Play Book Tag discussion

I loved this book. It was not at all what I expected. It is so much more. It is beautifully written, with fascinating characters, and layers of interesting subtle revelations about people and the world. It's sometimes silly, but it's more literary than YA.

The set up is rather familiar (with two time periods, and secrets to be discovered), and the plot was predictable in a couple ways (the girl doesn't go through with her suicide plan). Otherwise, the book is uniquely itself. It has the quirkiness I've come to expect from contemporary Japanese literature, a little sci-fi/fantasy, and it has a lot of depth and earthiness too.

The set up: An author in British Columbia finds a waterproofed package on the beach that includes the journal of a teenage girl (written before the tsunami in Japan). The book is largely about a teenage girl in Japan, whose family lived in California for a time. Her father is depressed, and her (great?) grandmother is a Zen Buddhist nun (I loved her of course). I like the mix of tones, locations and topics, including the tech collapse around 2000, California v Japanese high school, the tsunami, depression, prostitution clubs, love hotels, quantum theory, and more. And surprise - Shrodinger's cat. I have commented on the random prevalence of this topic before, but this is the first time that it really makes sense to the plot of the book. (It also recognizes that the cat scenario was intended to show the absurdity of one of the theories, not to teach it.) Even the footnotes in this book are entertaining.

Oh - and one of the ancestors was a kamikaze pilot during WWII. His letters to his mother were very enlightening to me. The author linked it to other cultural insights about suicide in Japan. These revelations alone would have made the book worth reading.

This book is also literary and meta, and the author incorporates characters like herself and her husband into the story, in a way that felt real and honest. I really enjoyed reading her thoughts about her marriage. It was subtle, different, and I found it personally meaningful. Her life on a small BC island felt very authentic as well. (My husband grew up on a small island, and she nailed the communication dynamics that develop with the year-round residents.)

The audio was a little annoying at the beginning, but overall it was very enjoyable. I would recommend the print book for the footnotes. There are a lot of interesting Japanese phrases that she explains really well, and so much more. The kindle version I had (from Libby) was not formatted properly. If you clicked on a footnote, you couldn't just go back to where you left off.

This book won't be for everyone. I can handle depressing topics, but the bullying was a little intense at one point - The Japanese girls used nail scissors for starters. If you still need a book with suicidal ideations, this book is full of them. (I was very confident that the girl would never do it though, so I didn't find it too depressing.)

And did I mention the interesting footnotes? You can safely ignore them, but chances are good that you'll want to read some of them.