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Getting back into reading Japanese novels after being sick with a 600 page family epic is certainly not something I would recommend, but this book was pretty awesome actually.

It follows a woman in her early 40s named Yoko living in Tokyo in what I think is probably the late 90s. She came to the city for university from a small mountain village and never turned back and now, post-divorce makes a living as a freelance photographer.

The story is more or less about her reassessing who she is and what she wants with her life now that she's single again. It seems like a pretty calm story, but everything suddenly explodes around her, making the novel one of the calmest wild rides I've ever taken.

Everybody is cheating on everybody, the family of her brother is falling apart at the seams, said brother is dying of cancer that nobody has told him he has, there's a murder, there's dealing with the aftermath of a past sexual assault. There's just a lot going on.

It really is a family epic. And while I really enjoyed it and think it would make a great addition to the English canon of Japanese translations, The story may be hard for some people because it does deal with issues of emotional recovery after traumatic sexual assault, dealing with abusive family members and terminal illness in the family, and just a lot of retrospection towards life and thinking about regrets and how you wish you had paid more attention to people before they were gone. So while the book isn't written in a way that feels heavy and overwhelming, the subject matter would be overwhelming to certain people and they should be careful if they want to read this novel.

This book was really cool to listen to, especially because it's narrated by the author. I often find that books narrated by the author are a lot more fun, especially if nonfiction.

As for the actual content itself, this book was a lot of fun. I listened to the authors other book about microbes pretty recently, so I was super excited to know that he had another book about different animals and the senses that they have. In a way it's kind of a lot bigger scale than talking about microbes, but at the same time, the way the senses of many animals work, scientists are looking in really small places. Like a lot of the book talked about insects and I've just never thought about the sensory world of an insect before.

I also really appreciate how he spent part of the book talking about how human activity can have a negative impact on the sensory experience of other animals and how we can improve the situation. It's always really nice to see when animals just aren't used as some kind of interesting subject, but then their actual lives in relation to ours are ignored.

Super fascinating book that I probably would have got a lot more out of if I hadn't listened to most of it while trying to go to sleep and when I was sick with COVID. Definitely recommend either way though and I hope that the author has another book out at some point because these topics are wicked cool!