Library Wars: Love and War

Library Wars: Love & War Kiiro Yumi, original concept Hiro Arikawa, translated from the Japanese by John Werry

This is a mega-review of vol. 1-13 (aka, the ones that are currently available in English)


The Library Freedom Act

Libraries have the freedom to acquire their collections.

Libraries have the freedom to circulate materials in their collections.

Libraries guarantee the privacy of their patrons.

Libraries oppose any type of censorship.

When libraries are imperiled, librarians will join together to secure their freedom.

In the not-too-distant future, Japan passes the "Media Betterment Act" which censors objectionable material. Librarians are against censorship and will fight to keep their collections free and available. Literally fight. Like, they made an army. To fight against the federal censors(and their army).

AND YOU WONDER WHY I LOVE THIS?!

I devoured this series. Like, read all of them in a week, often staying up way past bedtime because I COULD NOT PUT IT DOWN. I love the overall concept. Plus, not only is about people fighting to protect access to materials (with their literal lives!), but it's a shoju manga, so SO MUCH SEXUAL TENSION.

Our main character, Iku Kasahara wants to join the Library Defense Force to be like her "prince"-- a member who saved a book she wanted to buy from censorship. She has passion, but not a lot of skill and is driven hard by her Sargent Dojo (who, um, OBVIOUSLY is her "prince.") She eventually becomes the first woman on a super elite squad that has to both be an army fighter, but also an actual librarian. But, over the run of the series, this is far from the only relationship we see (I won't say my favorite, because it develops pretty late and is a bit of a spoiler.)

I love the politics and maneuvering the library forces do. I like the plotline where Kasahara's parents don't know what she does because she knows they won't approve. I love love love Kasahara's roommate, Asako Shibazaki. She's very beautiful and a bit aloof and a lot of people read her as shallow, but she has a lot going on beneath the surface. She's a librarian with some serious hidden talents. I love the way her character develops. (In fact, she might be my favorite character.)

I like that there are cultural end notes to explain things, and several bonus mangas at the end of most volumes to fill in some quiet moments.

The over-the-top melodrama of some of the relationship stuff gets old, but I'm starting to recognize that it's standard for a lot of shoju manga.

Overall though, I LOVE THIS SERIES and am trying to force all my coworkers to read it. (LIBRARIES BUILT AN ARMY TO PROTECT FREEDOM OF ACCESS FROM GOVERNMENT CENSORS. DUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUDE.)

If I understand Wikipedia correctly, there are 15 total volumes in this series. 13 are out in English now, and the 14th comes out in October. Based on past publication schedules, I'm guessing the 15th will be out next April. My one regret? This is based on a novel series and the source material doesn't seem to be available in English.

Books Provided by... my local library

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Graphic Novel Week: Pluto

Pluto by Naoki Urasawa, based on work by Osama Tezuka.


I'm going to review the entire 8-volume series as one, because that's how I think about it, because that's how we looked at it for inclusion on the Outstanding Books and College Bound list for Science and Technology.

Urasawa takes a story arc from Osama Tezuka's classic Astro Boy series and retells it for an older audience. The first volumes really focus on Gesicht, a top European detective who's looking into the horrible murders of some of the world's leading robots. It's soon evident that the serial killer is targeting the seven most powerful robots in the world. This troubles Gesicht for many professional reasons, but many personal ones as well--most of the seven are his friends, because he is one of them. This killer is unlike anything they've ever seen before--he's too fast to be captured on film, so he can't be human, but he doesn't show up on any robot sensors, so he can't be a robot.

As the mystery deepens, we meet the other robots, get backstories-- many are haunted by what they saw and did in the last great war and many live their lives today as a way to atone for their actions then. There are flickers of something at the edges of Gesicht's memory that he can't quite place, but he thinks it's important.

