Sunday, August 7, 2011

#33: The Lake by Banana Yoshimoto

A young mural artist takes up with a fragile man with a dark past in Banana Yoshimoto's The Lake.

I had never heard of Yoshimoto and picked this up on a whim from the Farmland Public Library.  She has apparently been big in Japan for some time. 

The Lake is a slight, and slightly creepy, novel that read a bit like Haruki Murakami lite.  The story ambles along as a blossoming romance between two troubled people until the pair visit a nearby lake cabin and two odd siblings who live there, one of who is an apparent psychic, where ties to a frightening past are revealed.

Without revealing too much of the backstory, I believe the novel would be pretty resonant to Japanese readers, and I enjoyed it well enough to look for more translations of Yoshimoto's work.

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