Singular Rebellion

Set in the rebellious year of 1969 when rioting students seemed poised to overthrow the whole setup, this novel is about the need all of us have, as individuals, to conform, and also to rebel; rebellion depending on conformity, and conformity demanding that rebellion be a solitary, singular affair. The narrator is a middle-aged employee of an electrical goods manufacturer, a job he has because, when a career civil servant at MITI, he'd refused a transfer to the Ministry of Defense. Those about him see this as a pacifist gesture, a rebellious act, but for him it was nothing as simple as that, for here we have a human being, not an ideological cardboard cutout, and his motives were, and still are, mixed. As the book opens, rebellion takes the form of marrying a young fashion model, a wild act for a former bureaucrat, yet even this seems to come about more by accident than choice, involving him in a more seriously rebellious world as his wife's grandmother turns out to be a murderess (she'd carved up her estranged husband with a razor, more or less by accident too), and the various confusions her coming to live with them gives rise to are the real comic center of the novel.
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