Dinah’s twin brother, Michael, was a musical prodigy. She still sees him, even though she moved across the world after he died.
‘He built the world, and we both lived inside it. He made it up, and I believed him.’
Animals have spoken to Yasuko since she was 13. Her son has recently left home.
‘I am scared that it is happening again.’
When Dinah and Yasuko meet, they form a friendship, connected by their grief.
I was keen to explore the lives of these two women impacted by mental illness. Given the blurb and some early reviews, I was expecting magical realism and lines blurring reality and inner lives in turmoil.
I couldn’t wait to see how their friendship unfolded so became frustrated waiting for them to meet. The first part introduces you to each woman separately and their lives don’t intersect until the second part.
I didn’t connect with or particularly like either of the main characters. It’s weird, though, because I feel like I know them better than they know themselves and at the same time don’t really know them at all.
This book delves into grief and anger, and the frustration and pain that accompany them. One of the passages that has stayed with me speaks to how tiring grief is.
‘I think because when you lose someone, you have to relearn everything. You have to learn the whole world all over again. But the world without that person in it. That takes a lot of energy, and a very long time.’
It’s possible I stayed too close to this story’s surface and that if I’d dived deeper I would have gotten more out of it. What I was most looking forward to once Yasuko was able to hear animals speaking again was learning what the dog she and her son used to see every night was saying. I acknowledge this misses the point of the entire book but that’s the type of reader that I am.
I didn’t spend time trying to figure out what was real and what was a symptom of mental illness. As far as I was concerned, it was all real to the main characters and so I took the position of going there with them to try to better understand them.
Favourite no context quote:
‘You need to stop beating yourself up. The world is doing a great job of that without your help.’
Content warnings include death by suicide, domestic violence and mental health.
Thank you so much to Scribe Publications for the opportunity to read this book.
Once Upon a Blurb
In Ueno Park, Tokyo, as workers and tourists gather for lunch, the pollen blows, a fountain erupts, pigeons scatter, and two women meet, changing the course of one another’s lives.
Dinah has come to Japan from New Zealand to teach English and grieve the death of her brother, Michael, a troubled genius who was able to channel his problems into music as a classical pianist — until he wasn’t. In the seemingly empty, eerie apartment block where Dinah has been housed, she sees Michael everywhere, even as she feels his absence sharply.
Yasuko is polished, precise, and keenly observant — of her students and colleagues at the language school, and of the natural world. When she was thirteen, animals began to speak to her, to tell her things she did not always want to hear. She has suppressed these powers for many years, but sometimes she allows them to resurface, to the dismay of her adult son, Jun. One day, she returns home, and Jun has gone. Even her special gifts cannot bring him back.
As these two women deal with their individual trauma, they form an unlikely friendship in which each will help the other to see a different possible world, as Smaill teases out the tension between our internal and external lives and asks what we lose by having to choose between them.
Schizanthus Nerd 