FOUR SEASONS IN JAPAN
By Nick Bradley
Penguin,
Rs 550
“Yama ari tani ari” (There are mountains, there are valleys). This old Japanese proverb quoted in this book is often used to mean that life has its ups and downs. Four Seasons in Japan thus takes its readers up the mountains and the valleys through its characters in a book within a book form.
The frame story has us looking at Flo, an American translator in Japan, whose Japanese girlfriend has left for America while she stays back, jaded and stuck in a rut, unable to even communicate her predicament to her few friends. The only thing that moves her out of her ennui is finding a copy of Sound of Water, a book by a publisher and an author she has never heard of. Being a translator, the name of the book reminds her of a famous haiku — “An old pond and/ a frog jumps in/ sound of water.” As she suppresses her inner turmoil, she begins to get mired in the turmoils of the characters of the book. The story within is that of Kyo, a 19-year-old failed medical aspirant, who has been sent to a Kota factory-esque cram school in Onomichi in the Hiroshima prefecture. The port town here is painted as an almost pastoral small town where Kyo’s stoic but cantankerous grandmother, Ayako, runs a coffee shop and has offered to take on the guardianship of the teenager.
The long years spent in Japan and the experience of working with Japanese texts give Bradley an easy understanding of essentially Asian experiences — the idea of a cram school or Ayako’s emphasis on academics above all else (friends, romantic relationships and even mental health). But there is a certain acceptance of these as opposed to judgment that makes the book delightful. The story moves along at a languorous, immersive pace until the reader is yanked back to Flo which feels almost like a jarring commercial break in the middle of a binge-watch.
