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.