And through it all it raises questions of what it means to be human and where the line is between Artificial Intelligence and humanity--if we get too good at designing AI, will there be a line any more? Can there be one? What about an injured human with robotic parts? How much robot is too much robot? And through it all, it's just a damn good, engaging story that has many heartbreaking moments. An early one that stands out is the story of North, a robot who is known for the death and destruction he brought during the war. He's now a butler to a composer who loathes him because everyone knows robots can't feel. All North wants to do is make music, to play piano and bring beauty to the world, but the composer won't let him, because robots are emotionless and can't understand or play true music because of it. It perfectly sets up the prejudices many have against robots, while showing that many of these AI systems are so advanced that robots may not be that emotionless after all. It's a tender story that sets up a lot of the larger issues and dynamics in the series.

I love the world Tezuka and Urasawa have built, and it's eerie to realize that the geopolitics read as super-current, but were in the original text from the 60s. As someone whose never read Astro Boy, I'm not familiar with the source material, but that's ok. The story is amazing on its own, but I do like the touch that each volume has a bit of back matter--an essay, an interview, another comic-- from a variety of people--Tezuka's son, manga scholars, other artists-- that help give both works a context to each other and to the larger manga world. It was very interesting and helpful. (Plus, I just love that Japan takes drawn books so seriously that there are a lot of manga scholars out there.)

I highly recommend it.

Books Provided by... my local library

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Graphic Novel Week: Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms

Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms Fumiyo Kouno, translated from the Japanese by Naoko Amemiya and Andy Nakatani

This isn't currently in print, but many libraries still have it and it's seriously worth tracking down a copy. It's two stories, in one book. "Town of Evening Calm" deals with Minami, a young woman who, 10 years prior, survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. She's still haunted by that day, and has intense guilt about the fact she survived when so many didn't. (Including many members of her immediate family.) "Country of Cherry Blossoms" is in two parts and takes place in 1987, the second part in 2004, and on one hand is a story of changing friendships and aging parents, but on the other is a look at how the bombing still lingers in Japanese society and thought. They're connected, but I won't tell you how.

This is an Outstanding Book for the College Bound, on the History and Cultures list. I didn't read it when we were working on the list, because I was on different subcommittees, but hearing the History and Cultures people talk about it, it was on my list of ones to pick up immediately.

The author's note at the end explains why Kouno wrote the story. She's from Hiroshima, where they avoid the subject. When she moved to Tokyo she discovered that the rest of Japan (excepting Nagasaki) don't talk about it because they don't understand it. They don't the scars those cities still bear, and how they're different than the ones the rest of Japan has.

The result is beautifully drawn book. "Town of Evening Calm" is rather heartbreaking, but "Country of Cherry Blossoms" is often very funny. It's a fascinating look into a time and place and effects events still have decades down to the line.


Book Provided by... my local library

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Exit A

A book I read in 2007:

Exit A: A Novel Anthony Swofford

Amazon description:
Seventeen-year-old Severin Boxx, an earnest, muscular high-school-football star, lives on an American air force base on the outskirts of Tokyo. Severin is mad for Virginia Kindwall, the base general's daughter, who is a hafu -- half American and half Japanese. Beautiful, smart, and utterly defiant of her father, Virginia has become a petty criminal in the Japanese underground.

Severin is soon caught up in Virginia's world, and together they drift through the mad neon landscape outside the walls of the base, near the busy Haijima rail station, a place of movement, anonymity, and sudden disappearance. Exit A is one of its many shadowy doorways. Severin and Virginia fall into trouble way over their heads and are soon subjected to the enormous, unforgiving tensions between America and Japan. Years later, Severin and Virginia remain lost to each other, until an emotionally frayed, thirty- something Severin embarks on a quest to find Virginia -- and the part of himself taken from him when his boyhood abruptly ended.

Darkly irreverent, frankly erotic, at once suspenseful and emotionally overwhelming, Swofford's Exit A builds inexorably toward a climax as it audaciously plumbs the legacies of war, the wish for redemption, and the danger of love..........

