The Love We Share Without Knowing [Paperback]

Christopher Barzak (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 25, 2008

In this haunting, richly woven novel of modern life in Japan, the author of the acclaimed debut One for Sorrow explores the ties that bind humanity across the deepest divides. Here is a Murakamiesque jewel box of intertwined narratives in which the lives of several strangers are gently linked through love, loss, and fate.

On a train filled with quietly sleeping passengers, a young man’s life is forever altered when he is miraculously seen by a blind man. In a quiet town an American teacher who has lost her Japanese lover to death begins to lose her own self. On a remote road amid fallow rice fields, four young friends carefully take their own lives—and in that moment they become almost as one. In a small village a disaffected American teenager stranded in a strange land discovers compassion after an encounter with an enigmatic red fox, and in Tokyo a girl named Love learns the deepest lessons about its true meaning from a coma patient lost in dreams of an affair gone wrong.

From the neon colors of Tokyo, with its game centers and karaoke bars, to the bamboo groves and hidden shrines of the countryside, these souls and others mingle, revealing a profound tale of connection—uncovering the love we share without knowing.

Exquisitely perceptive and deeply affecting, Barzak’s artful storytelling deftly illuminates the inner lives of those attempting to find—or lose—themselves in an often incomprehensible world.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Barzak's accomplished novel-in-stories dwells on people dealing with life's sorrows through somewhat tenuous connections. Set in Japan, the narratives focus on protagonists from the country and travelers in search of a new life, as in Realer Than You, in which 16-year-old Elijah Fulton longs for his native America while struggling to fit into his new surroundings outside of Tokyo. The Suicide Club is made up of four young adults on the fringe of Japanese society attempting to make sense of their lives, while Sleeping Beauties concerns, albeit sappily, an American teacher and his Japanese lover; the narrator loses his identity through total immersion in his lover's life, yet it's the slow return to self that is even more devastating. If You Can Read This You're Too Close centers on a disillusioned, selfish young man whose life is changed after a blind man sees him. Barzak's perceptive writing evinces the fragile and overwhelming desire for meaning and love. (Nov.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine

Have we unfairly placed this novel in the SF section? That's where Barzak and his fans come from, but this story will appeal to those who normally don't touch the genre. As far as classification difficulties go, many critics felt it was a stretch to call The Love We Share Without Knowing a novel rather than a short story collection. But few held this against Barzak, and it was clear that every reviewer fell in love with at least one story from the book. Critics also appreciated Barzak's light fantastic touch; they hesitated to even call it "magical realism," since events that seem to have supernatural elements to one character in the book may seem completely pedestrian to another. As several observers pointed out, this is a particularly apt style for the depiction of Japan, a simultaneously traditional and modern country. It also suits the book's young characters, who are caught between a longing for the fantasy of childhood and the independence of adulthood.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Bantam (November 25, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 055338564X
• ISBN-13: 978-0553385649
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.7 x 8.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #808,690 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Christopher Barzak grew up in rural Ohio, went to university in a decaying post-industrial city in Ohio, and has lived in a Southern California beach town, the capital of Michigan, and in the suburbs of Tokyo, Japan, where he taught English in rural junior high and elementary schools. His stories have appeared in a many venues, including Nerve, The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, Salon Fantastique, Interfictions, The Coyote Road, and Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet. His first novel, One for Sorrow, was published by Bantam Books in 2007, and won the Crawford Award as well as being nominated for the Great Lakes Book Award. His second novel, The Love We Share Without Knowing, was nominated for the James Tiptree Jr. Award and is a 2010 Nebula Award Finalist. He is also the co-editor, with Delia Sherman, of Interfictions 2, an Amazon.com Best Book of 2009. Currently he lives in Youngstown, Ohio, where he teaches fiction writing at Youngstown State University.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars deep but depressing look at loneliness, December 5, 2008

By 

Harriet Klausner - See all my reviews
(#1 Hall OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Love We Share Without Knowing (Paperback)

In Ami, Japan, sixteen year old American Elijah Fulton is bored. His only outlet is running. On an isolated path he meets a red fox who seems to imply he should follow; he does and ends up in a sacred circle. Soon after still suffering ennui, Elijah without telling anyone takes the train to Tokyo. After spending the day there, he tries to find the train back to the town where he, his parents and younger sister reside, but fails; no one seems to help him until a teen calling herself Midori helps him as she is going there too. After leaving the train at Ami they walk together until she heads to her father's farm while he goes home. Later he learns Midori committed suicide thirteen years ago.

