The Crane Wife by Patrick Ness

George Duncan is a good and kind man, the kind of man that is left by women because there is no challenge in him.  He is not brutal or unkind, just decent, growing old alone in quiet desperation and loneliness.  He has a grown up daughter Amanda who is deeply unhappy, somehow unable to connect with people around her and make friends.  George manages a printing shop and folds paper into the shapes of animals and flowers while his assistant Mehmet taunts the customers with terrible service.

It is an uneventful life until one night George hears a soulful cry from his garden.  Bumping and tripping his way through and out of his cavernous house he finds a crane with a terrible wound, an arrow right through one of its great wings.  He manages to break the arrow and although bleeding the great bird flies away.  The next day Kumiko appears in his shop and moves into his life.  She makes scenes which incorporate George's figures, paper sculptures that bring the art world to a frenzy and anyone who sees them to tears.  But Kumiko's most beautiful works are a set that she shows only to George, describing the Japanese myth of the Crane Wife, a sad and lonely tale of love, passion and loss.

Ness weaves the Crane Wife myth, Kumiko's mysterious appearance and George's lonely life together beautifully, we are never sure who or what Kumiko is and how the myth and what George experiences mesh together.  I don't usually like stories that do not have a resolution, but this was a stunning exception.

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A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozaki

Ozeki's book opens with an entry from a diary by Nao Yasutani, a 15 year old Japanese girl living in Tokyo.  She introduces herself as a time being and says that we are all time beings, that is, creatures living within and defined by time.  She draws our attention to the dual meaning of Ozeki's title, we are time beings but also the phrase 'For The Time Being' means 'just for now', again a play on Nao's name.

Next we are introduced to a second first person narrator, Ruth herself finding Nao's diary on the beach of her isolated island in British Columbia, across the Pacific from Japan.  Is this the Ruth writing the book or another, it's not clear?  How did the diary get to British Columbia?

Twin narratives unfold, of Ruth, a Japanese American living with her partner Oliver in the wilderness but pining for New York, and Nao, raised in California but forced to move to Japan when the dotcom bubble burst and her father lost everything. 

Nao struggles to adjust to life in a Japanese high school and is bullied viciously.  After her school perform a mock funeral for Nao in an act of ultimate ostracism her father Hiroki #2, who is suicidal for much of the novel, takes Nao to live for the summer with his grandmother Jiko.  Jiko is an ancient buddhist nun who with gentle kindness, exercise and meditation helps Nao find peace with herself.  And and through Jiko a connection is made to Hiroki #1, Juki's son and Nao's father's uncle, a kamikaze bomber but also deeply thoughful intellectual who died in the Second World War. 

Ruth struggles with her loneliness and with her neighbours, and remembers caring for her own mother through her descent into alzheimers, unravelling in time.  They have a visitor, a Japanese crow that perhaps came over on the tsunami wreckage, but is certainly not indigenous and somehow links to Nao's story.

Ozaki shows us things and events from both sides, 9/11 is witnessed by both sets of characters from opposite sides of the ocean.  The things that happen to Nao are both sad and to me unacceptable but Ozaki is deft at helping us realise that perhaps our constructions of what is and is not acceptable are at heart cultural.  As a Westerner I learned so much about the differences between Japanese and American culture, between collectivism and conformism versus rampant individualism. 

Towards the end of the novel things begin to break down and Ozeki playfully shows us the constructed nature of her tale, things begin to appear where they cannot be, the two stories begin to merge and unravel and a cat is rescued.

I simply can't wait to read more of this author, this is a beguiling haunting book which I really enjoyed.

DYSTOPIA #4
The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick

 What if history had run on different tracks?  What if Roosevelt had been assasinated and not led the USA into World War II, what if the North Africa campaign had failed and Rommel succeeded, Stalingrad never happened and the Nazis taken over Europe.  What if Japan had prevailed at Pearl Harbour, the United States fleet destroyed, Japan never made to suffer the atomic bombs at Nagasaki and Hiroshima?  If Italy had never switched allegiance from Axis to Allies, and instead become a minor ruler in a world split between the might of two empires: Japan and the triumphant Third Reich.  If the USA was partitioned, the Rockies acting as a DMZ between Japan's reticent Buddhist non-violent society on the western seaboard and Germany's agressive Nazism complete with work camps and gas ovens to the East.  Dick imagined this, and the result is an extraordinary mediation on American society and the fragility of history.