My oldest daughter Courtney recommended this book to me. She bought herself a copy so lent it to me and I read it in just 3 days. It's very....different. It's told from the perspective of a woman who is raising her child alone because her husband wants a divorce. It has been translated into English from Japanese. I had never heard of the author before.
STORY SUMMARY
It is spring in Tokyo and a young woman has just been left alone with her 2 year old daughter. Her husband has left them. She begins a new life in an apartment and over the next year she struggles to raise her little girl by herself. Their new home is infused with light streaming through the windows. Sometimes it's so bright she has to squint.
Emotionally, she is plunging into darkness. She becomes unstable. She becomes kind of unmoored. The months come and go, the seasons begin to change and she has to decide what she is going to do and what she will become. She needs to deal with the loss of her marriage.
Although mentally/emotionally she is in a dark place, she notices various light all around her in each season. She learns to become a single mom.
MY THOUGHTS
This book, at its core, is about the effects of divorce on young children and the spouse left behind. There's a sweet tenderness about this book yet at the same time it is unsettling. It's a bit odd. We never learn of the first names of the woman, her little girl, nor her husband. We only have their last name, which happens to be the same name as the apartment building she is living in.
I honestly didn't like the young woman. She was a hot mess. We don't get a sense of when this story takes place which kind of bugged me. We only know that she is getting a divorce, works full time in a library, and must put her little girl in daycare. She becomes a bit promiscuous and very depressed. I'm just not a fan of books that leave me wondering what in the world is going to happen to her and the little girl and that's what this book does. Yet at the same time, there's a sense of power and independence towards the end.
The main themes in the book are abandonment, divorce, single parenthood, isolation, fear.
I later found out that the book is supposed to be set in the 1970s yet no where in my copy did that come out. It's actually kind of a depressing read.
I was irritated that the young woman sometimes wants nothing to do with her ex-husband and tries to prevent him from spending time with their daughter yet at other times, she tries to get back together with him. Maybe this is a common feeling for women who have been divorced.
I get that a transformation was taking place but how odd to have her move into a smaller, darker apartment in the end. I just didn't get it.
In my opinion, this book is appropriate for ages 17 and older (due to some mature content).
On a scale of 1-10, with 10 being the highest, I rate this a 7.
3 comments:
I'll probably avoid this book if I ever run across it. I don't like depressing books. Thanks for the review.
Yeah it didn't start out depressing really. But.....alhtough well written i found the overall plot to be depressing. but i guess it's a good look at how women who've gone through a divorce might feel and how that impacts the child.
I've never heard of this one. Sometimes books that are translated from another country or language don't quite get things across just right. Maybe that is the case with this one?
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