A chance meeting draws the shady Otsuki to the home of a master calligrapher, where he is subjected to a bizarre pornographic movie in which shots of a teenage girl alternate with close-ups of insects. Otsuki is then introduced to the calligrapher's attractive granddaughter, the star of the film, and is asked to shoot the remainder of the work himself. A metaphysical thriller, surreal noir, and "moral tale" gone wrong, Triangle is an unsettling peek into the dark and irrational reality lying beneath a city.
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A chance meeting draws the shady Otsuki to the home of a master calligrapher, where he is subjected to a bizarre pornographic movie in which shots of a teenage girl alternate with close-ups of insects. Otsuki is then introduced to the calligrapher's attractive granddaughter, the star of the film, and is asked to shoot the remainder of the work himself. A metaphysical thriller, surreal noir, and "moral tale" gone wrong, Triangle is an unsettling peek into the dark and irrational reality lying beneath a city.
"One imagines...that Triangle is suffused with a similar sense of paranoia-inducing conspiracy even in its original Japanese. The protagonist, Otsuki, is a jaded, crusty, ex-junky drifter who works at random jobs while mostly living off of the various women that come in and out of his life. He was a Romantic once, but “...now that I was a jaded thirty-something, the best moments with a women were not when she arrived at your door, or when you were undressing her, but when you watched her face in the window of a taxi disappear as it drove off.” He’s a character we’ve met before in a hundred other noir and mystery narratives. And like in Chinatown or any Philip Marlowe story, Otsuki must mimic an Orphic descent into a contemporary Underworld — a place where natural order is upturned and the stoicism, or callousness, of the protagonist is put to the test." – Scott Beauchamp, Full Stop
"That the mysteries of Triangle are not easy to resolve will be, for some readers, frustrating. Others, however, will find that Matsuura’s willingness to eschew facile resolution at the novel’s end, and to allow, instead, the mystery to remain is what makes this one of those rare novels that one wants to reread as soon as the last page is turned." - David Cozy, The Japan Times
"(A) suspenseful and phantasmagorical work (...) Fans of Murakami will find this an esoteric and experimental read that will leave them pondering the book's unanswered questions long after reading." - Publishers Weekly