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Come for the parallel-world plot, stay for the complex thoughts about living with serious illness
Content notes: Cancer treatment. There is an incident of brutal misogynistic violence near the opening of the book but it isn’t something that casts much of a shadow over the rest of the story.
After witnessing a violent attack in Ochanomizu, Nami runs into her old college friend Nakagawa. He gives her his jacket - it’s a cold day, and she isn’t feeling well - but when they try to meet up so she can return his jacket, they can’t find each other, even when they’re standing in exactly the same place in exactly the same park. They soon realize that they live in parallel worlds: two different Tokyos with slightly different buildings and slightly different celebrities and pop culture.
Nakagawa and Nami can correspond by phone, so they send each other movies and music from each others’ worlds, they go out to eat and to see theatre, they have long text conversations. But Nami’s hiding something from him that she’s hiding from almost everyone she knows: she’s undergoing chemotherapy for breast cancer. And as the months progress, there’s another divergence between their two worlds: in Nakagawa’s world -- but not in Nami’s -- a novel coronavirus has broken out in Wuhan, China at the beginning of 2020. Nami can only listen and try to be supportive as Nakagawa’s job goes remote, as the Tokyo olympics are postponed.
This is a hard book for me to review. I don’t think that the parallel-world plot is fully developed or well-integrated into the rest of the book, and I really wish that it had been. But this is, despite the fact that it meanders away from its own premise, a really good book. It’s a really good book that is mostly about Nami trying to build a good, authentic, meaningful life for herself as a cancer patient, and a cancer survivor. And if that sounds depressing, it really isn’t! It has some important things to say about the ways in which serious illness is dealt with and talked about - which is interesting from a cultural perspective, but also, many of the things she talks about (like the image we have from books and TV shows of the saintly mom or girlfriend who dies from cancer while always smiling and passing on words of wisdom) aren’t exactly uniquely Japanese. How do you deal with not being able to do everything you used to be able to do? How do you deal with mourning the person you used to be? How do you manage the tension between telling the truth about yourself (and subjecting yourself to a lot of unwanted feelings from strangers - or from family!) and trying to pretend everything is okay? What happens to your feelings about sex and gender? What happens to a promising, ambitious young woman whose life has completely gone off the rails of the “marriage and kids” train?
Ultimately, this is a book that’s wrestling with all of these questions in a thoughtful way, and that is just more interested in the daily minutiae of Nami’s life and recovery than in this parallel-world stuff. And you know what? That’s valid. I think it would have been a better book if it had ditched the parallel-world stuff from the very beginning (this was originally a serialized novel, so I don’t know how much Sakuraba knew about the ending when she wrote the first chapter!), but it’s a kindhearted and beautiful and complicated book.
And maybe a little too much is Sakuraba trying to work out her feelings about the covid pandemic. There's a section in the middle that's a lot of Nakagawa narrating the covid pandemic to Nami while Nami says "Wow, that sounds rough." But after a while the book finds its way again and rights its course quite elegantly.