Not exactly cheery or uplifting—as if the eight women writers share the same depressed consciousness.
Eight short stories about contemporary Japanese women grappling with the darker sides of sexuality.
Despite having different translators, the volume’s first two stories, both of which revolve around teenaged protagonists on the cusp of losing their virginity, have a similar monotone of stoic passivity. The narrator of “Milk,” by Tamaki Daido, feels increasingly alienated from her childhood friends, but her new sexual connection with her boyfriend seems a poor substitute. In the title story, by Rio Shimamoto, the narrator witnesses the dissolution of her parents’ marriage while she is deciding whether to have sex with her boyfriend. In the third story, “Piss,” by Yuzuki Muroi, a 20-year-old prostitute is victimized by her boyfriend as well as by sadistic clients. Her only solace comes from one of her regulars, an older man who drinks her urine. A sense of never-realized threat permeates Shungiku Uchida’s “My Son’s Lips,” in which a working mother reluctantly allows a cab driver to take her and her children to his apartment to advise his wife on housekeeping. Similarly, the divorcee in “Her Room,” by Chiya Fujino, agrees against her will to visit a new acquaintance whose neediness verges on menacing. In the volume’s last three stories, realism gives way to more experimental explorations of the female psyche. The narrator of Amy Yamada’s “Fiesta” is the impulse/emotion Desire whose destiny is determined by the actions of the woman whose body Desire inhabits. The dreams of an unmarried office worker desperate for a child are at the center of “The Unfertilized Egg,” by Junko Hasegawa. In the final and richest story, “The Shadow of the Orchid,” by Nobuko Takagi, a housewife’s jealousy of her surgeon husband’s dead patient conjures up the young woman through an orchid she gave the doctor before her death.
Not exactly cheery or uplifting—as if the eight women writers share the same depressed consciousness.Pub Date: June 5, 2006
ISBN: 4-7700-3006-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Kodansha
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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