Like so much of Kawakami’s work, an elegant mystery that questions reality in the most ordinary of situations.
Enigmatic novella in which the world of Japanese mythology intrudes into the mortal realm.
Readers familiar with Kawakami (The Ten Loves of Nishino, 2019, etc.) will know her alter ego–ish character Tsukiko Omachi and the one-time high school teacher known only as Sensei, who figure in such recent works as Strange Weather in Tokyo. In an afterword, Kawakami writes, elusively, that “the world that exists behind a story is never fully known, not even to the author.” Two worlds, in fact, exist here. The first is Tsukiko’s quiet life, which, on this summer day, the air loud with cicadas, is punctuated by a visit from Sensei, who, as ever, is critical: She doesn’t know how to make somen noodles, her habit of touching her earlobe is off-putting, she’s old enough that the imprint of the tatami mat on her skin doesn’t go quickly away after a nap. “That’s a rude thing to say,” says Tsukiko of Sensei’s last jibe, though she complies with his demand to tell him a story. The one she obliges him with is odd: As a child, she says, she was awakened one night by the clamor of two—well, somethings fighting, not animal, not human, but tengu, “the spirit creatures I had seen in folktale books.” Others see them, too, but ignore them, even as Tsukiko’s mother recounts that in her day it was a fox that followed her around, while some of Tsukiko’s classmates have companion ghosts, badgers, and the like. The most understanding of those classmates, a young girl named Yuko, seems sympathetic enough—until, as Tsukiko notes, the tengu touch her, and “when they did so, the spot on Yuko’s body where they had touched her would sparkle. Like a nighttime parade.” Is Yuko real or another visitor from the spirit world? At once melancholic and joyful, the story satisfies Sensei, the cicadas begin to chirp again, and life goes on, if suffused in strangeness.
Like so much of Kawakami’s work, an elegant mystery that questions reality in the most ordinary of situations.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-59376-580-4
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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