An intriguing introduction to a significant voice in contemporary Japanese fiction.
This pair of novellas, ably translated from the Japanese by Trowell, marks the English-language debut of celebrated author Kashimada.
In the first novella, Touring the Land of the Dead, a delicate, layered exploration of family, trauma, and memory, Natsuko and her husband, Taichi, board a train to a luxury seaside resort–turned–"cheap health retreat." Her wealthy grandparents frequented the resort on long-ago summer vacations with her mother, and Natsuko also visited the spot in its better days with her own parents, before her father was struck by a fatal disease that plunged the family into a poverty Natsuko's feckless mother could never imagine—much less work—her way out of. The trip is their first since Taichi became ill with a progressive neurological disorder not long after they married, leaving Natsuko to support them with her part-time job at a child care center. At the humbled hotel, "the past...[creeps] up on the present," rooting Natsuko in place as her mind's eye gazes back to the 8 mm films of her mother dancing as a child with her grandparents in the hotel's once-elegant, now empty salon. Natsuko contemplates how her mother's and brother's entitlement has only grown through their own diminishment, how they've exploited Natusko and Taichi to fortify their denial, and revisiting these memories opens Natsuko to a new understanding of her obligations, affections, and what might yet be possible. The second novella, Ninety-Nine Kisses, is told through Nanako, the youngest of four sisters who live with their mother in one of Tokyo's Shitamachi, its older, traditionally less affluent and less fashionable neighborhoods. When "a pretentious-looking outsider" lands in the area, apparently looking for inspiration as an aspiring filmmaker and, Nanako suspects, easy pickings among the neighborhood girls, the elder three sisters vie for his attention. But for Nanako, he holds no interest, and she's equally uninterested in what she sees as artificial divisions of class, worth, and the self. Sexually obsessed with her sisters, she views herself as inseparable from them, four parts of a single body. While this story links thematically to Touring the Land of the Dead through its portrayal of a family in unglamorous circumstances, uncertainty in one's sense of self, and aberrant manifestations of familial bonds, it doesn't quite rise to its rarefied level.
An intriguing introduction to a significant voice in contemporary Japanese fiction.Pub Date: April 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-60945-651-1
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
A boarding-school fantasia, with Hilderbrand’s signature upgrades to the cuisine and decor. Sign us up for next term.
A year in the life of the No. 2 boarding school in America—up from No. 19 last year!
Rumors of Hilderbrand’s retirement were greatly exaggerated, it turns out, since not only has she not gone out to pasture, she’s started over in high school, with her daughter Shelby Cunningham as co-author. As their delicious new book opens, it’s Move-In Day at Tiffin Academy, and Head of School Audre Robinson is warmly welcoming the returning and new students to the New England campus, the latter group including a rare midstream addition to the junior class. Brainiac Charley Hicks is transferring from public school in Maryland to a spot that opened up when one of the school’s most beloved students died by suicide the preceding year. She will be joining a large, diverse cast of adult and teenage characters—queen bees, jealous second-stringers, boozehounds young and old, secret lesbians, people chasing the wrong people chasing other wrong people—all of them royally screwed when an app called Zip Zap appears and starts blasting everyone’s secrets all over campus. How the heck…? Meanwhile, it seems so unlikely that Tiffin has jumped up to the No. 2 spot in the boarding-school rankings that a high-profile magazine launches an investigation, and even the head is worried that there may have been payola involved. The school has a reputation for being more social than academic, and this quality gets an exciting new exclamation point when the resident millionaire bad boy opens a high-style secret speakeasy for select juniors in a forgotten basement. It’s called Priorities. Exactly. One problem: Cinnamon Peters’ mysterious suicide hangs over the book in an odd way, especially since the note she left for her closest male friend is not to be opened for another year—and isn’t. This is surely a setup for a sequel, but it’s a bit frustrating here, and bobs sort of shallowly along amid the general high spirits.
A boarding-school fantasia, with Hilderbrand’s signature upgrades to the cuisine and decor. Sign us up for next term.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9780316567855
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
A masterpiece.
Two young Indian writers discover their conjoined destinies by leaving home, coming back, connecting, disconnecting, and swimming in the ocean at Goa.
Sonia’s grandfather, the lawyer, and his friend, the Colonel, are connected by a weekly chess game and a local tradition of families sharing food, “paraded through the neighborhood in tiffin carriers, in thermos flasks, upon plates covered in napkins tied in rabbit ears.” Shortly after Desai’s magnificent third novel opens, the two families are also connected by a marriage proposal. Upon hearing that Sonia is feeling lonely at college in Vermont—loneliness? Is there anything more un-Indian?—and unaware that she is romantically involved with a famous, much older painter, her elders deliver a hilariously lukewarm letter proposing that she be introduced to Sonny, the Colonel’s grandson. Sonny is living in New York working as a copy editor at The Associated Press, and he, too, has a partner no one knows about. Sonny’s family feels they are being asked to give up their son to balance out some long-ago bad investment advice from the Colonel; on the other hand, they would very much like to get the other family’s kebab recipe. The fate of this half-hearted setup unfurls over many years and almost 700 delicious pages that the author has apparently been working on since the publication of The Inheritance of Loss (2006), which won the Booker Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award. You can almost feel the decades passing as the novel becomes increasingly concerned with the process of novel-writing; toward the end, Sonia can’t stop thinking about whether, if she writes all the stories she knows, “these stories [would] intersect and make a book? How would they hold together?” Desai’s trust in her own process pays off, as vignettes of just a page or two (Sonia’s head-spinning tour of a museum with the great artist; Sonny’s lightning-strike theory that only people who have cleaned their own toilet can appreciate reading novels) intersect with the novel’s central obsessions—love, family, writing, the role of the U.S. in the Indian imagination, the dangers faced by a woman on her own—and come to a perfectly satisfying close.
A masterpiece.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780307700155
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: June 6, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
© 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.
