"Yoshiro thinks he might never die
A hundred years old and counting, he is one of Japan's many 'old-elderly'; men and women who remember a time before air and sea were poisoned, before terrible catastrophe prompted Japan to shut itself off from the rest of the world. Yoshiro may live for decades yet, but he knows his beloved great-grandson - born frail and prone to sickness - might not survive to adulthood. Day after day, it takes all of Yoshiro's ingenuity to keep Mumei alive.
As hopes for Japan's youngest generation fade, a secretive organisation embarks on an audacious plan to find a cure - might Yoshiro's great-Grandson be the key to saving the last children of Tokyo?"
The answer is no, and the next question is where is the book with that storyline? Because this isn't it. The first two praragraphs are accurate. The third paragraph... not so much. In fact there are maybe one or two references in the entire book to any secretive organistion, and it's not looking for a cure, it's looking to try to sneak people out of the sealed nation that is Japan.
The book is well written. There's no denying that. The world building is really very good indeed and the prose is poetic almost to a fault. There are places where I wonder if something has been lost in translation, but those moments are few and far between.
The story we do have is meandering and never moves very far. It's an exercise in building an alternate society on the page, and it succeeds very well in doing that. However, it's not an exciting romp as promised in the review on the inside of the front cover. And that's where my disappointment lies in this book. If the blurb was correct, I would have liked it more.
I'm annoyed with myself over my reaction to this book. I know how petty I am in wanting the book I was promised instead of the book I got. The book I got IS good. The ending was really quite moving. There were sections of great writing in there.
But I can't bring myself to love this book. The story wanders all over the place, not leaving a very cohesive whole. It is unpredictable, but not always in a good way. Some bits just seem a bit too random and irrelevant. Thanks to that damned blurb I was expecting something with a strong central narrative, and that's completely absent.
I can live with and enjoy well written books about not much, where there's no real resolution - but this is the equivalent of selling Jon McGregor's Reservoir 13 as a police procedural. (Although McGregor's prose might have beeen good enough to make me forget the mis-selling if that had happened). And being honest, I did enjoy reading this. I was never bored. There were laugh out loud moments. I just feel cheated because of the advertising team who wrote that misleading blurb.
I think I would recommend this book, but with the codicil that you ignore what the publishers tell you about it.
I may revisit this some day, to see if I change my opinion on it. But it'll be a while. And I may pick up another book by Ms Tawada if I see one.
6.5/10
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