Manazuru [Paperback]

Hiromi Kawakami (Author), Michael Emmerich (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 31, 2010

Twelve years have passed since Kei’s husband, Rei, disappeared and she was left alone with her three-year-old daughter. Her new relationship with a married man—the antithesis of Rei—has brought her life to a numbing stasis, and her relationships with her mother and daughter have spilled into routine, day after day. Kei begins making repeated trips to the seaside town of Manazuru, a place that jogs her memory to a moment in time she can never quite locate. Her time there by the water encompasses years of unsteady footing and a developing urgency to find something.

Through a poetic style embracing the surreal and grotesque, a quiet tenderness emerges from these dark moments. Manazuru is a meditation on memory—a profound, precisely delineated exploration of the relationships between lovers and family members. Both startlingly restless and immaculately compact, Manazuru paints the portrait of a woman on the brink of her own memories and future.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In Kawakami's first novel to be translated into English, a woman fades in and out of the present as she visits the beach town of Manazuru, in the shadow of Mt. Fuji. Kei's husband disappeared when their daughter, Momo, was three. Momo is now 12 and lives with Kei and Kei's mother in Tokyo. Moments shared among the women are pleasant but awkward, due to three generations of unspoken resentment. Some jarring transitions aside, Kawakami's handling of temporal space feels authentic: as Kei kisses her lover in one time and place, the wetness leaves her lips in another; she sits alone on a bench in Tokyo. The real and the fantastical meld as Kei narrowly avoids disaster (she escapes the typhoon that destroys the restaurant where she was dining). Her memories are startlingly vivid, yet their veracity remains uncertain; are the visions she has of her husband with another woman real or imagined? Kawakami has a remarkable ability to obscure reality, fantasy, and memory, making the desire for love feel hauntingly real.
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From Booklist

The Manazuru of Kawakami’s is a dream state as much as a place, a seaside town visited often by the restless narrator, Kei. Kei’s husband vanished more than a decade ago, and only now, living in Tokyo with her mother and sullen 16-year-old daughter, is she compelled to put his memory to rest. Kei is haunted not only by her husband but also inexplicably by other shadowlike entities. She is drawn again and again to Manazuru, where she enters a world where time stops, sound evaporates, women hang from trees, boats spark into flame and disappear, and ghosts come and go like smoke. Yet the fantasy has purpose as a manifestation of Kei’s sense of displacement, and of her estrangement from her daughter and mother. The action convincingly moves in waves between Kei’s past and present, the surreal and the everyday. Part ghost story, part meditation on life and death, family and self, this slim novel is captivating and suspenseful, and sure to satisfy not only fans of ghost fiction but all readers. --Annie Tully

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Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Counterpoint; Reprint edition (August 31, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1582436002
• ISBN-13: 978-1582436005
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #891,993 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Beautifully written, January 20, 2011

By 

Winnotta - See all my reviews

This review is from: Manazuru (Hardcover)

This is an internal stream of consciousness story, beautifully written and poignant. This is an incredible mental journal of a woman abandoned by her husband, and after 12 years slowly lets go of him so she can begin her life anew. I suspect this isn't everyone's cup of tea, but for me it was hauntingly beautiful and well worth the read.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars refined, September 27, 2010

By 

Nico - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Manazuru (Paperback)

Very refined. However, I liked better Kawakami's earlier and less spooky book The Teacher's Briefcase.

2 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars A thoroughly dislikable heroine, September 20, 2010

By 

C E Voigtsberger Jr (Ventura, CA United States) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Manazuru (Hardcover)

I can understand why all the men in her life leave her. The heroine of this book is self-absorbed, whiney, neurotic and wanders in and out of lucidity. If that is your cup of tea, have at it. If not, leave it.