The story begins when Konami, a housewife with vague fears about her seemingly peaceful home with her husband, one day finds a sticker on a pillar at Mitsukoshi Department Store in Nihonbashi that was supposed to have been attached to her parents’ house when she was a child. She grows up being told by her mother that a mannequin doll dressed as a miner in an abandoned mine theme park, which still exists today, is your father, but eventually, after getting married in Tokyo, her father Tutomu begins to appear in her daily life and everywhere in her living space. …
This work explores the fundamental fears of human beings as reality/everyday life and fantasy/madness erode into each other. The protagonist, who grows out of his situation through imagination and self-dialogue, engages in strange and comical behaviour and actions, but this in turn gives the novel its strength, drawing the reader in with a certain humour and transporting us to unexpected realms we had not expected.
After its publication in the magazine, it received rave reviews from newspapers and became the talk of the town! It was nominated for the 167th Akutagawa Prize.
Winner of the 65th Gunzo New Writers Award!
(translated with DeepL)
It was nominated for the 167th Akutagawa Prize, and won the 65th Gunzo Prize for New Writers. This is the author’s debut, and their only book so far.
At 128 pages according to Amazon, this is a short book.
This is an informal reading group and as such, we don’t have a schedule nor weekly assignments. Please join whenever you like and read at your own pace!
There are no chapters in the novel, but there are sections divided by a circle or a pickaxe symbol (at least I think this also marks the end of a section). Below is a table listing these sections, so we can mention up to which part we’ve read when we post our comments or questions.
Section no.
Ends with
BookWalker %
Page no.
1
歩いて行く。
9%
2
高笑いが聞こえる。
17%
3
力なく思った。
21%
4
舌打ちをひとつ。
26%
5
光は見えない。
32%
6
姿を捜した。
41%
7
だろうと思った。
46%
8
昏倒した。
52%
9
声をあげた。
53%
10
見入っている。
64%
11
そればかり思った。
68%
12
考えていた。
72%
13
握り直す。
76%
14
声をあげる。
77%
15
波紋をつくった。
84%
16
ひとつついた。
88%
17
続けていた。
89%
18
end of book
93%
Please feel free to comment on the book or ask questions while you read it. As we are reading at different paces, it is crucial that everybody generously applies spoiler tags. Discussion for the whole book will take place in this thread.
Who is interested in reading this book?
I am interested in reading this book.
I am currently reading this book.
I have finished this book.
I have stopped reading, but I will return at some point.
So I’m currently up to what you have as section 2, 17%. This book is really stressing my reading abilities and kinda frustrating me at times tbh, there’s seemingly a new weird challenging thing about it every time I pick it up and vocab repetition feels almost nonexistent.
Spoilers up to there
I feel like I always relate to the weirdo characters who can’t really properly integrate into societal roles, get really anxious and neurotic about things, are from an outsider perspective “failures,” on and on. That’s good, right?
I think I’d like the way the writing style is kinda odd if I was better at the language. The whole department store escape felt pretty vivid and interesting and I am curious to see where we’re headed now that the book has just about caught up with the premise.
You know, when she started imagining people wrestling a child from the noises above in her apartment – a few years back we had people complain that we were making too much noise in ours. Well, it was from the person next door, and was kind of annoying us too (loud bassy noises, probably just speakers up against the wall honestly) but we didn’t feel like complaining so it initially got pinned on us.
My first guess though was it was the people above us because there was also a bunch of loud banging up there all the time. Apartment staff told us “no, they were the ones who complained” which maybe they shouldn’t be revealing, but anyway, when I responded that the complainers are extremely loud, a little later I was informed “oh yeah, they said they’ve been wrestling in there.” Maybe she’s right!
The mention of 長軀(<- I could not type this kanji whatever I tried, had to copy from jisho)の天女像 with the 瑞雲, that stumped me for quite a while, must be this [1].
And びいどろ, which almost no dictionary would pick up, comes from vidro, and specifically refers to bowls and cups made of glass.
Also, I only knew けろけろけろっぴ because I had just come across him in another book (which one? I’ve lost track). [2] I suspect others may know him already though.
Anyway, super early days, as I’ve only read a few pages, but I like what I’ve read so far. The writing seems quirky, and the premise even more so. Hopefully it will feel less challenging as the book progresses and we get our bearings.
Yep, just gonna say I was doing all of the same exact searches and looking at pictures like those, haha. I have the feeling that けろけろけろっぴ sounds/looks familiar but I can’t specifically place it.
Meanwhile, I loved this guy in high school and had notebooks with him on it also a shirt I think although it was likely not meant for high schoolers and I just bought a large size
This constantly happens to me too, so yes, definitely a good thing I’m sure!
So we got a glimpse of her daily life. Interesting job she found for herself
I wonder what kind of job her husband does and he gets to laugh so much during online meetings.
I totally get trying to not make a sound in your own house so people don’t know you’re there, for some reason.
section 3
I didn’t realize this was another covid-era novel. Huge vaccination centers and not being able to find an appointment felt almost nostalgic.
So I knew the premise of the book and I still couldn’t believe my eyes as I read about her mother actively teaching her to greet her “father” and calling the trips to the mine 墓参り
I keep learning about fresh, inventive ways to destroy a child!
I wonder if it’s really the exact same doll she saw. Seems strange to have brought it all the way from Akita.
I had the same questions about it being the same sticker before, which somehow seems even more implausible. I get the feeling we’re not on our way to concrete answers with this book. Part of me wants to point out she seems to see these things when she’s feeling stressed… but also I have to wonder if she’s ever not at a high level of stress, haha.
