ゆっくりおやすみ、樹の下で

This is a gentle and thoughtful book. A little girl named Mirei visits her grandmother in the old family mansion in Kamakura. The house is heaped with the belongings and memories of 100 years of family members. It almost seems like the past could be alive in this place. And then one night, the broken grandfather clock starts to tick again, and Mirei meets the people of the past.

This book builds momentum slowly. The first half sets the scene and establishes the main characters. The protagonist Mirei learns a little about her family history, meets her grandmother, and is shown around the house and neighborhood. She sees a portrait of her late great-grandmother, who came of age during WWII and looked exactly like Mirei. As the book drew near the middle, it was starting to seem like a slice of life story, and I wondered if perhaps I had misunderstood the blurb/synopses/book beginning suggesting that this was a story with fantastical elements. But at precisely the halfway point of the book, the narrator tells us not to worry (I laughed at this little self-aware chapter), for wondrous things are going to start happening now. And indeed they did. And in the second half of the book, the relevance of some of the seemingly minor details became clear. This book ties up the plot strings, and might leave you clutching a tissue as you near the end.

The difficulty level felt similar to ふしぎ駄菓子屋 銭天堂. Perhaps slightly more difficult. If something like a tree name or a 1930s celebrity is mentioned, it’s easy enough to figure out that it’s a name from this kind of broad category, even if you don’t know the details of the reference. My edition was from 朝日文庫 and came in a standard little Japanese A6 paperback of 292 pages, including afterward. It has full furigana, and some words are written in hiragana instead of kanji. The book is divided into many tiny chapters of 3 pages each, so a convenient stopping point is always nearby. (Apparently it was originally published as a serial story in 朝日小学生新聞.) I came across this book at my local Kinokuniya, where a small stack of these appeared one day on the “Why don’t you try reading Japanese?” shelf in the Japanese language study section, next to the usual suspects like graded readers, 君の名は, and Murakami.