Reviews
(4/5)January 15, 2024
August 19, 2023
This is an autobiographical novel. The author/narrator was born in Japan but moved to the US with her family at the age of 12, thereafter maintaining a cultural connection with Japan largely through the collection of classical Japanese literature on her parents' bookshelves. When the book opens she is 32, still in the US, but not feeling at home either in the US or Japan. The book is largely a sequence of memories of her past interspersed with long conversations with her sister. It took me a whi
August 15, 2023
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Crushing loneliness and depression
This book is titled after a literary genre called 私小説 ("I-novel" in English) where an autobiographical content is recounted in the form of a novel. You thus get dialogue, flashbacks, narration, and so on, but applied to content that (supposedly) happened in real life. In this specific case, the whole "action" takes place over the course of a single day, Friday December 13th 19XX, which marks the 20th anniversary of the author's arrival to the us, along with her family. Upon receiving an "early