Nebula Award nominee 2009.
In this haunting, richly woven novel of modern life in Japan, the author of the acclaimed debut One for Sorrow explores
the ties that bind humanity across the deepest divides. Here is a
Murakamiesque jewel box of intertwined narratives in which the lives of
several strangers are gently linked through love, loss, and fate.
On
a train filled with quietly sleeping passengers, a young man's life is
forever altered when he is miraculously seen by a blind man. In a quiet
town an American teacher who has lost her Japanese lover to death
begins to lose her own self. On a remote road amid fallow rice fields,
four young friends carefully take their own lives – and in that moment
they become almost as one. In a small village a disaffected American
teenager stranded in a strange land discovers compassion after an
encounter with an enigmatic red fox, and in Tokyo a girl named Love
learns the deepest lessons about its true meaning from a coma patient
lost in dreams of an affair gone wrong.
From the neon colors of
Tokyo, with its game centers and karaoke bars, to the bamboo groves and
hidden shrines of the countryside, these souls and others mingle,
revealing a profound tale of connection – uncovering the love we share
without knowing.
Exquisitely perceptive and deeply affecting,
Barzak's artful storytelling deftly illuminates the inner lives of
those attempting to find – or lose – themselves in an often
incomprehensible world.
