I picked this up on impulse at the library even though I knew my Women in Translation Month TBR was already of truly ludicrous proportions, mostly becI picked this up on impulse at the library even though I knew my Women in Translation Month TBR was already of truly ludicrous proportions, mostly because I was intrigued by the title and the fact that this had won the Yukio Mishima Prize.
Once I got it home I checked the reviews on Goodreads and YIKES! I almost put it back in the pile to return to the library immediately, but that Mishima Prize had its hooks in me, so somehow this ended up in my priority TBR for the month anyway.
Then I started reading, and I could see what a lot of the reviewers were saying. The writing is choppy, terse. There are no quotation marks. The protagonist is simply referred to as the woman. It is not always clear who is speaking, or what is speech, thought, observation, reflection...
And then on page 10, a single paragraph turned that all around. I was all in. (I will add the paragraph at the end.)
Listen. All of those things were purposeful stylistic choices, and maybe they work for you, maybe they don't. Most of the time they worked for me.
The woman is startled by a malfunctioning alarm in her apartment. She asks a neighbor to watch her son and gets on a plane to Nagasaki, obsessed with thoughts of the atomic bomb. Once there, she immediately falls into an affair with a young Russian-Japanese man at the same hotel, where she slowly begins unpacking a lifetime of suppressed trauma.
A meditation on selfhood, and trauma, and gender relations, and healing, and Christianity, and the different ways one can lose oneself.
The quote: "There are always bloodstains when you wrap someone's body with bandages. The same can be said for this woman. They aren't anything special. There isn't anything special about my bloodstains, about my loneliness, about my past, about the injuries and harm done to me by the men in my past. So if I were to write a novel, the protagonist would be a woman like that."...more
WHEN LAST WE LEFT our dignified Xie Lian (who has ascended to heaven three times (and been banished twice)) and the charming San Lang (who pretended tWHEN LAST WE LEFT our dignified Xie Lian (who has ascended to heaven three times (and been banished twice)) and the charming San Lang (who pretended to be just a bloke, but could mow down a horde or terrifying ghosts in a heartbeat), who JUST LIKE EACH OTHER, AND JUST LIKE HANGING OUT SOLVING MYSTERIES, OKAY? Xie Lian has finally had to admit that San Lang is almost certainly Hua Cheng, the most fierce and feared ghost in all the realms.
So volume two is where we get to run into some of the consequences of their actions. Solving the last mystery has made them a powerful enemy, and Xie Lian is asked to save a mystery in Hua Cheng's territory. Which leads to a devastating reveal about Xie Lian's past, which Hua Cheng is not going to let lie. Xie Lian also reveals that his method of Cultivation requires chastity, and Hua Cheng maybe has a feeling about that. We get a lot of back story on Xie Lian's mysterious past, and some more Mo Xiang Tong Xiu feels on "What is wrong? What is right? What is black? What is white?"
I am continuing to very much enjoy this series. ...more