A humane vision of people and their stories traveling, learning, sometimes suffering, and always changing.
An elegantly written, wryly affectionate mashup of Jane Austen and the Japanese immigrant experience.
Yamashita, author of the brilliant experimental novel I Hotel (2010), here delivers a book of stories in many voices. The first set is told, usually matter-of-factly, by sansei, third-generation Japanese Americans who often have only tenuous connections with the mother country. In the first, a sansei visits Kyoto, “cold with a barren sense of an old winter,” and there becomes part of a story within a story that revolves around bathing—but with many twists and turns, involving people made slow by old age, captured by terrorists, and lashed by typhoons, and all in the space of 17 pages. The closing line is a droll, note-perfect commentary on what has happened before. A more straightforward story, punctuated by haunting photographs from the early years of the last century, turns on certain differences between the descendants of Japanese immigrants to the U.S. and to Brazil (“What was a sansei? I was a figment of their imaginations”) but closes with the gently perceptive reminder that while it is winter where the narrator lives, north of the Equator, it is summer to the south. The second set of stories brings Jane Austen into the picture, she serving as the putative author of a book of stories whose characters “represent the minutiae of sansei life as it once existed in a small provincial island in an armpit of postwar sunshine.” Those stories share the once-upon-a-time incantation “mukashi, mukashi,” but they’re altogether modern, with Regency carriages giving way to gold Mercedes sedans and Fitzwilliam Darcy taking the form of one Darcy Kabuto II, football hero, class vice president, and best-looking member of his class, “which meant he looked like he was the son of Toshiro Mifune.” Yamashita’s reimagining of Austen is sympathetic and funny—and as on target as the movie Clueless.
A humane vision of people and their stories traveling, learning, sometimes suffering, and always changing.Pub Date: May 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-56689-578-1
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Coffee House
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
A touching portrait of courage and friendship.
A lifetime of friendship endures many upheavals.
Ellie and Homa, two young girls growing up in Tehran, meet at school in the early 1950s. Though their families are very different, they become close friends. After the death of Ellie’s father, she and her difficult mother must adapt to their reduced circumstances. Homa’s more warm and loving family lives a more financially constrained life, and her father, a communist, is politically active—to his own detriment and that of his family’s welfare. When Ellie’s mother remarries and she and Ellie relocate to a more exclusive part of the city, the girls become separated. They reunite years later when Homa is admitted to Ellie’s elite high school. Now a political firebrand with aspirations to become a judge and improve the rights of women in her factionalized homeland, Homa works toward scholastic success and begins practicing political activism. Ellie follows a course, plotted originally by her mother, toward marriage. The tortuous path of the girls’ adult friendship over the following decades is played out against regime change, political persecution, and devastating loss. Ellie’s well-intentioned but naïve approach stands in stark contrast to Homa’s commitment to human rights, particularly for women, and her willingness to risk personal safety to secure those rights. As narrated by Ellie, the girls’ story incorporates frequent references to Iranian food, customs, and beliefs common in the years of tumult and reforms accompanying the Iranian Revolution. Themes of jealousy—even in close friendships—and the role of the shir zan, the courageous “lion women” of Iran who effect change, recur through the narrative. The heartaches associated with emigration are explored along with issues of personal sacrifice for the sake of the greater good (no matter how remote it may seem).
A touching portrait of courage and friendship.Pub Date: July 2, 2024
ISBN: 9781668036587
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A stunning feat of storytelling and moral clarity.
An Irishman uncovers abuse at a Magdalen laundry in this compact and gripping novel.
As Christmas approaches in the winter of 1985, Bill Furlong finds himself increasingly troubled by a sense of dissatisfaction. A coal and timber merchant living in New Ross, Ireland, he should be happy with his life: He is happily married and the father of five bright daughters, and he runs a successful business. But the scars of his childhood linger: His mother gave birth to him while still a teenager, and he never knew his father. Now, as he approaches middle age, Furlong wonders, “What was it all for?…Might things never change or develop into something else, or new?” But a series of troubling encounters at the local convent, which also functions as a “training school for girls” and laundry business, disrupts Furlong’s sedate life. Readers familiar with the history of Ireland’s Magdalen laundries, institutions in which women were incarcerated and often died, will immediately recognize the circumstances of the desperate women trapped in New Ross’ convent, but Furlong does not immediately understand what he has witnessed. Keegan, a prizewinning Irish short story writer, says a great deal in very few words to extraordinary effect in this short novel. Despite the brevity of the text, Furlong’s emotional state is fully rendered and deeply affecting. Keegan also carefully crafts a web of complicity around the convent’s activities that is believably mundane and all the more chilling for it. The Magdalen laundries, this novel implicitly argues, survived not only due to the cruelty of the people who ran them, but also because of the fear and selfishness of those who were willing to look aside because complicity was easier than resistance.
A stunning feat of storytelling and moral clarity.Pub Date: Nov. 30, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-8021-5874-1
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2021
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
