A novel packed with ideas about art, life, and love.
Elegantly understated novel of a tenuous love affair in modern Japan.
Tōru Sakanishi is in his early 20s, an apprentice architect who is fortunate enough to earn an entry-level position with the Murai Office of Architectural Design, headed by a renowned architect who had studied with Frank Lloyd Wright. Known as Sensei, or teacher, Murai is a stern leader, but a man brimming with ideas. Competing to build a new Library of Modern Literature, his chief rival a contemporary named Kei’ichi Funayama, Sensei takes his crew to the mountains to escape the summer heat of Tokyo, occupying the simple house of the title. Sensei has strong attachments to the place, not least of them a woman with whom he has a discreet relationship. While Sensei ponders a design for the new library—“We need a brand-new concept that users will find convincing. Just explaining it verbally won’t be enough, though. The building has to be designed to actually show them what you’re getting at”—Sakanishi muddles his way through, failing in his delegated task to design stacking chairs “because [he] couldn’t get the angle between the seat and legs right.” Moreover, he’s thoroughly distracted by Sensei’s niece, Maruko Murai, who disarms him by saying, “You’re good at sharpening pencils.” A knowing colleague warns him off, saying that an interoffice romance is strictly forbidden, but adding, “Of course, if you decided to quit, you could move in on her right away in the time you had left.” Sakanishi doesn’t take the warning, but in any event, things don’t unfold in quite the way he wishes. Matsuie, renowned as an editor (of Haruki Murakami, among other writers) before becoming an author, delivers a simple but graceful tale that’s full of intriguing asides on architecture, which Sensei insists is “function, pure and simple.”
A novel packed with ideas about art, life, and love.Pub Date: June 10, 2025
ISBN: 9781635425178
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
I Who Have Never Known Men ($22.00; May 1997; 224 pp.; 1-888363-43-6): In this futuristic fantasy (which is immediately reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale), the nameless narrator passes from her adolescent captivity among women who are kept in underground cages following some unspecified global catastrophe, to a life as, apparently, the last woman on earth. The material is stretched thin, but Harpman's eye for detail and command of tone (effectively translated from the French original) give powerful credibility to her portrayal of a human tabula rasa gradually acquiring a fragmentary comprehension of the phenomena of life and loving, and a moving plangency to her muted cri de coeur (``I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct'').
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-888363-43-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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