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jeeleongkoh's review
4.0
Abandoned by his mother, Takeru has to take care of an older brother who suffers from mental disability. Ono brings the reader right into the experience of the trauma. The language, as translated, is spare, and so gives lots of room for breathing and imagining. Not much happens, but what happens is elemental. The betrayal of loved ones. The kindness of strangers. And the enormous hope one can invest in a healing dolphin.
arirang's review
4.0
Now deservedly longlisted for the 2019 Best Translated Book Award
"I hated it. Detested it. I wanted to get away as soon as I could."
...
Takeru was still here, in this place his Mother hated, and his brother was not beside him.
Masatsugu Ono is one of the leading Japanese novelists of the 'post-Murakami' generation (a label he accepts) and, a very short work aside, this is his first novel to be translated into English. His other books have won the Asahi Award for New Writers, the Mishima Yukio Prize and the prestiguous Akutagawa Prize.
He is also - one thing that does seem to postively distinguish many overseas novelists from their often monolingual Anglophone peers - a literary translator, notably of the brilliant [a:Marie NDiaye|249543|Marie NDiaye|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1474445581p2/249543.jpg].
Lion Cross Point (originally 獅子渡り鼻) has been translated by Angus Turvill, who notably does an effective job of rendering the local dialect of the characters into a generic English-language unsophisticated dialect, which both enables the English reader to appreciate the difference between the sophisticated Tokyo Japanese and the local speech, but avoids the jarring of picking a particular English patios.
It is a short (just over 100 page) but powerful novella, deceptively simple but artfully constructed and very unsettling, one I immediately re-read on completion. Comparisons are always dangerous, but this could broadly be grouped with books such as [b:The Boy Who Stole Attila's Horse|24940382|The Boy Who Stole Attila's Horse|Iván Repila|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1427375543s/24940382.jpg|23842344], [b:Fever Dream|30763882|Fever Dream|Samanta Schweblin|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1471279721s/30763882.jpg|42701168] and [b:Such Small Hands|35915776|Such Small Hands|Andrés Barba|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1501905181s/35915776.jpg|5795351].
The novel is narrated, in the limited third person, from the perspective of 10 year old Takeru, who has come, alone to his mother's small home fishing village (modelled on the author's own home village on Kyushu Island) from Tokyo, where he lived with his mother and elder brother, to stay with the elderly Mitsuko (Takeru himself is unclear of her relation to his mother).
He befriends Saki a neighbouring girl, 2 years younger, but also sees and is talked to by Bunji, a ghost-like character that no one else acknowledges:
Takeru had been dreaming of his sleeping brother again, and again it was Bunji’s voice that brought him up from the depths of the dream, so when he opened his eyes he wouldn’t have been surprised to see Bunji’s face. But it was actually Saki who’d woken him, coming through the back door of Mitsuko’s house.
“Oh…Saki,” Takeru said, rubbing his eyes. “What’s up?”
“You promised to play today,” said Saki.
“Oh, I’m sorry!”
Saki smirked.
“What?” Takeru asked.
“Your cheek looks funny. Like it’s been pressed against a tatami mat.”
“I was fast asleep,” said Takeru, not really feeling like he had been.
“And ya got drool down your chin.”
“Do I?” he said, quickly wiping his mouth and chin with his hand.
He remembered that Mitsuko had gone out, leaving a five-hundred-yen coin on the table so that he and Saki could buy some drinks or ice cream. His mother had often left money for him like that when she was busy, back in Akeroma. But that hadn’t been for treats—it had been for meals.
Gripping the coin tight in one hand, Takeru took his FC Barcelona cap from the back of the chair and hurried out after Saki. Bunji shouted from behind, as though pushing him forward.
Get ice cream. Enough for two—for you and your big brother!
