every transflora plant. After he reports it, he is thrown into a government job with the responsibility of tracking down the plant-graves of people's loved ones. Toshiro learns much more than he likely should have ever known, and even now with enough money to get by and signs of the transfloration in his body growing, still must work through it.

I enjoyed this book a lot— it poses many moral and philosophical dilemmas, some of which are critiques of issues that exist even today. Dystopian has always been my favorite genre, and I think Kasumi Yasuda's take on the concept is very well executed. The story's tone is bleak and dark, and most if not all characters involved in the story are simply fully desensitized to it to the point of not even taking a second glance at the rotting, plant-riddled corpses that line the streets. It is heavily implied that when someone undergoes transfloration, they stay alive even after fully turning into a plant, and something about the concept of not being able to even scream as your body roots itself into the ground for hundreds of years is both fascinating and absolutely terrifying.

The portrayal of poverty across the book is also very interesting. Although it is not blatantly stated, it is shown through background and subtext that the vast majority of the population struggles to even afford housing. Lack of resources like fruit, vegetables and wood have caused inflation to reach completely unlivable levels, and the only people that have the ability to live comfortably are those who work for the government— which Toshiro notices when he begins to work with transflora. Most if not all of those who sign up to begin transfloration are people who have no other way to pay for basic necessities, which brings up an issue of eugenics that also appears very present in the story.

I greatly recommend this book— it left me with a lot to think about and was very fun to analyze. I enjoy that the themes in the story are not surface-level, and require interpretation. I think many of the events that happen in the story will mean different things to different people, and perspective is a very important aspect of how this book presents itself.

-Livy