Earlier this week, a kid asked me what Japan was like. Me, having spent less than two weeks in Japan over a decade ago, and so *clearly* an expert, replied “Wacky. Japan is wacky.” And there is a lot of wackiness about Japan, like how I spent my first twenty-four hours there pointing at things and saying “I rolled that up in Katamari” or how things — toilets, restaurants, buttons — just play music at you. But there’s a lot of other stuff about Japan, like the rusty water stains running down the sides of the stucco houses right up next to the shinkansen train tracks, or sitting out on the reclaimed land in Tokyo in April and just how brown and grey and barren everything looks. Spring Garden hits smack between the Cheery Pop Super Love Happy Land of Japan and the just slog of Salarymen and Emptiness and drinking beer depression. Taro is divorced and alone. Nishi moved here because the apartment block is next to a house from a book! Taro has three different ways he can walk from his apartment to the rail station. Nishi stabs herself so she can see a bathroom! They eat octopus and drink beer. They make a friend. The friend moves away. Taro fills his whole apartment with couches! Someone uses the house to film a movie.
And then, bafflingly, the last chapter is told from Taro’s sister’s perspective, so did Taro die or something? I kept expecting the book to end with him falling, literally, off the fence, and dying because why else would we switch from a third person point to a view to a first person point of view from a character that we’ve never met before?
So is he dead? Is this all like the alternative, death-God, interpretation of Totoro? I have no idea.
Thus I will finish and say Spring Garden is kinda like a novel or kinda like a string of incidents listed in chronilogical order which may actually be the definition of a novel, I don’t know. I guess it’s wacky in a non-wacky way, might be the best way to say what it is.
Spring Garden by Tomoka Shibasaki went on sale November 7, 2017.
I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.