An elegant story that is in many ways more reminiscent of Mishima and Akutagawa than many contemporary Japanese writers.
Atmospheric, meditative story of memory and loss in a gentrifying Tokyo neighborhood.
There’s not much room for gardens in the older districts of Tokyo, where concrete has long covered up fields and streams. In one spot, sold by a farmer long ago for development, block after block of apartment buildings sprouted in the postwar era, each named after a sign in the Japanese zodiac. Taro, divorced for three years and still not used to it, still grieving the death of his father on top of that, is almost alone in the urban wasteland that Shibasaki constructs; the only neighbors he’s aware of are an old woman he calls Mrs. Snake, after the apartment building in which she lives, and Nishi, a comic book artist. All are being pushed out of their homes, which are slated to be razed once the last inhabitants are gone. But what of the secret treasure at the heart of the nondescript district, one of “the sort of grand, Western-style mansions that had sprung up in certain areas of Japan in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries”? Painted sky blue, with a pyramidal roof, it fascinates Nishi, who wonders who might have lived there. In time, Taro and Mrs. Snake come to see the sky-blue house as an anchor, even as their personal histories begin to unfold: Mrs. Snake, for instance, is now old, but when she was young, “she had been to see the Beatles playing the Budokan.” Ancient history, that, as is the unexploded bomb that disrupts the life of a nearby Tokyo neighborhood, prompting Taro to reflect that “the bomb was probably the same age as his father, and Mrs Snake too.” Just as the things of the surface belong on the surface, Shibasaki seems to be saying, so, too, are subterranean things—and memories, and secrets, and private artifacts—sometimes better left hidden, as her ending, steeped in foreboding silence, suggests.
An elegant story that is in many ways more reminiscent of Mishima and Akutagawa than many contemporary Japanese writers.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-78227-270-0
Page Count: 154
Publisher: Pushkin Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2017
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.
A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!
Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends, in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
"This soil," concludes the young narrator of this quiet chronicle of garrotted innocence, "is bad for all kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear." And among the exclusions of white rural Ohio, echoed by black respectability, is ugly, black, loveless, twelve-year-old Pecola. But in a world where blue-eyed gifts are clucked over and admired, and the Pecolas are simply not seen, there is always the possibility of the dream and wish—for blue eyes. Born of a mother who adjusted her life to the clarity and serenity of white households and "acquired virtues that were easy to maintain" and a father, Cholly, stunted by early rejections and humiliations, Pecola just might have been loved—for in raping his daughter Cholly did at least touch her. But "Love is never better than the lover," and with the death of her baby, the child herself, accepting absolutely the gift of blue eyes from a faith healer (whose perverse interest in little girls does not preclude understanding), inches over into madness. A skillful understated tribute to the fall of a sparrow for whose small tragedy there was no watching eye.
Pub Date: Oct. 29, 1970
ISBN: 0375411550
Page Count: -
Publisher: Holt Rinehart & Winston
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1970
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
