Astute, darkly atmospheric, and charged with the uncanny: Yoshimoto’s best in quite a while.
Three intense, otherworldly novellas, each about a young woman for whom sleep is not a state of rest but an indication of spiritual malaise: the latest from Japan’s ever-popular Yoshimoto (Amrita, 1997, etc.).
In the first, “Night and Night’s Travelers,” college-aged Shibami still reels from the accidental death of her older brother Yoshihiro, but her pain seems pale in comparison to that of her cousin Mari, who was Yoshihiro’s lover and confidante. Wholly incapacitated by his death, Mari moved into Shibami’s house and Yoshihiro’s room, becoming a part of his family for nearly a year until her grief subsided. When she appears outside Shibami’s window one snowy night, however, barefoot and wraithlike, the time has come for the truth about Yoshihiro’s other girlfriend, the American Sarah, with whom he moved to Boston and without whom he returned to Japan. “Voyage to the House of Sleep” charts a different course through grief as a hard-drinking woman, before she plunges into sleep, hears eerie music—sounds that her boyfriend identifies as a call from the dead. Sure enough, a woman the drinker once knew as a rival for the affections of another man has died—drunk herself to death, in fact—and, with the help of her boyfriend and a midget medium, the two women make contact, if only to explain that although they treated each other abominably, they were also friends and could have been more than just that. The title story features a woman who sleeps more and more in an effort to escape from joblessness, the death of her closest friend, and the fact that her boyfriend’s wife is in a coma, unlikely to awaken. Only a dreamlike encounter with that wife, who tells her to go out and get a job, frees her from her lethargy and allows her to resume a normal life.
Astute, darkly atmospheric, and charged with the uncanny: Yoshimoto’s best in quite a while.Pub Date: June 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-8021-1669-8
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2000
Powerfully affecting and disturbing.
A young man dying of AIDS returns to his Ohio hometown, where people think homosexuality is a sin and the disease is divine punishment.
Brian left Chester when he was 18, seeking freedom to be who he was in New York City. Now, in 1986, he’s 24, his partner and virtually all of their friends are dead, and he’s moving into the disease’s late stages. “He turned his back on his family to live a life of sin and he’s sick because of it,” thinks his mother, Sharon; nonetheless she says yes when Brian asks if he can come home after years of estrangement. His father, Travis, insists they must keep Brian’s illness and sexuality a secret; he makes Sharon set aside tableware and bedclothes exclusively for their son and wash them separately wearing gloves. Sickels (The Evening Hour, 2012) doesn’t gloss over the shame Brian’s family feels nor the astonishing cruelty of their friends and neighbors when word gets out. Brian’s ejection from the local swimming pool is the first in a series of increasingly ugly incidents: vicious phone calls, hate mail to the local newspapers, graffiti on the family garage, a gunshot through the windshield of his father’s car. Grandmother Lettie is Brian’s only open defender, refusing to speak to friends who ostracize him and boycotting the diner that denied him service. Younger sister Jess, taunted at school, wishes he’d never come home and tells him so. This unvarnished portrait of what people are capable of when gripped by ignorance and fear is relieved slightly by a few cracks in the facade of the town’s intolerance, some moments of kindness or at least faint regret as Brian’s health worsens over the summer and fall. Sharon and Travis both eventually acknowledge they have failed their son; she makes some amends while he can only grieve. Sickels’ characters are painfully flawed and wholly, believably human in their failings. This unflinching honesty, conveyed in finely crafted prose, makes for a memorable and unsettling novel.
Powerfully affecting and disturbing.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-938235-62-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hub City Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
Mandel’s solid writing and magnetic narrative make for a strong combination in what should be a breakout novel.
Survivors and victims of a pandemic populate this quietly ambitious take on a post-apocalyptic world where some strive to preserve art, culture and kindness.
In her fourth novel, Mandel (The Lola Quartet, 2012, etc.) moves away from the literary thriller form of her previous books but keeps much of the intrigue. The story concerns the before and after of a catastrophic virus called the Georgia Flu that wipes out most of the world’s population. On one side of the timeline are the survivors, mainly a traveling troupe of musicians and actors and a stationary group stuck for years in an airport. On the other is a professional actor, who dies in the opening pages while performing King Lear, his ex-wives and his oldest friend, glimpsed in flashbacks. There’s also the man—a paparazzo-turned-paramedic—who runs to the stage from the audience to try to revive him, a Samaritan role he will play again in later years. Mandel is effectively spare in her depiction of both the tough hand-to-mouth existence of a devastated world and the almost unchallenged life of the celebrity—think of Cormac McCarthy seesawing with Joan Didion. The intrigue arises when the troupe is threatened by a cult and breaks into disparate offshoots struggling toward a common haven. Woven through these little odysseys, and cunningly linking the cushy past and the perilous present, is a figure called the Prophet. Indeed, Mandel spins a satisfying web of coincidence and kismet while providing numerous strong moments, as when one of the last planes lands at the airport and seals its doors in self-imposed quarantine, standing for days on the tarmac as those outside try not to ponder the nightmare within. Another strand of that web is a well-traveled copy of a sci-fi graphic novel drawn by the actor’s first wife, depicting a space station seeking a new home after aliens take over Earth—a different sort of artist also pondering man’s fate and future.
Mandel’s solid writing and magnetic narrative make for a strong combination in what should be a breakout novel.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-385-35330-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2014
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