Not exactly cheery or uplifting—as if the eight women writers share the same depressed consciousness.
Eight short stories about contemporary Japanese women grappling with the darker sides of sexuality.
Despite having different translators, the volume’s first two stories, both of which revolve around teenaged protagonists on the cusp of losing their virginity, have a similar monotone of stoic passivity. The narrator of “Milk,” by Tamaki Daido, feels increasingly alienated from her childhood friends, but her new sexual connection with her boyfriend seems a poor substitute. In the title story, by Rio Shimamoto, the narrator witnesses the dissolution of her parents’ marriage while she is deciding whether to have sex with her boyfriend. In the third story, “Piss,” by Yuzuki Muroi, a 20-year-old prostitute is victimized by her boyfriend as well as by sadistic clients. Her only solace comes from one of her regulars, an older man who drinks her urine. A sense of never-realized threat permeates Shungiku Uchida’s “My Son’s Lips,” in which a working mother reluctantly allows a cab driver to take her and her children to his apartment to advise his wife on housekeeping. Similarly, the divorcee in “Her Room,” by Chiya Fujino, agrees against her will to visit a new acquaintance whose neediness verges on menacing. In the volume’s last three stories, realism gives way to more experimental explorations of the female psyche. The narrator of Amy Yamada’s “Fiesta” is the impulse/emotion Desire whose destiny is determined by the actions of the woman whose body Desire inhabits. The dreams of an unmarried office worker desperate for a child are at the center of “The Unfertilized Egg,” by Junko Hasegawa. In the final and richest story, “The Shadow of the Orchid,” by Nobuko Takagi, a housewife’s jealousy of her surgeon husband’s dead patient conjures up the young woman through an orchid she gave the doctor before her death.
Not exactly cheery or uplifting—as if the eight women writers share the same depressed consciousness.Pub Date: June 5, 2006
ISBN: 4-7700-3006-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Kodansha
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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