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LIZARD

SHORT STORIES

Six short stories from Japan's popular literary star (N.P., 1994, etc.) offer pallid bromides, blending postmodern cool with superficial explorations of ``time, healing, karma, and fate.'' Products of an affluent society that has embraced the West but not forgotten its fundamental traditions, the characters are uncertain of the future, skeptical of materialism, yearning to end the anomie and existential pain they feel. In ``Lizard,'' the title and most notable story, a doctor who works with emotionally disturbed children loves a young woman in whose reptile eyes ``I see my own lonely face, peering down, looking for something to love and cherish.'' Haunted by a brutal attack she witnessed as a child, Lizard has become an acupuncture practitioner dedicated to healing those in pain, but she cannot forget her past; only a confession of a similar painful memory from her lover offers them both solace. The protagonist of ``Blood and Water'' leaves the religious commune she was raised in, but finds that, troubled by ``the sorrow that clings to life,'' she can only be comforted by her lover's ``tough resilience.'' Other stories describe a date in an empty restaurant that helps a writer and his girlfriend understand that, though the way they think may be completely different, they are the ``archetypal couple'' whose relationship is the ``dance of two souls resonating like the twist of DNA'' (``Helix''); a man's encounter on a train with a stranger who reveals to him a universal life force that encompasses even ``the slight feeling of alienation'' he experiences in his marriage (``Newly-Wed''); a young wife's liberating realization that her marriage is secure (``Kimchee''); and the revelation of a family secret that offers hope to a woman with a sexual past (``A Strange Tale from Down by the River''). In general, the stories are too slender to support Yoshimoto's attempts to detail spiritual awakenings. As insubstantial as sushi without the fish. (First printing of 75,000)

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1995

ISBN: 0-8021-1564-0

Page Count: 192

Publisher: Grove

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1994

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THE THINGS THEY CARRIED

It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.

Pub Date: March 28, 1990

ISBN: 0618706410

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990

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SIGHTSEEING

STORIES

A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.

Seven stories, including a couple of prizewinners, from an exuberantly talented young Thai-American writer.

In the poignant title story, a young man accompanies his mother to Kok Lukmak, the last in the chain of Andaman Islands—where the two can behave like “farangs,” or foreigners, for once. It’s his last summer before college, her last before losing her eyesight. As he adjusts to his unsentimental mother’s acceptance of her fate, they make tentative steps toward the future. “Farangs,” included in Best New American Voices 2005 (p. 711), is about a flirtation between a Thai teenager who keeps a pet pig named Clint Eastwood and an American girl who wanders around in a bikini. His mother, who runs a motel after having been deserted by the boy’s American father, warns him about “bonking” one of the guests. “Draft Day” concerns a relieved but guilty young man whose father has bribed him out of the draft, and in “Don’t Let Me Die in This Place,” a bitter grandfather has moved from the States to Bangkok to live with his son, his Thai daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren. The grandfather’s grudging adjustment to the move and to his loss of autonomy (from a stroke) is accelerated by a visit to a carnival, where he urges the whole family into a game of bumper cars. The longest story, “Cockfighter,” is an astonishing coming-of-ager about feisty Ladda, 15, who watches as her father, once the best cockfighter in town, loses his status, money, and dignity to Little Jui, 16, a meth addict whose father is the local crime boss. Even Ladda is in danger, as Little Jui’s bodyguards try to abduct her. Her mother tells Ladda a family secret about her father’s failure of courage in fighting Big Jui to save his own sister’s honor. By the time Little Jui has had her father beaten and his ear cut off, Ladda has begun to realize how she must fend for herself.

A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005

ISBN: 0-8021-1788-0

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Grove

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004

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