Customer Reviews

Life in the Cul-De-Sac

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a beautiful sequence of interwoven short stories about four Japanese families living on a suburban cul-de-sac in Tokyo. If you like Raymond Carver-esque/magical realism, you'll love the lyrical, almost spooky connections and poignant near-misses of Life in the Cul-de-Sac. Very readable, often quite funny, full of surprises.

I actually got turned onto this book by the translator, who's also done a lot of Haruki Murakami stuff (novels & in The New Yorker)...

A great read for anyone looking for new adventures in fiction.

Kuroi gives us the merging of tradition with the modern world in the Japan of the 1980's. Some families run to the future, some are dragged kicking and screaming into it and others have no idea how to deal with it.

In twelve interrelated stories, we meet the residents of five homes in a cul-de-sac - another name for which is dead-end street. Many of these folks are already at a dead-end, while others seem destined to get there soon. Some would escape it if they just knew how.

All of the stories are about every-day folks (though the mixture of extremes is unlikely in such a small group). There is no real central conflict, but rather the reactions of the characters to the challenges of keeping families and themselves 'healthy' amidst real world struggles.

Translator Philip Gabriel captured the modern Japanese style while presenting us with a very readable book. Writing a novel through linked stories is quite common in Japanese literature and Kuroi did a good job with the threads that tie them together.

Far easier to 'figure out' than many modern Japanese authors, Senji Kuroi wrote a book that I found quite enjoyable.

As the first reviewer stated I was attracted to this book because of the translator because he translated many of Murakami Haruki's books. While I did not enjoy this book quite as much as those written by Murakami, I did find it to be an interesting read. The book is one big down note. We are first introduced to the Oda family. The father Fusao is a depressed man who is often left at home with his two children while his wife is off taking classes. He tells his children about his family home that had stood in the same spot as their present house, and the reader can feel the family's past being melted away because of the destruction of the home. The rest of the chapters in the book deal with the families who live close to the Odas their stories are similar to his: lonliness, lack of roots, and a desire to return to the past. An Interesting read.

For those unfamiliar with Japanese literature, I recommend starting this connected series of short stories only after first flipping to the back to read the Translator's Afterword. There is so much context given in those five pages that I was left scratching my head as to why the publisher hadn't made it a "Foreword" instead. There, one learns that the twelve stories, which are all grouped around a nondescript cul-de-sac in outer Tokyo and its few families, is a "rensaku shosetsu" (novel of linked stories)-which apparently is a popular literary format in Japan. There, one also learns that the stories were originally serialized from 1981-84, a period marking the beginning of the Japanese boom economy and high national spirits.

In that context, the stories-which carry with them a sense of quiet desperation and disconnection familiar to readers of Cheever and Carver-can be seen as going against the grain of popular sentiment of the time. Indeed, there is little evidence of the much-heralded Japanese "group ethic" and rather more a sense that no one-not even people in the same family-are in any way connected to those around them. The families of the cul-de-sac are a demographic cross-section clearly meant to embody average Tokyoites, and Kuroi's portrait of them as lonely and alienated individuals is meant to disturb. Wives and husbands live totally separate lives, children come and go, elders grow old and forgotten, with only occasional bursts of outreach. The writing is necessarily sparse and ventures into surrealism at times, and though the book is an important social commentary, it's not the most timely or enjoyable read.

At first I was not so sure, the book seemed a rather Soap Operaish. But after a bit I was hooked. Very clear and yet subtle examination of Japanese life in the suburbs. The women characters are suprisinfgly strong for Japanese literature of this era. And the "dominant" men come off as intersting and yet useless buffons. I think it takes Japanese literature to a more elaborate height than most Japanese literature written by men. Murakami is all about men, and that get's boring to me (and I am a man), where as Kuroi gives us the tragic banality of suburban life for both the men and woomen of the era. It is a bit dated, but having grown up in U.S. suburbs it still rings frieghtenly true to me. And that is another thing; this book is very creepy and even scarry by the end. No obvious horror, but just the relentless creepiness of suburban living. I look forward to more Kuroi books in english!