One-on-One

One-on-One is a collection of short and medium-length fiction by the Japanese author Kotaro Isaka, originally published in Japanese as PK. The Chinese edition, translated by Xingye Kong, was published by New Star Press in 2015. The volume collects three works: PK, Superman, and The Secret Envoy. PK is internally divided into five narrative strands—A, B, C, D, and E—and although it is not long, it is broken into more than a dozen brief sections that leap forward and interweave with one another. The story opens with a tense soccer match: at the crucial moment, a player steps up to take a penalty kick, pauses to reflect, and finally strikes the decisive shot. Around that kick unfold a minister's inquiry into the truth of a match from six months earlier, a writer's stubborn adherence to his own creative convictions, a serial killer hidden in the crowd, and a chain of cause and effect built from a series of small choices. Superman and The Secret Envoy then magnify details that seemed incidental in the first piece: a boy gains the ability to foresee murders after being saved once, a technical surveyor discovers a crisis that humanity will face in the future, and the key to averting that crisis turns out to hinge on a trivial insect. The three stories echo and complete one another, forming a set of dominoes that spans time. The title One-on-One actually points to the penalty kick—the instant when one person faces the entire stadium and the whole world. In this book Isaka continues his popular multi-strand narrative approach, blending sports, suspense, science fiction, and temporal dislocation into a compact collection: one person's courage may not change the rules, but through a chain reaction it may quietly alter the direction of the world. After publication the book received a Douban rating of 7.0, making it one of Isaka's more experimental works.