Paperback, 108 pages
Published by Giramondo Publishing.
I could relate so much to this book. It opened my eyes to seeing the blind spots in my relationship with family, places, and memories. Jessica Au beautifully captures in-the-moment experiences of her travels with her mom, and you realize that that's the only thing that matters.
Still not sure what to make of this one, even on a second reading. The first time was inclined to wonder Why are we doing this or how does this all fit together, second time was more taking each moment as it's told. Enjoyed the experience of it, which is what matters most.
A daughter takes her mother, originally from Hong Kong, to Japan for a holiday. It alternates between precisely observed details of the present and the daughter's narration of memories from her past, her mother's, sister's and partner's.
An extremely moving novella - meditative. opaque, and yet full of very precise and beautiful observations; of nature, of everyday objects and scenes, of people, and of art. On the face of it a tale of a young woman and her mother visiting Japan together, it gets less and less clear how much of this story is actually real and how much is imagined.
There's a sentence towards the end almost explicitly warning you not to believe what you're reading, comparing writing to a painter painting over what was previously there:
"It was only in this way that one could go back and change the past, to make things not as they were, but as we wished they had been, or rather as we saw it. I said, for this reason, it was better for her not to trust anything she read."
Au also manages some wonderful descriptions of Japan, …
An extremely moving novella - meditative. opaque, and yet full of very precise and beautiful observations; of nature, of everyday objects and scenes, of people, and of art. On the face of it a tale of a young woman and her mother visiting Japan together, it gets less and less clear how much of this story is actually real and how much is imagined.
There's a sentence towards the end almost explicitly warning you not to believe what you're reading, comparing writing to a painter painting over what was previously there:
"It was only in this way that one could go back and change the past, to make things not as they were, but as we wished they had been, or rather as we saw it. I said, for this reason, it was better for her not to trust anything she read."
Au also manages some wonderful descriptions of Japan, that almost physically took me back there:
"The streets were so small that there were often no footpaths but rather white lines drawn on the asphalt to indicate where you could walk. Occasionally, we’d pass a cluster of convenience stores and small shops and coffee houses, which you could always spot at a distance by their brightly coloured vertical signs."
And about learning Japanese:
"I thought of learning Japanese, how childlike I still felt in the language, how I was capable only of asking for the simplest things. And yet, I persisted, because I dreamed one day of being able to say more. I thought of the instances when I had been able to converse in a string of sentences, like with the woman at the bookshop, and how good this had felt, how electric."