Takeru stopped and looked around. That’s nasty, he muttered. Did Bunji hear? Even if he had, he wouldn’t have understood what Takeru meant. But he must have sensed Takeru’s discomfort, because he put one of his big hands over his mouth, and the other went to the top of his head. I want to vanish, the gesture seemed to say. But he didn’t have to vanish. Takeru pulled down the brim of his cap. That always made things he didn’t want to see disappear.
In the review of such a brief book, one doesn't want to say too much about the plot, but we learn that Takeru's older brother had severe learning disabilities, and that his mother was the abused mistress of a low-life gangster.
Strikingly the author tells Takeru's story not simply in flashbacks, but rather in associations of memory that the boy draws from the people, places and events he encounters in his mother's village. For example, the ghost-like figure he labels Bunji after he spots his resemblance in a community photo, taken decades earlier at Mitsuko's house: he gradually learns that Bunji's situation was in fact very similar to his own brother's and that he also had a younger brother who looked after him, with a name very close to Takeru's own. And that Bunji mysteriously disappeared, assumed drowned, at the local beauty spot Lion Cross Point, potentially taken there by his brother.
Something traumatic has clearly happened in Takeru's past - the passage I quoted above concludes:
He pulled his cap down lower still so nobody would see his face. His vision blurred as sweat dripped relentlessly into his eyes. Saki’s gaze was itching on his face.
Though he could see nothing, because he could see nothing, he saw ants crawling up from somewhere, crawling around his brother’s cheek, arms, shoulders, calves. He didn’t know why he saw it. He knew, but he didn’t know.
But exactly why Takeru's mother hated the seemingly idyllic hamlet so much, and what happened so that Takeru is no longer with his mother and brother is never made explicit. As Ono has explained in interviews:
Author interview:
https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2018/may/big-thing-conversation-masatsugu-ono-reid-bartholomew
Excerpt:
https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/dispatches/article/first-read-from-lion-cross-point-masatsugu-ono-angus-turvill
Reviews:
https://shigekuni.wordpress.com/category/literature-japanese/
http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/through-a-childs-eyes-mystery-and-longing-in-masatsugu-onos-lion-cross-point/
"I hated it. Detested it. I wanted to get away as soon as I could."
...
Takeru was still here, in this place his Mother hated, and his brother was not beside him.
Masatsugu Ono is one of the leading Japanese novelists of the 'post-Murakami' generation (a label he accepts) and, a very short work aside, this is his first novel to be translated into English. His other books have won the Asahi Award for New Writers, the Mishima Yukio Prize and the prestiguous Akutagawa Prize.
He is also - one thing that does seem to postively distinguish many overseas novelists from their often monolingual Anglophone peers - a literary translator, notably of the brilliant [a:Marie NDiaye|249543|Marie NDiaye|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1474445581p2/249543.jpg].
Lion Cross Point (originally 獅子渡り鼻) has been translated by Angus Turvill, who notably does an effective job of rendering the local dialect of the characters into a generic English-language unsophisticated dialect, which both enables the English reader to appreciate the difference between the sophisticated Tokyo Japanese and the local speech, but avoids the jarring of picking a particular English patios.
It is a short (just over 100 page) but powerful novella, deceptively simple but artfully constructed and very unsettling, one I immediately re-read on completion. Comparisons are always dangerous, but this could broadly be grouped with books such as [b:The Boy Who Stole Attila's Horse|24940382|The Boy Who Stole Attila's Horse|Iván Repila|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1427375543s/24940382.jpg|23842344], [b:Fever Dream|30763882|Fever Dream|Samanta Schweblin|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1471279721s/30763882.jpg|42701168] and [b:Such Small Hands|35915776|Such Small Hands|Andrés Barba|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1501905181s/35915776.jpg|5795351].
The novel is narrated, in the limited third person, from the perspective of 10 year old Takeru, who has come, alone to his mother's small home fishing village (modelled on the author's own home village on Kyushu Island) from Tokyo, where he lived with his mother and elder brother, to stay with the elderly Mitsuko (Takeru himself is unclear of her relation to his mother).
