World literature lost a fine voice with Kawabata’s death, to which this elegantly puzzling work stands as testimonial.
Pensive last novel by Kawabata, unfinished at the time of the author’s 1972 suicide but still capable of standing on its own.
Flowers, bells, wounded trees: the natural and human worlds meet and mingle in this slender, sharply honed narrative. The title is also the first word: “Dandelions cover the banks of Ikuta River.” A renga could grow from that lyrical line, which instead sets the scene for the jolting follow-on: the river and the town that lies alongside it may be placid and lovely, but it is also the site of an asylum to which Kizaki Ineko has been exiled. Her illness, somagnosia, is the inability to perceive the bodies of others. The condition, naturally, affects her ability to relate to others as well: the fellow asylum inmate who writes, calligraphically, “To enter the Buddha world is easy; to enter the world of demons is difficult,” is to her simply a floating brush, while her boyfriend, Kuno, is a specter. Much of the novel is given over to back and forth between Ineko and her mother, who rather unhelpfully is a repository of oddments about Ineko and her condition, including the tragic story of a somagnosic mother who murdered her baby: “How is that possible? To be unable to see your own baby’s head, to wring a neck that isn’t even visible to you.” An extended metaphor about social distance and loneliness seems to be at play, but so, too, is Ineko’s quest for meaning, the origins of her illness unfolding in a tragedy involving her father. “Perhaps the origins of philosophy are there,” she says wisely, “in that period when infants start to become aware of their surroundings, when they start to see, to remember words.” Why she has chosen not to see may be a mystery, but then so is much about this enigmatic story.
World literature lost a fine voice with Kawabata’s death, to which this elegantly puzzling work stands as testimonial.Pub Date: Dec. 12, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8112-2409-3
Page Count: 128
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
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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