Full Details
Added By: Administrator
Last Updated: valashain
The Love We Share Without Knowing
| Author: | Christopher Barzak |
| Publisher: |
Bantam Dell Publishing Group, 2009 |
| Series: | |
|
This book does not appear to be part of a series. If this is incorrect, and you know the name of the series to which it belongs, please let us know. |
|
| Book Type: | Novel |
| Genre: | Fantasy |
| Sub-Genre Tags: | Mythic Fiction (Fantasy) Magical Realism |
| Awards: | |
| Lists: | |
| Links: |
|
| Avg Member Rating: |
|
|
|
|
Synopsis
In this haunting, richly woven novel of modern life in Japan, the author of the acclaimed debut One for Sorrow explores the ties that bind humanity across the deepest divides. Here is a Murakamiesque jewel box of intertwined narratives in which the lives of several strangers are gently linked through love, loss, and fate.
On a train filled with quietly sleeping passengers, a young man's life is forever altered when he is miraculously seen by a blind man. In a quiet town an American teacher who has lost her Japanese lover to death begins to lose her own self. On a remote road amid fallow rice fields, four young friends carefully take their own lives-and in that moment they become almost as one. In a small village a disaffected American teenager stranded in a strange land discovers compassion after an encounter with an enigmatic red fox, and in Tokyo a girl named Love learns the deepest lessons about its true meaning from a coma patient lost in dreams of an affair gone wrong.
From the neon colors of Tokyo, with its game centers and karaoke bars, to the bamboo groves and hidden shrines of the countryside, these souls and others mingle, revealing a profound tale of connection-uncovering the love we share without knowing.
Exquisitely perceptive and deeply affecting, Barzak's artful storytelling deftly illuminates the inner lives of those attempting to find-or lose-themselves in an often incomprehensible world.
Excerpt
Realer Than You
Everything you think you know about the world isn't true. Nothing is real, it's all made up. We live in a world of illusion. I'm telling you this up front because I don't want you thinking this story is going to have a happy ending. It won't make any sense out of sadness. It won't redeem humanity in even a small sort of way.
My name is Elijah Fulton, and unlike so many things, this actually happened. It happened in Japan at the beginning of the twenty-first century, when I was sixteen and my parents forced me to leave America. It happened in Ami, a suburb an hour away from Tokyo, on a trail in a bamboo forest.
I was running that day, as usual, because running and biking were the only ways I could get anywhere. You had to be eighteen to drive in Japan, so all of a sudden I was a kid again. Without a car, I was stuck in our tiny house with my thirteen-year-old sister and my mom as they learned how to cook Japanese food with Mrs. Fujita, the wife of my dad's boss. Mrs. Fujita was always calling from the kitchen for me to come taste whatever weird thing they were making in there, like, "Come taste this delicious eel, Elijah!" and I wasn't having any of that. So I ran to get away from everything. From my parents and their friends, from my little sister. From Ami. If I could have, I would have run away from Japan altogether.
When I first started running, I didn't know where the roads led to or even in which direction they traveled, so to be safe I'd circle the apartment complex next to our house, and every day I'd run a little further. By the end of my first week I made it to the end of our road, and a few days after that I crossed over to a road that ran over a hill, into a forest of bamboo and pine trees. The road twisted uninterrupted through the woods for a long time, like a stream flowing through the trees, but I kept going, and eventually I reached a place where the road split off in two directions. One way curved out of the forest, opening onto a cabbage farm and, beyond it, the sloping red- and blue-tiled roofs of town. The other way deteriorated into a dirt trail that wound further into the forest.
I took the trail that went into the woods, where under the gray-green bamboo shadows locusts buzzed and sawed, carrying on a strange conversation. As I ran I listened to the thud of my feet as they fell on the path, and the rise and fall of my breathing. Safe rhythms. They let me know my body was still the same, even though nothing else was familiar.
As I ran, a dragonfly big as my hand flitted back and forth around me, circling me but never leaving. It was bigger than any dragonfly I'd ever seen in America. I could see all of its details, its metallic body and bulbous head, its knobby joints and how its wings sparkled in the shafts of falling sunlight. It's no wonder why people once believed they were fairies. But people will believe in almost anything, really. Sometimes you don't even have to try very hard to convince them.
I was so distracted by looking at anything other than where I was going that I didn't notice the trail I was running on had ended at some point. And when I did notice, I found myself in a cleared circle deep in the woods, where a tiny unpainted house, like the sort people back home put up on poles as bird mansions, stood pressed into the shade at the back of the clearing.
This house had little stairs leading up to a doll-sized door bolted with a rusty lock, and coins and braids of colored string lay scattered across its steps. As I walked closer to examine it, I started to think someone very small would unlock that door at any moment, swing it open, and step out. Maybe it was the dragonfly and all those thoughts of fairies that made me think that. Maybe it was my mood that day in general. Whatever the reason, no one opened that tiny door to ask what I was doing there. Instead, a rustling startled me, and when I looked up, I found a red dog stepping out of the trees behind the house.