Yeah I found certain pictures of the mine really striking, was looking it up as well!
Here we can see the sort of mannequin she’s referring to.
I remain intrigued but I’m still fighting against the sentence length and the way certain things are phrased pretty hard At this point I’ve spent 3-4 sessions to read basically the amount of text that I do in one sitting with other material.
Oh boy, well, speaking of a parent messing up their child, this background was rough. No wonder she’s like this.
I think it’s becoming really clear what a non-character her husband is, like they live together but there are only the briefest references to things he has done outside of the sections we’re reading, and he’s more like a presence in the house that affects how she feels and behaves than an actual person. Wouldn’t surprise me if that continues through the novel.
That bit about the eggs got kinda hard for me to read. It… sounded like she was literally painting on eggshells? 母のキャンバスは画板から卵の殻のほうに移行していたので
But then in addition to that there’s stuff about the burning insides and it was kind of a nightmare haha. Oh well. Tough book.
Section 4. I found this section easier to read, although from what I hear this may change again.
The section with the eggs also confused me a bit. It definitely looked like she painted directly on eggs, or at least eggshells, but then how did she paint them to look like they were burning from the inside? She must have had some talent. .
So it looks like this is a slow (or rapid) descent into madness we’re reading about. Very interested in how it will unfold. It actually surprises me that she could move to Tokyo and find a husband after that upbringing. I wonder if we should take all we read at face value or not (well, apart from the miner doll pursuing her). Maybe all of this is in her head, even the husband?
Also curious about where her mother’s income was coming from. How could they even survive?
Section 5.
I actually really enjoyed this section, incomprehensible dialogue notwithstanding.
I wasn’t expecting a change in point of view, not to mention the point of view of ツトム himself. So wait, is this a ghost story? We get to watch the last day of his life, which obviously happened a very long time ago, and we also know about no one alive remembering his name any more, with his family also gone after him. ツトム is not even his real name, yet we call him that. What’s going on?
I found the mine descriptions very evocative. I could almost feel the coolness of the rocks and the smell of rust and wet stone, the disorienting feeling as the mine cart continued deeper and deeper, and the claustrophobia, no, absolutely justified panic this would naturally bring out in anyone. .
As for the short dialogue, no idea what was being said
I hope that if it’s somehow important, we’ll get to hear about it again.
Section 6. From a shopping mall to a mine, and then to IKEA . It took me a moment or two to understand where she was, but then all the descriptions made so much sense. I like the writing a lot, and I still don’t have the slightest idea where the book is going, but I’m here for it.
I finished the book! And…I don’t know what to say. I loved it, I’m glad I read it, but I think I need to let it settle in my head for a bit before I can say anything about it, or even start to pretend I understood it.
Edit:
Thinking about the book, don't mind me (spoilers of course)
When her husband objected to her going to see her father (the only time he did anything active, really), he talked about how her father was taking advantage of her now that his new family was neglecting him, and she didn’t respond to any of that at all. I thought it was a story she fed him, but now I’m thinking it was the truth. There was a father (the old man in the house) alright, although he was probably totally absent during her whole childhood. What I’m unsure about is whether there was a husband.
Okay, the existence of a father established, we now know why the place was different, why there were pills and diapers and stuff all over the place. Why did she see herself though? And why did the seasons change? Was she gone for longer than it seemed in the narrative? Or was she having flashbacks of a winter she spent there with her father?
And something that’s been bothering me throughout the whole hilarious miner abduction: Are there no cameras and no guards in this entire place? Is it at all possible? Or did none of that happen after all?
Also, what about that flower left in front of the miner? Was that real? What about the miner’s real story? I kept expecting it to connect to something somehow, but I don’t think it did. I feel like the whole miner substitution scene (along with the suddenly very familiar face) was somehow very significant, but I can’t quite put my finger on it yet. Was she violently discarding her real connections (father or husband) for an imaginary ideal (Tsutomu)? Or something. And the scene with the nabe and the her two fathers, and the uneaten cake, that was something too. And the mother’s eggs? There’s some symbolism in all of that, I’m sure.
All in all, I loved the book, and its careful balance between delusion, horror, humour, and mundane slice of life. I loved the writing (even though it was on the harder side), the unconventional metaphors, the constant sense of unease and unreality, the main character’s thought processes (several of which I could even identify with). I just wish I could form a clearer picture of what I just read. I’ll be back with more thoughts if they occur to me.
Edit:
More thoughts: There’s also definitely some significance in the difficulty she had in opening the apartment door. The obvious explanation would be to play with the reader, make us think that none of that is real, that she’s trying to open some stranger’s door. But then the key gets in, and after some more tries, the door opens. She looks in, but she doesn’t enter, at least not until after the end of the book. I’m thinking this is just her difficulty in facing, and getting back to, reality. Does this reality include a husband? Why does the house feel empty?
Maybe it does. Maybe the husband is totally real, but she’s just distant (mentally) from him and their life together right now. Maybe he’s not home because the covid restrictions have lifted and he’s back in the office? Or maybe he didn’t exist in the first place, and she lives there alone. Or she may even not live there any more at all, but the keys still work?
She said several times how she sleeps better alone, how the constant presence of someone else around her was irritating. Of course in Tokyo there’s always someone around, and she was as bothered by the neighbours as much as by the husband (or more).
also a shirt I think although it was likely not meant for high schoolers and I just bought a large size
(Also, that footnote is rendering differently in my quote compared to what I see on the screen:)
