I went into this hoping for another great read similar to The Cat and the City — which i really enjoyed — but found something totally different.
While some of the story is set in Tokyo, gone is the portrayal of the giant, oversized metropolis of Tokyo, and we spend a great deal of our time in rural Japan. On the one hand we have Flo, the American translator living in Tokyo. who finds a book about Kyo, a young man also from Tokyo, who is sent to live with his grand-mother, Akayo, in the small-town countryside to attend cram school for a final chance of getting into university to study medicine. Flo, who is at a loose end is hooked on the story and begins to translate it.
For myself, having moved to small town Devon from the East-End of London some years ago, i found Kyo’s experiences rather similar to my own: the culture shock and having to learn to slow down to a whole different pace of life away from the rat race, away from the concrete jungle to places with horizons, away from the spoon fed safety of modernity to taking some responsibility for your own well-being. But, the story is more than this, it’s also about Kyo and Akayo’s journey towards each other and the contrast between a Japan being left behind and a modern Japan accelerating into the future with no care to slow down and look at what is being left behing — are these two worlds reconcilable?