It looked more like a fox than a dog maybe. Not like a real fox, though, all skinny and dirty. More like one that just stepped out of a storybook. It had a rich coat of red fur and a bib-shaped patch of white down on its throat. Lifting its nose to sniff the air, cocking its head to one side, it inspected me like I'd inspected the house.
While it circled, I stood still like you're supposed to, careful not to provoke it. I mean, storybook or not, it was some kind of canine and I was obviously on its territory. It must have decided I was okay, because eventually it lowered its head, uninterested, and walked away. I let a breath out, but only a second later I realized my troubles weren't over. The dog was leaving, but it was taking the path I needed to leave by.
I could have waited until the path was free of strange animals, but instead I decided to walk a little ways behind it. It was getting dark, and I couldn't help but wonder what other creatures might come out to meet me if I was still lost in that forest after the moon rose.
As I followed, the dog kept moving, only stopping to look over its shoulder occasionally, its black nose gently nudging the air in front of it. Whenever it did that, a little pang went off inside my chest and suddenly I wanted to pet it, to wrap my arms around its neck and hold it like I used to hold my girlfriend back in the States before we broke up because I was leaving. The fox felt that familiar.
And that's when the really weird thing happened. That's when I got the idea that our meeting wasn't an accident. As we left the shade of the forest, I thought, It's leading me. It's taking me home again, isn't it?
But then it didn't lead me home after all. Well, not all the way, that is. When we reached the path to the intersection where I needed to cross over, it stopped, looked at me once more with its bright green eyes, then dashed back into the woods we'd come out of. I stood there watching it slip through the poles of bamboo for a while, a flash of burnt orange amid the gray-green. And afterward, when all I saw was green again, I ran the rest of the way home.
The name Ami officially has no meaning, but I think it has a secret one. In the Dictionary of Secret Meanings, the word Ami means "the most boring town in the world." With its Catholic-school-uniformed boys and girls walking the sidewalks, with its 1950s-looking housewives wearing aprons as they zoomed down the street on mopeds, it was like living in some surreal Leave It to Beaver rerun. Unfortunately, they have those in Japan, too.
It wasn't just the apron-wearing housewives on mopeds or uniformed Japanese students wandering the streets, though. Those things were all a part of it, but it was more than that. It was the strange symbols on billboards instead of the Roman alphabet, it was the radio announcers spewing streams of incomprehensible chatter, it was the TV shows that made no sense, it was the way my family took everything in such stride. It was all of those things together that made me feel dizzy.
My dad's boss, Mr. Fujita, got my dad used to the place pretty quickly, so I don't think he ever felt the same kind of vertigo I did. And Mrs. Fujita and my mom were dead set on becoming best friends. With Mr. Fujita, my dad bought a car. With Mrs. Fujita, my mom learned which stores had the best groceries, which restaurants the best sushi. So both of my parents had interpreters helping them make everything easy.
Liz and I, on the other hand, had been put in a school for kids of English speakers. Mostly Australian and British kids went there, but it was still cool to be able to speak English, even though there were differences between our English. Like what the hell's a jumper? How about arse and bloke? Words like that always made the few American students snicker and look at each other smiling. Then the Aussies and Brits would laugh at the Americans snickering. It was all a friendly sort of making fun of one another, I guess. I had a Japanese class, but just being there sounding like an idiot as I tried speaking Japanese with a bunch of kids who really spoke English made me feel like I'd stumbled into some kind of government brainwashing program. When I told Liz how I felt after our first few weeks, she said, "Classrooms and government brainwashing programs are the same thing, Elijah. That's how they are everywhere, though. Not just here." I seriously have no clue where she comes up with these things.
My dad works for an electronics company, a big name brand in America that rhymes with phony. And that's the word I want to talk about. Phony. Because that's what I thought about most of the people I met in my first few weeks. They were phonies. Fakes. Or as my English teacher back home would have said, what I was dealing with was a "culture of charlatans." Everyone seemed to always be bowing and apologizing, saying how they should have been the one to thank you for giving them the opportunity to present you with a gift, which to me seemed like the biggest guilt trip ever. I couldn't really believe anything they said, because it all seemed so absurdly polite. I thought they had to be lying.
I wanted the bluntness of America. I wanted someone to lean on a car horn and shout out the window, "What the hell's the holdup?!" I wanted someone to say what they were really thinking. Stuff that helps you know where you stand with a person. But the Japanese are all about subtlety. If they're mad, they'll just keep smiling, saying "please" and "thank you." If you want to know what they really think, you can forget about it unless they're thinking something nice.
When I got back from my run that day, my sister, Liz, was watching one of those weird Japanese TV shows. The host kept saying, "Hontooo?" and the audience laughed whenever he said it, like he was the funniest guy ever. Liz laughed with them, as if she understood. Actually, she did understand. It was me who didn't get it. Liz was only thirteen, but she'd spent the last three ...
Copyright © 2009 by Christopher Barzak
Reviews
Images
No alternate cover images currently exist for this novel.
