By Jessica Au
I read this in early September 2024. It’s a blue Fitzcarraldo, and it reads like one, which is both entirely complimentary and also tells you so much about the tone and atmosphere it creates.
It’s misty and hazy - the story, insofar as it has a plot, is about a woman and her mother who take a trip to Japan together. They visit museums, see historical sites, go on walks and shopping. It’s all interspersed with stories and anecdotes about the woman’s past, which are like gleaming jewels sparkling as you come upon them in the dark misty water of the present day. One particularly lovely one was from her university days, invited to a garden party at her lecturer’s house, followed by house-sitting that same house for two weeks. It was so reminiscent of that garden party my tutor held in fourth year that it stuck in my head as idyllic and nostalgic. Another particularly good one was of her uncle, who loved a girl in school until she left for the US, and waited for her for long decades, until he got a letter from her that she had a family now, but had been searching for him, only for her to find out that maybe this story wasn’t ever true, and maybe she’d made it up and mapped it onto her uncle.
The stories are great, but it is the main prose, set in the present day, that has the most depth and nuance. The mother’s actions and thoughts, and even speech, are continually related through the lens of their relationship (there are no quotation marks in the whole book, all speech is related second-hand), raising the question of whether she knows her mother at all, and how reliable anything she says is. They are permanently, terminally separated by the gulf of age, generation, experience, location, language, all the things it is possible to be separated by. They seem to continually misunderstand each other, and misunderstand each other’s misunderstandings, and so on. All motivations are unclear and murky. On the surface, their conversation is banal, everyday, simple, and yet, through their relationship, which brings them closer and separates them more than any two strangers, it is loaded with nuance, concern, care, frustration, and sheer history.
And it is so beautiful. The mother is rendered, through this haze, with strokes of character—near the end, the narrator realises that in the whole trip, the mother has not bought anything that is not a gift for someone else—that in their simplicity and precision, recall Picasso’s bull sketches. It takes a rich and sophisticated talent to navigate so many conflicting themes and intents with enough skill to render each separate and complementary.
It was a little hard to read, though. The prose meanders at time, and the stream-of-consciousness effect requires extended concentration, much like I felt what little of Proust I’ve read required.
Wistful, melancholy, and gorgeous.