Minatoya (the memoir Talking to High Monks in the Snow, 1992) debuts in fiction with a pleasantly told, highly detailed, risk-free, and autobiographical “I-story” of Etsuko in the years between the world wars. The story opens in 1921 in Seattle, where the widowed Etsuko lives with her sister Naomi and Naomi’s husband Akira. Naomi dies during childbirth, and after a few years Akira decides that the child, Hanae, must return to Japan to relearn her native culture. Accompanying Hanae to Kobe, Etsuko faces an uncomfortable reunion with her own cold and distant mother, Chie, who abandoned her soon after her birth. Hanae haltingly enters Japanese culture; the nationalist fervor in Japan swells; and Etsuko participates in antiwar activities. As the war fever grows, Etsuko and Chie achieve a modest peace and join various pacifist groups, while Hanae studies her way to the head of her graduating class of 1939. Each of these phases of the plot is authoritatively embellished with fine re-creations of Japanese culture of the era, but aside from the light pressure Akira exerts on Etsuko to return Hanae to the US, the story could just as well have occurred in contemporary Japan without impeding its general intent. Etsuko, who guides the reader through the autobiography-novel, is strangely missing from the meat of the tale: her antipathies are lukewarm, her loyalties only gently divided, and her anxieties exclusively domestic in focus. Minatoya also begins many sections with Etsuko describing the pitfalls and challenges of writing autobiographical fiction, a device that intrudes unnecessarily upon the flow of the story. Well written, nevertheless, and thoroughly researched. Minatoya evokes the nature of Japanese culture and offers explanations for many of its beliefs and habits—without which her slim storyline would never have reached such excessive length. They don—t propel the reader forward, but they are informative.
Pub Date: June 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-684-85362-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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