Published in 1989 in Japan, this novel is the first US publication for Shimada; set in New York and Tokyo, it's a study of cultural displacement in the guise of a mother's quest for her long-lost son. Mrs. Amino is a Japanese-American whose little son Masao (Matthew) was kidnapped by his father when they lived in the US. Now, 25 years later in Japan, the lonely, super-rich Mrs. Amino wants Matthew back. She assigns her raffish houseboy Kubi to scour Tokyo; ex-beauty queen Maiko will check out New York, where she finds Matthew's elderly foster-father Katagiri, a Japan-hater whose loyalty belongs to the Orphan Republic, a grandiose term for the child-rental business founded by his Irish-American wife and himself. They rented out orphans to parents who had lost their kids; Matthew was their only Japanese rental child. Shimada has built his novel around this idea, but what is it exactly? The biggest child-labor racket since Fagin's pickpockets hit the streets of London, or a golden opportunity for deprived kids to outperform child actors? His own view is as cloudy as his long, rambling exposition of the project is awkward. Similarly cloudy is his treatment of Matthew, now working in Tokyo as a ``professional friend,'' selling everything from sex to a sympathetic ear, and dependent for companionship on his guardian spirit, Mikainaito, who can enter other people's dreams. It's hard to say whether Matthew has been crippled by his rental-child experience, or has just the right kind of hipness for life in New York and its mirror-image Tokyo (``the capital city of illusion and amnesia''). At the end, Shimada contrives a mother-son reunion that entails the challenge, for Matthew, of an unlimited run. What interests Shimada is the porousness of modern life, but he has not yet found the right metaphor or story-idea to express it.
Pub Date: Nov. 16, 1992
ISBN: 4-77001-535-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Kodansha
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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