Customer Reviews

Translucent Tree

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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.