![]() It is also the story where the main character is most self-aware. Here memories lost and found blur, and the corporeal and the ethereal are indistinguishable. MacDonald) all the elements of the prior stories converge. The final and capstone story is the longest and my personal favorite. He learns to cook, fashions a new memory of his wife, and soon he too learns to remember when he was a shiitake. One of her musings is about remembering when she was a shiitake she lingers in this memory with all her senses. In it she shares not only recipes but her reflections on life. A grieving widower is introduced to an unknown side of his wife when he discovers her cooking journal. Takemori) is the most fanciful in the collection. The translators are very successful in conveying the nuances of the culture of Japan while not losing the intimacy or immediacy of the story. They demonstrate how the war, post-war and then modernity changed the world these characters inhabited and how that, in turn, shaped them. These two stories are particularly rich in cultural and historical details of wartime Japan. Through the history of the appliance we learn the evolving struggles of the humans in its orbit. Takemori) a thrift shop customer experiences nostalgia for times and places she’s never seen, setting the stage for the telling of the “life” of a dilapidated old sewing machine. MacDonald) a ghost remembers when he was alive, and in “The Life of a Sewing Machine” (transl. As readers we begin to understand that perhaps some of the ghosts aren’t there at all, that the character’s desire for the encounter is enough for it to transpire.Īmong my favorites, in “Kirara’s Paper Plane” (transl. ![]() ![]() The apparitions serve a purpose they are there to blur the past and present, and as they do, they blur reality as well. Subtle, charming, they are not always even clearly ghosts, but rather a wish or desire. Along with other flights of fancy, ghosts make appearances or are implied in almost all the stories. ![]() This collection includes love stories, narratives of lost memories, and several tales where time-slips and parallel worlds work their magic. The glue that holds these stories together is memory: how the characters remember, wish to remember, or even remember events they never experienced. Kyoko Nakajima tackles the past and present, the mundane and the ethereal in her delightful collection of short stories Things Remembered and Things Forgotten, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori and Ian McCullough MacDonald. Thanks for helping support Books on Asia! ![]()
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