Rating: 3/5
Review
Rather disappointing
I had high hopes of this book - it sounded insightful and engrossing, with a fine evocation of some important aspects of Japanese society and other very thoughtful reviewers think highly of it. In the end, though, for me it didn't quite manage to be any of these things.
The book is slow in pace, which I often like and which can be very effective, but here just seemed to drag for long periods. For example, endless descriptions of the intricacies of various local roads or listing exactly how many yen each course of a meal cost just seemed to me like tedious and pointless detail rather than building up a convincing backdrop. I found the characters (and there are many of them) rather thinly drawn and lacking real emotional depth, and although the story emerges gradually and rather skilfully, I found that the chopping between third person narrative and various first person internal monologues distracted rather than added to it.
I think part of the problem for me was the translation, which wasn't so much poor as inappropriate, in that it is very specifically American. I have no objection to this in principle, but it really got in the way of the evocation of provincial Japan. People go to the restroom and the barbershop, for example, which kept transporting me to the USA rather than Japan, and the young women sound like Californian airheads when they speak to each other. After being given a sinister description of the behaviour of the murderer, the narrative voice says, "That, indeed, was the kind of guy he was." This is a repressed, threatening, violent man and he calls him a "guy"? Things like this continually threw me out of the story, and although nothing is actually described as "totally awesome" I sometimes had the dreadful feeling that it might be.
So, I'm afraid I can't really recommend this book but do read the other reviews here before being put off by mine because there are plenty of others who liked it very much.
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