Lead Review

  • Book: The Lake
  • Location: Tokyo
  • Author: Banana Yoshimoto

Location

Content

The Lake is written in a simple and unassuming form which gives a lovely rhythm to the book.

Chihiro’s Mother has just died as the book opens. Leaving her small town behind Chihiro moves to Tokyo to a new life and during the mourning period she catches sight of Nakajima in an apartment opposite, who, like her, daydreams out of the window. Already the two young people are forming a connection from behind the window glass.

As the unconventional and largely asexual relationship develops, they spend more and more time together, both as it turns out, nursing the wounds of the loss of their Mothers. However, as the book progresses it becomes clear that Nakajima has also suffered an additional and terrible trauma in his childhood and his story starts to unfold as the two of them take a trip to The Lake where they visit the house Nakajima used to live with his Mother.

Chihiro is asked to paint a mural at a school – a school that is under threat of closure – and chooses to paint a Lake surrounded by monkeys, characters that she feels would connect well with the children. Some of the monkeys are ghostlike and almost reflect the ghosts that both of them are trying to put to rest. Both Chihiro and Nakajima need to come to terms with the different kinds of Mothering they each had, one mother was a good time girl, the other was cloying in her affection; and both are left struggling to find their way back into a world, to find their own kind of normality and to trust in a future with hope.
-Bettina Hartas for WeLoveThisBook.com –

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