Some of the earlier and lesser stories are merely diverting, but the longer and later ones are devastating.
A collection of stories featuring female narrators amid the turbulence and upheavals of mid-20th-century Japan.
Though Dazai often drew from his own life in his novels—a life marked by alcoholism, drug addiction, and time in a mental institution—both the voice and perspective are different here. In every story, the first-person protagonist is a young woman, generally in her early-to-mid-20s. Or younger, as in the day-in-the-life of “Schoolgirl,” one of the longest and best pieces. Proceeding chronologically, the stories cover an expanse from the late 1930s to the late ’40s. Early on, the narrators struggle with the constraints of gender and class, or how the male author believes his female characters felt about such issues. (It can be difficult to tell whether some of the disgust expressed by his self-lacerating narrators represent their own or the author’s attitude toward being female.) The pivot arrives with “December 8,” a slice of Japanese life from the day after Pearl Harbor, when the everydayness seems pretty much the same as it did before. From here, it won’t, as all hell breaks loose in the subsequent stories. Amid the bombing of houses, the disappearance of spouses, and the disintegration of familial relations, conventional morality pretty much collapses. There are no happy endings or glimmers of hope. In “Osan” (1947), a young wife tries to hold her home and family together as she suspects that her husband has embarked on an affair that brings him no happiness. It ends with the narrator lamenting, “I can’t stop trembling—not with sorrow or anger so much as disgust with the absolute idiocy of it all.” The author died by drowning in 1948 at the age of 38, seemingly in a double suicide with the lover for whom he had abandoned his own family.
Some of the earlier and lesser stories are merely diverting, but the longer and later ones are devastating.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780811239332
Page Count: 256
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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
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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