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
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana.
The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense.
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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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