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(4.27/5)A collection of three short stories, each of them about an unnamed young woman whose life is going through an unwelcome change, set in an eery, dreamlike atmosphere. Each of the narrators is, in their own way, out of touch with her own emotions, in one case so much she might count as an unreliable narrator.
While the style itself is straightforward enough, and a good source of exposure to slice-of-life-y vocab, this provides a challenge to the reader. You have to pay constant attention to nuances and things the narrators aren't directly thinking about to figure out who they really are. For this reason, I think this book is ranked well in the low L30s. I wouldn't recommend this as a first novel, the risk of missing important clues is very high if you're not familiar enough with the language.
Deep narration, over the imagination, some interesting dark themes.
Short stories thread to an end, and still something feels left unsaid, perhaps should explain more. Not sure if this would be well-received or not.
The book uses very every day kind of language. The stories are all written from the point of view of one character, which both tends to be a bit easier than 3rd person pov and also gives a pretty good taste of how someone may think in Japanese.
There's not that much furigana, and the book is clearly intended for adults (both wrt the themes as well as th language used) but the style is very clean and not too complicated or abstract, making it rather easy to follow along.
Yoko Ogawa's writing manages to take something commonplace and familiar, or even something joyful, like a pregnancy, and infuse it with a sense of eeriness. There is a vaguely unsettling atmosphere throughout all three of the novellas in this collection. The reader's imagination does most of the work, and the text only feeds this imagination by highlighting slightly off details in an otherwise mostly familiar context.
What I found really interesting is that while the narration is in the first person, and we're very much (sometimes claustrophobically so) in the narrator's head, we still don't necessarily understand their motivations or inner thoughts - we just watch their reactions.
In terms of language difficulty, I feel this could be lower than the current L32. I'd recommend it to people just starting out reading novels in Japanese. The sentences are generally short and straightforward, most of the vocabulary common.
A set of three rather ambivalent stories that feature characters with unique viewpoints towards what might otherwise be deemed as rather bland situations. Not much ever happens, but the author has a talent to portray scenes and characters in a very unsettling way, often mixing a factual, almost clinical style of description with very tactile, surreal, sensual, or even grotesque vocabulary.
This gives a strong sense of connection to the feelings of each narrator, and since they tend to be unreliable by design or through their quirks or limited awareness, this makes for a creepy feeling that goes through the whole length of this book. You never really know how things are going to turn out.
Language-wise, while there is little specialized vocabulary, the language here is fairly subtle and precise, the author tends to shy away from using the set of generic words you constantly encounters in the easiest novels / light-novel.
When you add that to the nuanced narrative, this means you have to read each sentence carefully to make sure you understand everything. I find that this makes this book a slower and more challenging read than I would expect from the current L32 rating, and certainly not one I would recommend for a beginner.