Reviews
(4/5)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 while to get started with this (it's a bit out of my normal reading genre and interests) but I warmed up to it as I went along. I picked it up originally because I read a review that described it as almost aggressively untranslatable, and I'm always interested in experiences I can only get because I can read Japanese.
The back cover blurb calls this a "bilingual 小説". That's a bit of an exaggeration, but the author liberally peppers the text with English words and lines of dialogue, to convey the code-switching bilingualism of the narrator and her sister. (The first page is almost entirely English, but this is very unrepresentative -- I half wonder if the author deliberately did it to put off readers with insufficient English right at the start...)
Difficulty level here is largely in vocabulary, I think, though the author does sometimes have long train of thought sentences that can be a bit difficult to comprehend if they get abstract. There is no specialised vocab -- it's just a book about growing up in America -- but all those novels clearly gave the author a large vocabulary and it turns up in this book. Furigana are provided in some cases.
A handful of times in the book the text drops without warning into historical kana spellings, usually just for a sentence or two. The longest example is a couple of pages that are a meditation on and end with a couple of quoted paragraphs from Akutagawa Ryuunosuke's 舞踏会. Don't be put off -- the following section is one of the most interesting in the book IMHO and relies a bit on this text for context. (For more on the author's view on historical kana spellings, see her non-fiction https://learnnatively.com/book/283d058879/).
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" morning phone call from her older sister, the author spends the day between reminiscing about those 20 years, her feelings of being stuck between cultures, and finally taking some action to move forwards.
I enjoyed the writing, which showed the skill range of the author. I appreciated the way she plays around with the composition to depict her being drunk (uneven lines) or nostalgia (using katakana instead of hiragana, i.e., pre-war format). As mentioned by the other review, she will also cite literary classics in their full pre-reform kana and kanji glory, which might be difficult for a Japanese learner without experience with those (it's good practice, though! You can check pm215 intro on reading those on the forum too: https://forums.learnnatively.com/t/2023-aozora-short-story-and-essay-advent/5663/8)
What I enjoyed less (and would even call a trigger warning) is the constant depiction of the debilitating loneliness and depression the author felt at the time. I have to say that it did take a toll on me. The book ends on a somewhat optimistic note (and, since I could check what happened to the author, I guess you could say things turned out all right), which helped a bit, but I don't think I would recommend this book if you are in a bad place yourself.
As a fun tidbit, the author mentioned having published a research article earlier during year 19XX. Google scholar tells me it's 1985, which indeed had a Friday, December 13th.