Changes

Although this book is translated from the Italian, which I am guessing is Messina's mother tongue, it has a very Japanese sensibility. I say that blithely, as if I would know. I don't. But it feels that way. If the Haiku is the quintessential Japanese form of poetry, then this comes close to being what I would imagine the quintessential Japanese novel to be like. It is fragmentary. There are chapters that read exactly as a western reader would expect a chapter to read…events, narrative, character exposition, emotion, tension, resolution, some or all of that. Interspersed are pages that from the western perspective read like "notes for a novel". Lists of records for a radio show, the numbers of people who died, things bought at a ''konbini'', favourite things a mother and daughter did, phrases said into the wind. Or definitions of a thing, or choices that were made. Or a child's drawing. Sketch notes for scenes that were never written. But I imagine, and I speak from ignorance, that from a Japanese perspective, they might read like poems…not Haiku, but still, condensed moments of story-telling that tell the story as much from what they leave out as what they put it. Less is more. Beauty in fragility and brokenness and mindedness.