Formally experimental at times, this book is a beautiful stream of consciousness narrative of a Tokyo housewife. Her “ladies who lunch” group and their rivalries, her neighbours and their dramas, the husband and children she seems strangely alienated from, all feature alongside Natsumi’s inner monologue. She takes us shopping, enumerating what’s on the supermarket shelves, and we enter a trancelike state where time seems to loop and ideas float like they’re suspended in aspic.
One image that comes up a few times and stuck with me: Natsumi staring at the water coming out of a tap. It just seemed to perfectly encapsulate the slightly “frozen” state she’s in a lot of the time, yet at the same time you see her curiosity, her spirit.
I really enjoyed this book and I liked the way it jumped around, how you got stuck in different modes and moments along the way, very much how a mind works. The detailed descriptions of food, of the flat, of shops and public transport make this is a really great example of “domestic drama”, one that could easily also tip into horror, but takes it more into a nod to the absurd.
One word: drudgery.
Leave a Comment