Inoue writes with remarkable clarity and disarming simplicity about feelings and concepts usually too intricate and...
This newly translated volume includes the novella of the title plus two midlength stories by Inoue (The Hunting Gun, 2014, etc.), a major Japanese author less known in the U.S.
In 1942, the novella's narrator, a journalist, was hired by the family of recently deceased artist Onuki Keigaku to write his biography, but the war intervened, and 10 years later, the book remains unfinished. As the narrator begins to refocus on his work, the true subject becomes not the famous painter but his former friend Shinozaki, who made his living counterfeiting Keigaku’s work under the name Hara Hosen. After reading Shinozaki’s name in the famous artist’s diary, he remembers his own random encounters with the forger’s work and stories he has heard from Keigaku’s son and others about Hosen/Shinozaki, who spent his last years making artistic fireworks he was too busy to enjoy. The narrator finds himself struck by the coincidental intersections between his and Hosen/Shinozaki’s lives and ultimately finds the counterfeiter’s failed life represents “the peculiar sadness of our karma.” In “Reeds,” the same narrator re-examines fragmentary childhood memories, each fraught with undefined emotion. His most developed memory concerns riding in a boat with a young couple who were making love. Even after learning the woman’s possible identity, the narrator is not sure what really happened, although “as times goes by, this supposition is slowly being transformed in my heart into a matter of unquestionable fact.” The unreliability of memory and perception also lies at the heart of “Mr. Goodall’s Gloves,” which takes place in postwar Nagasaki and revolves around a character introduced in “Reeds”: Grandma Kano, who raised the narrator through elementary school and was actually not his relative but his great-grandfather’s mistress. The narrator’s ruminations on his life and relationships add up to a new appreciation of memory, however flawed, as “sacred.”
Inoue writes with remarkable clarity and disarming simplicity about feelings and concepts usually too intricate and ambiguous to pin down.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-78227-002-7
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Pushkin Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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