Strangers

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Kei isn’t convinced his trips to Asakusa are good for his health. She sees Heido changing day-by-day, becoming hollow-eyed, aged and emaciated. She’s even more worried because Heido himself cannot see these changes – when he looks at himself in the mirror he looks as healthy as ever. Can Kei save him from the ghosts of his past? Or is his desire to make up for the lost years of his relationship with his parents too strong to resist?

Strangers has also been made into a movie, Ijintachi to no Natsu (1988), directed by Obayashi Nobuhiko, and apparently released in the US under the titles The Discarnates and Summer Among the ZombiesThe narrator Hideo Harada, a 47-year-old TV scriptwriter, meets a couple who bear an eerie resemblance to his dead parents, and forms a friendship with them, visiting them often. As his health declines, he comes to realise that they are ghosts who are sapping his life-force. It somehow seems entirely natural then for Hideo to take up the man's invitation and go for a beer at the man's home. How to get out of this? He loves spending time with his parents but what if they are killing him? But is it the parents? Cue unmasking of a succubus and rescue by friend cum ex wifes boyfriend stata una bella sorpresa, ho scelto questo libro "a caso" fidandomi solo della mia simpatia per i giapponesi, ed a conferma ho incontrato una storia Kafkchiana con la tipica venatura ironica giapponese (possono narrare qualsiasi argomento che io li percepisco come un po' frivoli, autoironici, che in fondo la prendono alla leggera, non danno molto peso alla cosa, non so spiegarlo bene questo atteggiamento, comunque mi piace). Meanwhile he also become more involved with the woman in his building, Kei, with a real relationship developing between them.

I liked this book. Again, it was somewhat stilted and formalized in translation but that's easily overcome. The dialogue sometimes was kind of silly, with little annoying things like money being called "dough" etc which seems out of context in the story. Kind of simplistic in tone, although it does delve into the whole search of self by Harada-san and why he feels like he must continue to see his "parents." Harada is a very tragic figure to begin with, and by the end of the book I was really pulling for him. When a book does that for me, then it's a good read. Hideo's visits to the people who resemble his parents so closely turns out to come at a high but confusing cost, appearing -- to others -- to sap the life out of him, though he himself remains largely oblivious to this. As the book turns from character study to an eerie ghost story, I realized that I found myself invested in Hideo’s relationship with his parents. In one heartbreaking scene where Hideo and his parents decide to eat out for dinner at an expensive restaurant, Mr. Yamada creates a chapter of unbearable heartbreak and finality that makes this novel worth reading. I did not expect this scene to come out so affectingly, but it is the best part of the novel. I understood all at once that although goodbyes must be made—it’s never easy to write the least. In their company Hideo can relive his childhood and make up for what he missed -- something so tempting that he can't pass it up, despite realising that it is somehow unnatural and possibly even dangerous. Only by allowing colleagues, friends, and family -- all of whom he had largely abandoned or allowed to drift away -- to help can he be saved.Strangers is an odd little book and isn’t my usual fare because it involves ghosts. Fortunately there was more to it than the spectral element.