An intense psychodrama, winner of Japan’s prestigious Akutagawa Prize for Fiction. The story is told through three deftly intertwined elements. The first consists of bookseller Tsuyoshi Manase’s tormented memory of his experiences near the end of WWII, in a cave on the Philippine island of Leyte, where he was traumatized by a “massacre of sick soldiers” (ordered by a proud captain) and haunted for years afterward by the dying words of a gentle lance corporal, who assured him that “even the most ordinary pebble has the history of . . . earth written on it.” A further element of the story is composed of Manase’s marriage and fatherhood, both tragically blighted by his obsessive collecting of stones and work as an amateur geologist, and both effectively ended when his eldest son Hikaro (himself a budding scientist) is savagely murdered. Finally, there is the confusion in Manase’s mind—unresolved until the concluding pages—that conflates his ordeal on Leyte with the later events of the day (while Manase was “away”) when Hikaro perished: in a cave. In this slowly paced, yet oddly absorbing, study of obsession and sublimation, Okuizumi moves skillfully between Manase’s present and past, relaxing the story’s tension only for an inexplicably extended account of his second son Takaaki’s estrangement from his father, career as a college soccer star, and involvement in radical student politics. Still, Takaaki’s climactic confrontation with his father dovetails beautifully with Manase’s realization that the “hallucinations” he suffers have a disturbing basis in reality; and it precipitates the story’s bone-chilling visionary ending. A remorseless little tale, very much in the spirit of that masterly storyteller Ryunoseke Akutagawa (some of Yukio Mishima’s psychological novels come to mind as well), and a fine debut performance.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-15-100365-3
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1998
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
PROFILES
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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