January 29, 2018
Goenawan’s well-paced mystery follows ruminative Japanese graduate student Ren Ishida as he returns to the town where his sister was murdered. When Keiko Ishida was found dead in the small town Akakawa, she had sustained stab wounds, had tie marks on her wrists, and was lying alongside a bloody kitchen knife—but nothing was missing from her purse and there’s no known motive. She was also carrying a pack of birth control pills, though she’d been tight-lipped about her romantic life and never mentioned a boyfriend. Ren plans to stay just long enough to collect his sister’s belongings, but is drawn into the town’s morass when he temporarily takes over his sister’s old teaching post at a cram school and agrees to fill her room in a politician’s graveyard-quiet mansion (where he reads Rushdie to the politician’s silent wife, Ms. Katou, in exchange for lodging). As Ren becomes invested in Ms. Katou’s (and other townspeople’s) backstories, he’s also drawn into a beguiling friendship with one of his students—whom he nicknames “Seven Stars” for the brand of cigarettes she smokes—which gets increasingly thorny as he realizes she may be connected to his sister’s troubled past. Goenawan’s debut balances a finely wrought plot with patient, measured portraits of fragile relationships, making for a spare yet inviting novel that grabs hold and doesn’t let go.
February 1, 2018
When a Japanese graduate student's sister is violently murdered in a small town in rural Japan, he abandons his life and steps into her shoes to come to terms with her death.Ren Ishida has always admired his sister, Keiko, from afar. He grew up obsessing over her love life despite never having much of his own. He pursued the same major as her at university--a study of British and American literature--with ambitions of becoming a teacher, just like her. But when Keiko is stabbed to death on the street in the small town she calls home, Ren is so guilt-ridden and grief-stricken that he travels to her town under the pretense of obtaining her ashes and finalizing her affairs but ends up moving into her home and replacing her as an English teacher at the local high school. Over the course of Ren's spiritual reconnection with his sister, he unwittingly uncovers the mystery behind her murder and unearths shocking family secrets in the process. Goenawan's debut proves to be a slow, soulful whodunit full of deadpan humor and whimsical narrative unpredictability in an attempt at a Murakami-esque aesthetic. Ren's barren, unreliable narration can be as hilarious as it is sad, and an interesting cast of characters--a girl in his class nicknamed Seven Stars, with whom he forms a taboo romantic entanglement that torments him; his friend and fellow teacher, Honda--gives the novel a voice and world of its own. Goenawan unfortunately struggles with transitions between present action and flashback, and the novel falls victim to plot holes and linguistic cliches (an underage Seven Stars to Ren, while wearing her schoolgirl uniform: "Didn't you say age was only a number?").A witty, well-constructed debut that manages to overcome moments of cliche.
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January 1, 2018
Nearly finished with his graduate degree in English, Ren Ishida leaves Tokyo to retrieve his late sister's belongings from the small Japanese town where she had been teaching at a cram school. He is soon offered a job teaching her classes and the same rooming arrangement, where he could live in a wealthy man's house rent-free in exchange for reading to the owner's mute wife. At work, Ren becomes the object of a student's infatuation, a student who may hold the key to Ren's sister's death. Ren operates in a fog, moving between memories of his sister's struggle to protect him from their parents' constant fighting and neglect to the six-day work week that consumes nearly all of his time. Although it is his sister's seemingly random murder that initiates the action, this dreamlike novel is not a conventional murder mystery; its character-driven focus and introspective tone will attract literary-fiction readers.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)
Starred review from February 15, 2018
This first novel by Goenawan, an Indonesian-born Singaporean writer, is set in 1990s Japan, when Ren Ishida, a twentysomething literature student, is notified that his older sister Keiko has been murdered in a small town outside of Tokyo. In his despair, the grieving Ren leaves Tokyo and moves to the small town where he seeks traces of his sister's life while rebuilding his own. He assumes Keiko's role as a teacher in a cram school and talks to the people she knew in the hopes of reconnecting with her life. As he meets students, prominent politicians, a sage poet, and other town residents, Ren connects the woven fates of their lives to his sister, and now his own. The prose is sparse but intricately detailed, capturing Ren's feeling of despair and isolation in the shadow of mourning for his lost sibling. VERDICT In a genre-bending novel about family and loss that shifts from a murder mystery to magical realism, Goenawan infuses her postmodern tale with enough complexity, suspense, and emotional connection to make it memorable and haunting.--Ron Samul, New London, CT
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