Translucent Tree [Hardcover]

Nobuko Takagi (Author), Deborah Iwabuchi (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 6, 2008

Chigiri Yamazaki is a divorced single mother who has returned to Tsurugi City with her 11 year old daughter to care for her ailing father--a famouse sword maker whose business has completely faltered. It falls upon Chigiri to keep dept collectors at bay.

Go Imai, a freelance documentary maker, is on a business trip from Tokyo and has decided to stop by this little town of Tsurugi, where he had come to do a story on Chigiri's father 25 years ago. Go reunites with Chigiri, and the two begin a love story of epic consequence and passion reminiscent of the works of Marguerite Duras and Alice Munro, set against the backdrop of bucolic Japan.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Translucent Tree left this reader with a feeling of pure insight into Japan, not unlike the movies of Hayao Miyazaki… This is a romance, a love story, and nothing is lost in translation.” — Los Angeles Times

"Translucent Tree is impossible to label as simply romance. What I found was something more tuned-in with reality, especially a Japanese reality, but certainly human first." --Mecha Mecha Media

"I found Translucent Tree engrossing " --Katherine Dacey

"A story of a convincing, mature relationship which ends, despite its sort of fumbling beginnings, with deep love, respect, and eroticism." -- Library Thing

About the Author

Nobuko Takagi was born in 1946. Since her debut as a novelist in the early 80's, she has written prolifically, and has been the recipient of several literary awards, including the Akutagawa Prize, (the Japanese equivalent of The Pulitzer Prize) in 1984. Takagi is perhaps best known for her explorations on the theme of love. Her fiction deals with love in many different guises: pure love, married love, extra-marital affairs, and love triangles. Her investigation of the workings of the mind often focuses on the dark side of human nature. Other literary awards she has won include the Women's Literature Award(1995) the Tanizaki Junichiro Award (1999) for Translucent Tree and the Minister of Culture Award (2006). Many of her works have been translated and published in China and Taiwan, and Translucent Tree has been adapted to film in Japan, where it met huge success.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 188 pages
• Publisher: Vertical; 1st edition (May 6, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1934287148
• ISBN-13: 978-1934287149
• Product Dimensions: 5.7 x 0.9 x 7.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,345,558 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "exploding with pleasure", March 26, 2011

By 

Patto (Vermont) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)   

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This review is from: Translucent Tree (Hardcover)

TV producer Go Imai returns to the town of Tsurugi, where twenty-five years earlier he filmed a documentary about a master sword maker. The now old and ailing craftsman has no memory of him, but Go reconnects with the sword maker's daughter Chigiri, a divorced single mother.

Go and Chigiri aren't kids anymore, yet they're hit by an electrifying attraction that anyone else would call love at first sight. They're reluctant to give a name to this "entanglement of feelings." Anything named can be lost.

Since Go is married, their meetings are as isolated and dreamlike as the old cedar tree in Tsurugi that grows in a peculiar oblique fashion in the center of a field.

Translucent Tree has the stylistic purity of classic Japanese literature. Although this is the story of a grand passion, the writing is devoid of romantic clichés and conventions. Nobuku Takagi particularizes the experience of her two lovers with every detail, and they feel like real people. The reader is fully present with their embarrassments, fears and pleasures.

Translucent Tree is highly erotic. Yet in the very midst of "exploding with pleasure," the characters are expressing something beyond the physical. Sadly, body and spirit are seen as equally fragile.

I enjoyed the book and recommend it (if you don't mind scenes of explicit lovemaking).

Nobuko Takagi won the Tanizaki award for Translucent Tree, and I do sense a Tanizaki influence. As well as garnering literary acclaim, it was made into a movie. Translucent Tree is Takagi's first book to be translated into English.