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courto875's review against another edition
emotional
reflective
sad
slow-paced
5.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Xenophobia, Suicide, Murder, War, Alcoholism, and Colonisation
Moderate: Genocide
kathshiroma's review
challenging
dark
emotional
hopeful
reflective
sad
tense
slow-paced
4.75
Content Warnings
Graphic: Addiction, Alcohol, Alcoholism, Death, Genocide, Grief, Hate crime, and War
Moderate: Sexual assault, Sexual violence, Suicide, Rape, and Sexual harassment
Minor: Racial slurs, Self harm, and Murder
icecreamemperor's review
challenging
emotional
reflective
sad
medium-paced
3.25
Mixed feelings about this one, but definitely worth reading.
There were a few stylistic quirks that bothered me, though as usual I adjusted to them over time. There are a lot of lists — both sentence-level lists (especially early on) and also structural/narrative lists (I am X years old, _______). This was obviously a deliberate choice but the result for me was a lack of connective tissue in some places where I would have liked there to be more. The surface-level connections were usually very clear, so it wasn't that it was confusing — it was more that I wanted to hear the author write through and explore some of the connections as they were happening, to provide more insight and analysis beyond the obvious connections I was able to make as a reader. There are passages that do this, but based on the early parts of the novel I expected a lot more. Sometimes it felt like things were lists because the author wasn't confident in the exact nature of the connections, and was falling back on an anecdotal/impressionistic style to build up the general sense of a theme without necessarily having anything to say about it.
Sometimes this is a totally fine approach — I like to make my own connections, as a rule — but for a book like this, which leans heavily on the idea that the author's background and lived experience provides her with a unique connection to the material, I felt like leaving it up to the reader (me, not sharing that background/lived experience) to make those connections was a bit of a let-down. I am sure there were things left unsaid that I did not pick up on; I'm sure the way I framed the connections to myself were probably quite different from how Brina might have done so.
Also felt quite ambivalent about some of the sections where the author projects us (and herself) into the minds of others — the passages where the Okinawan people speak being the most obvious example, but there are also parts where she describes how her mother was feeling (e.g. the parallel Tokyo trips). These sometimes felt strange to me, coming on the heels of her (very painful, very effective/relatable) descriptions of how totally she had not understood or sympathized with her mother for most of her life. By the end of the book it becomes more clear that a new understanding is underway, but it's hard to take it at face value that this relatively recent turn of events now allows the author to provide real insight into a psychology from which she was previously so comprehensively alienated. (To be fair: in most of the writing about how her mother was feeling, there is a lot of doubt/uncertainty, which makes the places where the writing takes on a more authorial/authoritative tone about them stand out.)
I am 100% sure that the Okinawan passages were the result of research and efforts on Brina's part to fill these gaps/close her personal distance from her ancestors, many of which are described in the book (the whole book is a description of those efforts, really) — and I think they are powerfully written, and a strong choice as a way to present the history she wants us to understand (primarily through its effect on actual people, on the bodies/minds of her ancestors, etc.) But I also wish the book talked more about what went into writing them, including that research — and including whatever went on for her as a writer, conceiving of them, making the choice to write with that shared voice. A voice her younger self never would have considered available to her (would not even have wanted to be available to her.) In the context of the rest of the book that feels like a momentous personal decision on her part, and hearing more about the context of that might have allowed me to enjoy those passages without as much uncertainty or second-guessing (of her intentions? of her execution? I don't know, but I felt like it gave me an out sometimes, when I would have rather had to stay in.)
There were a few stylistic quirks that bothered me, though as usual I adjusted to them over time. There are a lot of lists — both sentence-level lists (especially early on) and also structural/narrative lists (I am X years old, _______). This was obviously a deliberate choice but the result for me was a lack of connective tissue in some places where I would have liked there to be more. The surface-level connections were usually very clear, so it wasn't that it was confusing — it was more that I wanted to hear the author write through and explore some of the connections as they were happening, to provide more insight and analysis beyond the obvious connections I was able to make as a reader. There are passages that do this, but based on the early parts of the novel I expected a lot more. Sometimes it felt like things were lists because the author wasn't confident in the exact nature of the connections, and was falling back on an anecdotal/impressionistic style to build up the general sense of a theme without necessarily having anything to say about it.
Sometimes this is a totally fine approach — I like to make my own connections, as a rule — but for a book like this, which leans heavily on the idea that the author's background and lived experience provides her with a unique connection to the material, I felt like leaving it up to the reader (me, not sharing that background/lived experience) to make those connections was a bit of a let-down. I am sure there were things left unsaid that I did not pick up on; I'm sure the way I framed the connections to myself were probably quite different from how Brina might have done so.
Also felt quite ambivalent about some of the sections where the author projects us (and herself) into the minds of others — the passages where the Okinawan people speak being the most obvious example, but there are also parts where she describes how her mother was feeling (e.g. the parallel Tokyo trips). These sometimes felt strange to me, coming on the heels of her (very painful, very effective/relatable) descriptions of how totally she had not understood or sympathized with her mother for most of her life. By the end of the book it becomes more clear that a new understanding is underway, but it's hard to take it at face value that this relatively recent turn of events now allows the author to provide real insight into a psychology from which she was previously so comprehensively alienated. (To be fair: in most of the writing about how her mother was feeling, there is a lot of doubt/uncertainty, which makes the places where the writing takes on a more authorial/authoritative tone about them stand out.)
I am 100% sure that the Okinawan passages were the result of research and efforts on Brina's part to fill these gaps/close her personal distance from her ancestors, many of which are described in the book (the whole book is a description of those efforts, really) — and I think they are powerfully written, and a strong choice as a way to present the history she wants us to understand (primarily through its effect on actual people, on the bodies/minds of her ancestors, etc.) But I also wish the book talked more about what went into writing them, including that research — and including whatever went on for her as a writer, conceiving of them, making the choice to write with that shared voice. A voice her younger self never would have considered available to her (would not even have wanted to be available to her.) In the context of the rest of the book that feels like a momentous personal decision on her part, and hearing more about the context of that might have allowed me to enjoy those passages without as much uncertainty or second-guessing (of her intentions? of her execution? I don't know, but I felt like it gave me an out sometimes, when I would have rather had to stay in.)
Content Warnings
Graphic: Colonisation, War, and Racism
Moderate: Rape, Murder, Sexual violence, and Violence
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