I adored the first half of this book-- the part were Severin and Virginia are in high school. I loved the descriptions of base life and the town/base interactions and the general and cultural tensions between the Americans and Japanese.

But then when it fast-forwards to them as adults, it lost me. It took a weird turn about North Koreans kidnapping Japanese kids and I didn't understand why Severin and Virginia grew into the adults they grew into. The ending was also really weak.

It was all the more disappointing because the first half of the novel was so very, very good.

Book Provided by... my local library

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National Poetry Month: Orchards

everyone knows
Lisa didn't mean it
everyone knows
when a person says
certain things
they don't mean
the words
they say
really

***************

and on the polished stone
I place tiny piles of
rice and minced eggplant
nourishment
for spirits

I think of how in New York
all we ever do is take flowers
to the grave of Dad's mother
and place small stones on the top
of the grave
once a year
maybe twice
that's all

I think of you, Ruth
and I think of me
just bringing flowers
and placing stones

and how that shouldn't
be all I do
for you

Orchards Holly Thompson

Last school year, Ruth hanged herself from a tree in the Osgood's orchard. When her suicide note was found, the community was in an uproar about the cruelty of eighth-grade girls. How could they have been so cruel? How could they have been so cold to one of their classmates?

That summer, Kana and her friends are sent in different directions. Kana is shipped off to Japan to spend the summer helping her maternal relatives with their mikan orchard. Separated from her friends and family, surrounded by a culture she understands but doesn't fit into (it doesn't help that her body has decided to take after her Jewish-Russian paternal side instead of her smaller, thinner, and quieter Japanese maternal side) Kana is left contemplating Ruth's suicide and what she could have done, if anything, to prevent it.

Here's what I liked about this book:

Kana's fish-out-of-water issues have a lot less to do with Japan and more to do with her family. I think it would have been easier to do the cultural isolation thing instead of familial isolation. I appreciate that not only did it NOT take the easy route, but it did the hard route really well and making her not fit in with her extended family gave a lot more emotional depth.

Most verse novels are a series of short poems. This is more like each chapter is a poem or a series of poems, but it all flows into one narrative, almost one long poem, more than most verse novels do. I liked the change-up and how it used poetry slightly differently to tell the story.

I really liked the visual detail-- the mikans that marked each chapter, the swirl design on the chapter pages, and the corner sketches that linked previous chapters to later ones, as well as illustrating an important part of the story. It's really subtle and doesn't detract, but we so rarely see visual elements in a purely text novel for teens. It was a very nice (and surprising) addition.

Overall though, this is just a very raw and honest account of one girl trying to come to terms with a horrible tragedy and her feelings of guilt surrounding it. I especially appreciated her moments of denial. They were painful and sometimes fueled the thoughts that the communal blame of the class may be right, but at the same time, it was so honest and raised some very good points.

I've been sharing a poetry-related post every day this month. This past week I shared some ancient Chinese poetry and highlighted some poems from All the Small Poems and Fourteen More.

Today's Poetry Friday round up is over at Random Noodling.

ARC Provided by... the publisher, at ALA Midwinter

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Battle Royale

Battle Royale Koushun Takami trans. Yuji Oniki

So a while ago, Leila put together a list of Hunger Games read alikes that included the following:


Okay, so Koushun Takami's cult classic Battle Royale comes up every single time The Hunger Games is mentioned within a three-mile radius of anyone with even the slightest leaning towards hipsterism:

"Blah blah blah Hunger Games blah blah."

"Excuse me. Just give me a moment to adjust my skinny jeans and Elvis Costello glasses. Now. Why on earth would you want to read that YA tripe when you could just read Battle Royale?"

"Um. Because despite the broad similarity in premise, they're actually completely different books, and were written with completely different audiences in mind? And maybe you should think about how ass-y it makes you sound when you dismiss an entire genre without even attempting to explore it?"


And yes, that made me kinda want to read the book.