He befriends Saki a neighbouring girl, 2 years younger, but also sees and is talked to by Bunji, a ghost-like character that no one else acknowledges:
Takeru had been dreaming of his sleeping brother again, and again it was Bunji’s voice that brought him up from the depths of the dream, so when he opened his eyes he wouldn’t have been surprised to see Bunji’s face. But it was actually Saki who’d woken him, coming through the back door of Mitsuko’s house.
“Oh…Saki,” Takeru said, rubbing his eyes. “What’s up?”
“You promised to play today,” said Saki.
“Oh, I’m sorry!”
Saki smirked.
“What?” Takeru asked.
“Your cheek looks funny. Like it’s been pressed against a tatami mat.”
“I was fast asleep,” said Takeru, not really feeling like he had been.
“And ya got drool down your chin.”
“Do I?” he said, quickly wiping his mouth and chin with his hand.
He remembered that Mitsuko had gone out, leaving a five-hundred-yen coin on the table so that he and Saki could buy some drinks or ice cream. His mother had often left money for him like that when she was busy, back in Akeroma. But that hadn’t been for treats—it had been for meals.
Gripping the coin tight in one hand, Takeru took his FC Barcelona cap from the back of the chair and hurried out after Saki. Bunji shouted from behind, as though pushing him forward.
Get ice cream. Enough for two—for you and your big brother!
Takeru stopped and looked around. That’s nasty, he muttered. Did Bunji hear? Even if he had, he wouldn’t have understood what Takeru meant. But he must have sensed Takeru’s discomfort, because he put one of his big hands over his mouth, and the other went to the top of his head. I want to vanish, the gesture seemed to say. But he didn’t have to vanish. Takeru pulled down the brim of his cap. That always made things he didn’t want to see disappear.
In the review of such a brief book, one doesn't want to say too much about the plot, but we learn that Takeru's older brother had severe learning disabilities, and that his mother was the abused mistress of a low-life gangster.
Strikingly the author tells Takeru's story not simply in flashbacks, but rather in associations of memory that the boy draws from the people, places and events he encounters in his mother's village. For example, the ghost-like figure he labels Bunji after he spots his resemblance in a community photo, taken decades earlier at Mitsuko's house: he gradually learns that Bunji's situation was in fact very similar to his own brother's and that he also had a younger brother who looked after him, with a name very close to Takeru's own. And that Bunji mysteriously disappeared, assumed drowned, at the local beauty spot Lion Cross Point, potentially taken there by his brother.
Something traumatic has clearly happened in Takeru's past - the passage I quoted above concludes:
He pulled his cap down lower still so nobody would see his face. His vision blurred as sweat dripped relentlessly into his eyes. Saki’s gaze was itching on his face.
Though he could see nothing, because he could see nothing, he saw ants crawling up from somewhere, crawling around his brother’s cheek, arms, shoulders, calves. He didn’t know why he saw it. He knew, but he didn’t know.
But exactly why Takeru's mother hated the seemingly idyllic hamlet so much, and what happened so that Takeru is no longer with his mother and brother is never made explicit. As Ono has explained in interviews:
I wanted to write in such a way that the reader would understand that there were a lot of things about Takeru that not even the author could grasp. I didn’t feel like I was “creating” a character.Recommended.
...
This boy has been deeply traumatized, and the more I wrote, the more I realized that I couldn’t allow myself to go into his mind and touch on things he didn’t want to reveal, or reveal what he had forgotten and was meant to forget.”
Author interview:
https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2018/may/big-thing-conversation-masatsugu-ono-reid-bartholomew
Excerpt:
https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/dispatches/article/first-read-from-lion-cross-point-masatsugu-ono-angus-turvill
Reviews:
https://shigekuni.wordpress.com/category/literature-japanese/
http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/through-a-childs-eyes-mystery-and-longing-in-masatsugu-onos-lion-cross-point/
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