Yumi is a call-girl in the evenings, raking in dough at a high risk in order to feed her pet crocodile (whom she occasionally fears may end up eating her). Haru is observing the human condition while playing gigolo to Yumi's step-mom. It's almost a savage rebuild of Breakfast At Tiffany's—minus a yellow-faced Mickey Rooney but plus a crocodile representing the relentless hunger of the capitalist paradigm. Pink is comically cynical and refreshingly blunt. Love, sex, capitalism, avaraice, misogyny, and misanthropy. One could be tempted to see Pink as one more brutal evisceration of the contemporary materialist mode, but the book's humnour and joie de vivre do a good job of either masking the effort or, at the least, spritzing a good amount of perfume over the whole affair.

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