In the Greater Republic of East Asia, every year 50 third-year junior high school classes are chosen for the program. Ostensibly, it's a a research program for the military. In reality, it's a form of control. Students are given a pack with water, food, a weapon (weapons vary from a fork to a machine gun) and the last one standing wins a salary for the rest of their lives and a signed card from the dictator.

Battle Royale follows the fate of Third Year Class B, Shiroiwa Junior High School.

Overall, I found this a very engrossing, fast-paced read (even though it's almost 600 pages long). It starts with a bus full of students who think they're on their way to a study trip and ends shortly after the Program does. There is a bit of info-dumping in the dialogue, usually when describing what happened in the various students' lives before the Program began. There's also some weird voice/word choice things that I can't tell if it's the author, cultural, or a translation issue. Like, a 15-year old popular girl with a rebel aesthetic refers to someone she's been "buddies" with for a number of years, but she's talking about a very close friend. I'd stumble across a few weird things like that and it would take me out of the story a bit.

BUT! I did really like it. It follows all 42 students and shifts who it's following pretty frequently, although it mainly focuses on three students trying to find a way to escape the island. There's a student list in the front and I found it pretty useful to photocopy it and then cross off students as they died. There's also a map (score!) and various zones become forbidden at different times, and it was useful for me to photocopy that and mark of the zones on the map, just like the characters were doing.

My real complaint is with book design. At the end of every chapter, in bold it says "X Students Remaining." It's really hard when you turn the page in the middle of a battle for your eye not to be drawn over and see how the battle ends. But, it was also helpful information to have, especially with so many students competing.

It's a great book that shouldn't be compared to the The Hunger Games because it's fundamentally different, even though the basic premise is similar, BUT, with Hunger Games so fresh in our minds, it'll be hard not to, so let's cave to temptation, ok?

One big difference is that while there are messages in the book on governmental control in a oppressive society, it doesn't explore these issues in the same way, or same depth. It instead focuses on the psychological toll of fear, and what makes classmates turn against classmates. It's more Lord of the Flies that way.

Also, there's a lot more blood. I noted in my review of Hunger Games that Sara thought the violence was more MG than YA and I more or less agreed. Battle Royale is high YA/adult on the violence scale.

I found Hunger Games chilling because of the government control aspect and just the general culture of Panem. Battle Royale is scary because everyone in the Program knows each other-- many of known each other for most of their lives. Also, it uses weapons and machinery that already exists* so you don't have things like trackerjackers and mockingjays that need explaining. You have guns. We know what guns are and what they can do.

While there is some romance in Battle Royale, it doesn't hijack the plot because everyone's a bit more concerned with survival than the objects of their affection. Or how to use them in order to win.

AND MOST IMPORTANTLY, Battle Royale has a HUGE cast. It's written in 3rd person narration and the focus changes frequently. This makes it a bit harder to read (especially if you're not familiar with Japanese names, because some names look very similar in English.) But, more importantly, if someone blacks out in a critical battle, the focus shifts so we can see the battle through someone else's eyes, not just get a summary of the action once the person who blacked out wakes up later.**

So I loved it. Was it better than Hunger Games? It was different. It won't appeal to all Hunger Games fans, but it's a great peace of dystopian fiction and I do recommend.


*The main exception is the collar they all have to wear so the teacher can hear them and track them and kill them remotely if they wander into a forbidden zone. Or just piss him off.

**And that's what I haven't reviewed Mockingjay yet. It's been 6 months and I still just want to say "GAH!"

Book Provided by... my local library

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Year of the Historical: Samurai Shortstop

Samurai Shortstop Alan Gratz

Toyo Shimada lives in a changing Tokyo, in a changing Japan at the end of the nineteenth century. Japan is teetering between tradition and new Western ideas and inventions. Toyo embodies this, the new Japanese man, while his father is of the old school, which causes much tension.