In Tokyo, Hitumi meets Kazuko in a restaurant after each of their respective dates let them down. Soon afterward Asami and Tadashi the only male of the four form a suicide club pact that reminds Hitumi of her late friend Midori.

More a series of somewhat related vignettes rather than short stories or a novel, THE LOVE WE SHARE WITHOUT KNOWING is a deep look at loneliness and its twin need to belong to others. Christopher Barzak makes the case that the human need for companionship is a basic requirement just a notch less critical than physical survival needs like food, water and shelter. Well written with more episodes than those above, but somewhat depressing because part of belonging could lead to negative consequences like forming a suicide club pact. Fans who appreciate a powerful character study that gets into the essence of human need (think of the Maslow's hierarchy) will relish this engaging but gloomy glimpse into the human psyche.

Harriet Klausner

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Sharing the love, March 1, 2009

By 

N. M. Deniro - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Love We Share Without Knowing (Paperback)

In this second novel by Christopher Barzak, readers will connect not only with familiar characters but with characters from far away. It is what I like to call a "global" novel, rather than one that speaks only to one country or region. It's a novel set in Japan, with characters both Japanese and American, as well as a few other nationalities. Each chapter is a story in and of itself. Some are told in the first person, almost as if the characters are sharing the secret stories of their lives with the reader, creating an amazing feeling of intimacy. Other chapters are told in the third person omniscient, in which the reader feels as if they are watching these characters on a movie screen. And other chapters are told in other ways, as in the third chapter, when it seems at first to be a monologue until you read to its end and discover that it isn't a monologue so much as an "address" from one character in the novel to another. The effect of this variation of storytelling perspectives is like a symphony, a variety of instruments or voices coming together to create something more than they could be alone, which is sort of the theme of the novel, I think. It's beautiful, and the effect it creates builds as you get farther into the book and allow the voices to mingle, as they build layers of meaning and tone.

But aside from that description of the way the novel is written, what's more important is the beautiful yet sad depiction of life as we know it, in many countries, not just Japan. This a gently existential book about the stark loneliness of being surrounded by people, of trying to understand others and be understood, it's about failing, it's about the search for one's place in the world, and the always mingling worlds of things and spirits. You can't teach Barzak's approach in a creative writing workshop or MFA program. It's not the sort of writing that shows itself off, it's not about displaying his abilities so much as giving a reader a variety of ways to read, and it manages to quietly amaze without begging you to notice your own amazement.

It's a book about falling in love, falling out of love, losing someone you love, and learning how to live with their absence. It's about living.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An engrossing and beautiful rumination on the many ways we love, February 27, 2009

By 

Kristine Harrington "Kris" (Youngstown, OH USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Love We Share Without Knowing (Paperback)

Some books are regarded as having more worth than others because of when and by whom they were written. We treat with skepticism modern writers with their non-linear reflections and questioning rather than proclaiming style and hold up anything written by dead white guys from days of yore (aka, the classics). We see biography and history regarded as more valid than fiction, and lately, and even within the fiction genre, we find multiple sub-genres: romance, realism, magical realism, sci-fi, speculative fiction, chick lit, and you get the idea.

But with these simple categorizations, we miss, well, we miss a lot. Christopher Barzak, has written two novels that defy these kinds of easy genre-based descriptions. The most recent, The Love We Share Without Knowing, is particularly difficult to pin down. This is its strength.

If you're looking for a typical love story: boy meets girl, is confronted with a significant obstacle to her affections, overcomes obstacle, love wins in the end, then this is not the book for you (you want something by Nicholas Sparks). Instead Barzak's novel doesn't provide us with easy or even any answers about love. We get questions in a world where the dead and living hold company together and where people drift between these two worlds in dreams and even in the guise of a fox. Love becomes dark and grasping, lonely and desperate, and it refuses to be silenced by death. And yet the darkness doesn't exist just for darkness's sake but rather to make room for the light because in the midst of the lonliness and death we come to realize what is at the heart of the novel's overlapping stories. The ghosts are supernatural manifestations of a truth that is presented as a hunch...that we leave in others' lives our traces, our love, in more ways than we will ever fully realize.