A young man in Japan in the 1960s. already shamed by his drinking and self-loathing, must come to terms with his handicapped newborn son.

It is a coming-of-age story, although the protagonist is in his late 20s when the book begins. Nicknamed Bird, he is an instructor in a cram-school and one of the least appealing protagonists I can recall in a modern novel, spending most of the narrative attempting to fly from the crises and failures of his life through a seamy mis-en-scene.

He undergoes a fairly explicit rebirthing journey characteristic of the genre, but it didn't feel cliched to me. The inventive writing evokes Tokyo's unglamorous side, where shame, despair, and anomie are the dominant feelings, to be overcome only with great courage. And the translation by John Nathan is fluid and almost totally without anachronisms.

At the end, I came to like Bird, and recognize his courage and evolution.

I'll be mailing this off to Aspen72 in Finland on Monday

Thank you very much for sending me this book which arrived in safe and sound yesterday.
Postage share is already on the way :)

This book has been waiting far too long in my shelves, but finally I have read it.
At first, it took a while to catch the idea that the main character was a Japanese man, maybe because of his dreams of Africa - despite the fact that the author is Japanese. But all in all, this book seemed to be some kind of development story in main character's life, how he grew as a person within the birth of his son, within the acute crisis related to it. Somehow the flow of the story was such, and also the mixture of all feelings, that things were not too much explained - reader was able to sense, adapt, the situation, or the shock, and find the kind of happy ending as a relief.
The unfortunate atomic bombs from WWII in Japan were indirectly present; they had so sad and extreme consequences to many people - and again there are some risks of fallout effects because of tsunami in 2011 :/ In that sense, this topic is pretty actual, still, and people should be aware of it in their decisions.
But thank you for this reading experience. Book is normally good when it generates lots of thinking afterwards :)

Edit: This book will be on its way to Gambia via Sirah's charity container. Happy reading to new readers!

This book goes to build a school library in Gambia. Happy reading!