An author that I have spent the last few years attempting vainly to track down; and upon my return to Newcastle, a row of shining Yoshimoto works line the shelves of the Japanese literature section.
No more, as they all belong to me now, till the irate coterie of Japanese literature students angrily demand a restraining order on me in the Robinson Library forever more.
This book is a collection of short stories, in the time-honoured tradition of Murakami and his asinine works. Each tale begins and ends the same way; lonely young person strolls through a world resembling a dreamscape of his own design, and later, through a series of seemingly mundane activities, finds the way out of his rut.
People float in and out of the tales like a dream; there are people doing things that would be perfectly mundane in real life, but acquire significance, in this book, as everything slowly interlinks. Magic realism is the key; Yoshimoto, in "A Strange Tale from Down By The River", slowly introduces the death of the protagonist's sister, yet juxtaposes her into the lives of her fiance; his brother, and many other people whose lives make her passing all the more lamentable.
I give it a 9/10 - a good intro to Yoshimoto's work
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