At his elite boarding school, Toyo lives in fear of the ritual hazing by the older students, and desperately hopes to make the baseball team. For, at it's heart, this is a baseball novel, and one your sports books fan will love. But at the same time, Toyo's father is teaching him the ancient way of the Samurai, a way of life Toyo tries to fit into this new world. Baseball might be the bridge.

The baseball parts I could honestly take or leave, but I love how accurate Toyo is. He doesn't always do what we expect a hero of a teen book to do, which is great, because so often in historical fiction, we have a hero that is essentially modern shoved into a different time and place. When Gratz needs to make the decision between "likable hero" and "historically and culturally accurate person" he goes with accuracy. I loved the portrait of a changing country and the class issues that were explored, and the cultural tensions between the Japanese and Americans. There's enough here to give it to your reader who usually can't stand sports books.

Super Fantastic.

Book Provided by... my local library

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Japanese Literature Challenge Review!

Hardboiled and Hard Luck Banana Yoshimoto trans. Michale Emmerich

This was the book I read for the Japanese Literature Challenge.

Death isn't sad. What hurts is being drowned by these emotions.

I am always a fan of Yoshimoto's quiet, understated prose and moods. Like Kitchen,this book is actually two novellas packaged together.

The first is Hardboiled, which is about a woman coming to terms with the death of her ex-lover, exactly a year ago. Part ghost story, the reader gets bits and pieces of relationship history as the story goes on, putting together what happened and why our narrator feels the way she does. And while the sense of loss and death permeate the story, it's not a sad story, just peaceful.

The second is Hard Luck. The narrator's sister, Kuni, is lying in a coma after suffering from a cerebral hemorrhage a few weeks before getting married. While there is part of this story that focuses on the family getting (emotionally) ready to remove her from life support, there is a family drama that gives a lot of anger to this story. After slipping into a coma, Kuni's fiance disappeared to deal with his grief at his parents house. Her parents are upset by actions they see as selfish and spineless. It's made worse by the fact that his brother, Sakai, does visit Kuni in the hospital almost daily, becoming close friends with the narrator. The reader feels almost as emotionally drained as the narrator as she tries to balance her new friendship and her plans for the future with her sorrow and the sorrow and anger of her parents.

Yoshimoto manages to convey so much in so few words, her books always end up haunting me.

Book Provided by... my wallet

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New Classics Challenge Review

I still have delusions of finishing the New Classics Challenge.

I only have to read 2.5 more books and review them. By tomorrow at midnight. Except, really, 5, because that's when my friend Ali's train gets in. And I still have to clean the house and I have plans for tonight. But I can finish, right?

Well, I did finish reading the longest book of the challenge, which is also TOTALLY counting for the chunkster challenge, coming in at 607 pages.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: A Novel Haruki Murakami

How do I begin to explain this? You have a missing cat, and his out-of-work drifting owner, and his disintegrating marriage. You have psychics, special healing powers, a politician that we just don't trust, and connections back to the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo. You have a crazy Russian officer, a teenager obsessed with death, and people spending a lot of time in the bottom of a well. Trust me, it all ties together into one glorious and amazing package of a book. To get too much into it would reveal too much about how the bits and pieces tie together.

In this book, Murakami uses the light, almost not there, but totally IS there, magical realism that we see in Banana Yoshimoto's work (I'm thinking most about "Moonlight Shadow" the second novella that's packaged with Kitchen). Yes there are dreams that may be happening on another plane, and psychic prostitutes, and other touches of the slightly paranormal (not least of which is the Wind Up Bird itself) but it doesn't feel like fantasy or anything, except for realistic fiction that isn't... realistic. I don't know how to explain it.

This may be the most incoherent book review ever.

Can I just say it was awesome and it reminded me that I really just need to read more Murakami, because I'm always blown away when I do?

Historical Context can be Everything

To start the day, I went to see Norman Borlaug receive the Congressional Gold Medal. It was a pretty great way to start the day. In addition to me and Dr. Borlaug, most of the Congressional leadership was there, as well as the President. Pretty good way to start the day.

