Manazuru by Kawakami, Hiromi - 2010

US: Counterpoint, 2010. Paperback. Very Good. A copy that has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged. Twelve years have passed since Kei's husband, Rei, disappeared and she was left alone with her three-year-old daughter. Her new relationship with a ma rried man--the antithesis of Rei--has brought her life to a numbing stasis, and her relationships with her mother and daughter have spilled into routi ne, day after day. Kei begins making repeated trips to the seaside town of Manazuru, a place that jogs her memory to a moment in time she can never qu ite locate. Her time there by the water encompasses years of unsteady footi ng and a developing urgency to findsomething. Through a poetic style embracing the surreal and grotesque, a quiet tenderness emerges from these dark moments.Manazuru is a meditation on memory--a profound, precisely delineated exploration of the relationships between lovers and family members. Both startlingly restless and immaculately compact,Manazuru paints the portrait of a woman on the brink of her own memories and future.