REVIEW SUMMARY: A lovely set of stories about people in modern Japan.
MY RATING: 
BRIEF SYNOPSIS: This charts the interactions, both brief and meaningful, between many different people living in and with Japanese culture.
MY REVIEW
PROS: A lovely picture of a culture that is foreign and has its own relationship with the fantastic.
CONS: This is a character-oriented book, not a plot-oriented book.
BOTTOM LINE: Short and well-written, yet leaves the reader with a greater understanding and a lot to think about.
The Love We Share Without Knowing is a beautiful and only lightly fantastic book. It follows the lives of different people in modern day Japan as they intersect with each other, often tangentially, sometimes meaningfully. It looks at friendship, love, and alienation. In its depictions of both Japanese and American citizens living in Japan, it illuminates culture and cultural difference.
The opening tale is an adaptation of Barzak's short story, "Realer Than You." An unhappy American kid feels quite alienated in his new home. He takes up running, and while running through the woods he finds a shrine, although at first he doesn't know what it is. He meets a fox there, and there seems to be something special about the fox. Later he sneaks off to Tokyo, but gets lost and isn't able to find a train home. When he finally does he meets a girl, and he suspects that she might be related to the fox. Later he learns that he may have seen a ghost.
In terms of the fantastic, it is ghosts that most haunt the story. A friend of the girl who may be a ghost feels stuck in an unhappy marriage. She and some acquaintances agree to commit group suicide out in the country, an odd cultural phenomenon perhaps unique to Japan. Back at her work, we meet a group of Westerners who move to Japan to teach English, and see some of the difficulties they have. They each relate to Japan in their own way. We meet the ex-boyfriend of one of the suicide group members; he picks up a girl on the street and heads to a "love hotel" with her. Later he becomes blind after a blind man sees him; the girl he picked up changes her life and ends up rescuing an American guy from a relationship with a Japanese man that had become a trap. Then the American man tries to introduce his mother to the country, and she has her own set of issues both with him and Japan.
It is this chain of acquaintance (and I haven't fully mapped it here) that makes this book so unique. It illustrates how lives are interconnected, even if that doesn't appear obvious to any one individual in the chain. I suspect that this is particularly apropos to Japanese society, where people tend to live so close together that they coexist shoulder-to-shoulder and at the same time remain formal and separate.
I have a particular fondness for sf/f set in different cultures, and Love We Share shares an excellent vision of today's Japan. Barzak lived there himself and taught English for two years, so he certainly knows something of the country. Yet he doesn't stay exclusively focused on the ex-pat community, which is nice. He also mixes up the settings--some of the vignettes are set in more rural areas, which are very different from the densely packed cities. The one thing that he doesn't mix up so much is generations; most of the viewpoint characters are young, and many of them experience friction with the older generation, both Japanese and American. Still, he covers people from many different walks of life, giving his Japan a nice feeling of depth.
This is a very quiet book--no adventure here, no mecha robots. Just people, doing what they do, trying to live and find meaning and connection. It's different from what we tend to think of as sf/f; perhaps it may fall into the "slipstream" category. That's no reason to avoid it; variety is the spice of life, and learning more about the variety that already exists here, on Earth, today, is absolutely worth enjoying. Combine that with a spare, lyrical style--not pretentious, easy to understand, swiftly flowing--and you have a short book worth savoring.
Comments (0)
| PermaLink
| Category: Book Review
Posted by Karen Burnham at Monday March 02, 2009 at 12:29 AM
© 2009 SF Signal