Then I get to work and find out that Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is now available online. I'm not happy about this. Read all about it over Geek Buffet.

But for now, some book reviews!

So Far from the Bamboo Grove by Yoko Kawashima Watkins

One the surface, this is a gripping and exciting story of survival, based on Kawashima Watkins life. She lived a comfortable wife with her parents, older brother, and older sister in a nice house in a bamboo grove in northern Korea. With the outbreak of WWII, the Koreans rebelled against the Japanese. Yoko's father was posted to Manchuria (also under Japanese control) and her brother was taken prisoner. Yoko, her mother, and her sister, then lead a harrowing tale of escape as they try to get to Pusan so they can get to Japan. Yoko witnesses rape and is the victim of a bombing. Then, once they get there, they must survive with no money in a country ravaged by the end of the war, and try to find their missing family members.

This book was in the news a lot last year as it was challenged for classroom inclusion. The problem with this book, wasn't really the violence and rape (of which there was quite a lot for a children's book, but not gratuitously) but the lack of historical context. If you knew nothing about the Asian theater in the lead up to WWII (and most elementary school don't)... after reading this book, it'd look like the Koreans were the bad guys and the Japanese were innocent victims. After all, to a young girl, that was the way it appeared. Not only that, but there are no end notes to put the book into context. Kawashima Watkins never discusses Japan's involvement in the war, or the fact that the Japanese occupation of Korea was brutal.

The book does show that war is an awful, awful thing and there are innocent victims on both sides, it needs context for the young readers it's aimed at.

My Brother, My Sister, and I by Yoko Kawashima Watkins

This is the sequel and picks up with the Kawashima siblings fighting for survival. The book starts with a fire in their warehouse. Yoko's sister, Ko is gravely injured. Yoko and Ko are blamed with starting the fire and murdering two bodies found in the ashes. That plot wraps up about half way through the book, and the struggle to survive and find Yoko's father (who is a war prisoner in Siberia) continues.

As far as context goes, this one does not have the overwhelming problems that the first does. It's also helpful to read, because I was disappointed that Bamboo Grove did not have an epilogue. But as far as the prose goes, it lacks the gripping quality of the first. How do you tell someone their life has plotting and pacing problems? I don't know. But how the murder investigation played out seemed highly unlikely (what do I know though? I wasn't there) but more importantly, that's just the first half of the book. The second half seems a bit boring in comparison.

The one problem this book has is that it never address why Yoko's father was being held prisoner. She's always maintained he was against the war and did no wrong. Now, students of history will find it hard to believe that a Japanese official station in Manchuria during this time did no wrong. But I'm not going to go so far as those that claim he was an official at Unit 731 (a Japanese unit that carried out horrific medical experiments in Manchuria during WWII). Because I just don't know.

Both are great books that I recommend as long as they can be read in a the proper context, which is going to need some help.

Banana Yoshimoto

Banana Yoshimoto is my new favorite author. Her novels are short and straight foward. They're sweet and you may be tempted to read them as a spun-sugar confection, but they're far from it. Her words are well-chosen and her prose, often dealing with grief, mourning, and healing, could easily be described as simple, but it's not. It's just smooth and uncomplicated, even though the emotions she deals with and her characters are not. She doesn't waste words, which makes the words she chooses have all the more impact.

Sometimes, when dealing with translated works, you wonder what's the author and what's the translator? Yoshimoto's work has a very consistent voice even with different translators, so I'm inclined to believe it's her. Still, her work is almost sparse to the point where I wish I read Japanese, so I could fully appreciate her word choices.

Plus, on the completely shallow end of things, her books are physically small enough to fit into my going-out purse for metro reading. Yet they're literary enough to engross me on the trip into town and anyone can judge me on them.

