Book Review: N.P.

I just finished reading Banana Yoshimoto's novel N.P.. I found it on a table in Smith's library, sitting on top of a book of Japanese verse. I was caught in the story in about 10 pages.

The novel is about a story, and how this story has caught the lives of five people (taking one of their lives in the process). This is the 98th story of a Japanese author who's previous 97 stories were published in a collection called N.P. before his death. The main character of is a young woman named Kazumi Kano. Her life has been on hold since the death of her lover Shoji, who committed suicide while attempting to translate the 98th story from English to Japanese. She runs into the son and daughter of the deceased author in the beginning of the summer, after having only met them once several years prior. These first meetings draws her quickly into the lives of the son, Otohiko, and the daughter, Saki. Through them she meets the mysterious Sui, a beguiling, dangerous and incomprehensible woman with deep ties to Otohiko and the story.

N.P. walks the line between eerie and charming. It treats fairly dark subject matter with light, colorful strokes. It evokes very vivid images of the season of summer throughout. The few times it became all dark, it was abrupt, and accompanied with an appropriate amount of night time or rain. Yoshimoto drops hints of the supernatural all through the narrative, hinting at curses and telepathy but never quite grasping them. I quickly fell into accepting these things as they came, for reading it was like being in a beautiful but unsettling dream.