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
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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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