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 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/).

Gradings:9
1
favorite_border
pm215 graded
on October 17, 2024
similar in difficulty to小さいおうちL40
pm215 graded
on August 21, 2024
easier than奥羽の二人L50??
pm215 graded
on December 17, 2023
harder than振仮名の歴史L39
pm215 graded
on August 19, 2023
similar in difficulty to三四郎L40
pm215 graded
on August 19, 2023
similar in difficulty to細雪 上L41
pm215 graded
on August 19, 2023
harder than用心棒日月抄L39
pm215 graded
on August 19, 2023
harder than花のあとL39
pm215 graded
on August 19, 2023
harder than新世界より (上)L38
pm215 graded
on August 19, 2023
harder than死仮面L39