This is a very surreal book and I struggled to really get into it at first, although it grew on me until I was actually quite taken with it, thinking about the plot and characters when not reading it and looking forward to getting back.
It reminds me somewhat of another book by a Japanese author: Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled (I was trying to reach the title/author of the book in my memory which I knew it reminded me of and my vague google search threw up some interesting new reading ideas before I found the title I was looking for!) in it’s dream like quality where the reader is never quite sure what is real or even what is reality and whether that even matters.
The main character, now a middle aged man, reminisces about his first love, a girl who he met when they were both finalists in a school creative writing award ceremony in Tokyo. They lived in different towns, but he would travel by bus to visit her and they had a sweet shy relationship. She told him that she never felt truly real in this world and how she imagined (or believed) that she was purely a shadow and her real self lived in another place. Together they fleshed out their ideas of this ‘place’ as a walled city with a library and some homes and a river and the only life apart from humans being unicorns.
He lost touch with the girl who abruptly stopped communicating with him until years later when he found himself waking up outside the walled city and having to separate from his shadow in order to enter and live there.
It gets weirder. He manages to leave the city and goes and works in a library in a small town where he makes friends with the ghost of and old man and a selectively mute (probably autistic) boy. Whether these both represent parts of himself, and whether the city was real and the real world was just a dream or shadow is not clear.
A very strange but beautiful and thought provoking novel.
Sarah Wray Writer 