When he hears that his fierce, beautiful twin sister Savannah, a well-known New York poet, has once again attempted suicide, he escapes his present emasculation by flying north to meet Savannah's comely psychiatrist, Susan Lowenstein.
Tom Wingo is an unemployed South Carolinian football coach whose internist wife is having an affair with a pompous cardiac man. Still, Kawakami manages to pull us further in, illuminating the perils within the social structures we’ve been taught to trust.Ī flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy ( The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent. On the contrary, the harm they endure becomes more severe, and cheap kicks and punches escalate into grisly attacks that border on snuff. “No matter what they do, we come to school each day, which makes them even more scared,” Kojima reasons. Rather than fight back, they actively succumb to the daily violence wreaked on them, clinging to the philosophy that giving in can be an act of resistance. Our narrator believes his eye is “behind all problems.like a slimy deep sea fish from a hidden world.” Brought together by their differences and their shared victimhood, the two teens find a safe haven in the world of words they build. Kojima has “stiff-looking hair” that sticks out in all directions and white shoes that are scuffed and dirty.
At the outset, our protagonist-he's referred to as “Eyes” by his tormentors because of his lazy eye-begins a furtive exchange of notes with Kojima, a quiet girl who’s also suffered at the hands of her classmates. Told from the perspective of a 14-year-old boy in present-day Japan, Kawakami’s tale follows the volatile lives of two teenagers relentlessly bullied by their peers. Like her last novel-an unsparing treatise on the pressures of being a woman in male-dominated Japan-this book isn’t for the fainthearted.
Kawakami has a unique knack for burrowing into discomfort, and she does it in a startlingly graceful way. This novel from the author of Breasts and Eggs (2020) takes on another subject seldom tapped in literary fiction and blows it open with raw and eloquent intensity.
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