Kitchen (translated by Megan Bakus) is probably her best-known work. I don't know why it took me so long to read this-- I remember being captivated by it and always wanting to get it, yet always choosing something else every time I went down to Canterbury books in high school.

Well, I finally read it this spring. On one hand, I can't believe I waited so long to discover this author. On the other hand, I'm glad I did because I think I'm at a point in my life where I can more fully understand the emotions involved.

This slim book (a mere 150 pages) contains two novellas (which I think might be my new favorite literary form). In the first, Kitchen, Mikage's grandmother (who raised her) passes away and the only place she can find comfort is in the kitchen. She can't sleep except on front of the floor by the refrigerator, the hum acting as a heartbeat almost. She finds refuge with Yuichi and his mother, Eriko. Together the three form a new sort of family that helps her heal--with the help of their kitchen. The second half of the novella takes place after Eriko passes away. This time it's Mikage's turn to help Yuichi heal, of course, with the help of food.

Despite all the death and tragedy, this is more a story of hope than of loss. It is not angst-ridden and not emotionally manipulative. In Kitchen, the characters are searching for comfort and they find it in each other and in food. Love, love, love.

The second novella, considerably shorter, is titled Moonlight Shadow. Satsuki is mourning the loss of her boyfriend, Hitoshi. It's been about a year since he was killed in an traffic accident. They had been dating since they were kids and used to frequently spend time with Hitoshi's brother, Hiirage and his girlfriend Yumiko. Hisoshi was driving Yumiko home the night of the accident and they were both killed.

One morning, while running, Satsuki meets Urara in the park. A strange girl, she tells Satsuki to come back to the bridge on a certain day, at a certain time, to see something special. Urara is that weird blend of realistic mysticism. She's slightly magical (she just intuited Satsuki's phone number) and yet is still realistic... It's hard to explain, but it works in the context of the story. I think it works because Yoshimoto doesn't make a big deal of it. She doesn't make a big deal about a lot in her books, which is what makes them so straight forward.

My favorite character in this story is Hiiragi. Still in high school and dealing with the loss of both his girlfriend and his brother, has taken to wearing Yumiko's sailor-suit dress school uniform every where. When he and Satsuki meet for lunch she says,

I'm stubborn, and I'll probably be dragged even deeper into this darkness, but I have no choice. I must keep living this way. But, as soon as possible, I wanted this boy to be always smiling, like he was now, like he always used to, and without the sailor outfit.

In Goodbye Tsugumi (translated by Michael Emmerich), Maria lives with her mother in the guest house behind the inn run by her Aunt Masako in a small, seaside, tourist town. Her cousin, Tsugumi, is an unpleasant and chronically ill girl Maria's age. Tsugumi is always walking that line between life and death and is Maria's best friend.

Maria's mother has long been her father's mistress. His divorce finally comes through and Maria and her mom move to Tokyo to be with him. Her aunt and uncle decide to sell the inn in order to start a European-style pension in the mountains. Maria returns to the place she grew up for one last summer. There, she and Tsugumi befriend Kyoichi, whose parents are building a large hotel that threatens the business of many of the small inns in town. Complications ensue, but the main story is about whether or not you can come home again and Maria's complicated relationship with her outrageous and just horribly mean cousin.

Tsugumi is an interesting and intriguing character. She can turn from sweet and nice-- the darling of the town-- to a manipulative bee-otch on a dime. Yoshimoto paints her well, and you never fully understand her, but do you ever fully understand anyone in your life? Maria, the narrator, understands Tsugumi more than anyone, but she still doesn't always make sense.

And, of course, there's Yoshimoto's prose, which I love...

I pulled the phone into my room and set it close to my pillow before I went to bed. What if it rings....? In the depth of the night, my sleep was shallow. And all during that ambiguous sleep, within the coming and going fragments of dreams, I continued to fell the existence of that phone. All night it was there, a sensation as cold and unpleasant as a rust mass of iron.

I can't wait to read more of Yoshimoto's books, and she has several others that are all on my list.