MY ANNIHILATION

A steep dive into the psyche of a man who may or may not have done some truly terrible things.

The first thing Ryodai Kozuka wants you to know is that that’s not his real name; he’s switched identities with someone else so that he can start a new life. Nor did the narrator push his half sister off a cliff when they were children; she fell on her own once he’d taken her into the woods to get her some breathing room from the home in which her father routinely beat their mother. The narrator isn’t a bit like Tsutomu Miyazaki, the Otaku Murderer of four young girls who was executed in 2008, not long after he reported being urged to commit his heinous crimes by a group of Rat Men only he could see. Instead, he’s a former doctor of psychosomatic medicine whose seduction of his vulnerable patient, sex worker Yukari, was entirely therapeutic, helping her recover from the sexual memories her previous physician, Dr. Yoshimi, had implanted in her. Implanted memories, it becomes gradually clear, are at the heart of this searing novella, though it’s not clear whether her treatment by the smilingly unrepentant Yoshimi or the narrator himself, who wonders if he really slept with her after all, is responsible for Yukari’s suicide. Once she’s hanged herself, the narrator vows to avenge himself on Kida and Mamiya, two former clients who showed her a video of herself that he’s convinced is what really drove her to take her life. Working with Wakui, the cafe owner whose budding relationship with Yukari had finally seemed to promise some stability in her life, he captures the two clients and starts messing with their own heads, and vice versa.

An unnerving tale that richly earns its title. By the last chapter, you won’t believe a word the narrator tells you.