” I used to think that life was like a book: you turn to the first page, and then there’s the next, and as you go on turning page after page, eventually you reach the last one.”
The narrator of this short novel was born in 1933, he tells us, the same year as the emperor. Like the emperor he also has a son. Unlike the emperor, born in luxury (even at a trying and turbulent time) our narrator experiences fallout and extreme poverty, in part because of his status as a Korean immigrant to Japan. This secondary status leads him to always be working against the odds to support a family as well as his parents. When his son dies at 21, just weeks after passing an important national test, the narrator begins to crumble and lose himself. The already barely there structures holding him up fall away and as he turns to drinking, the other parts of his life fracture.
We are getting most of this from the present tense, now in his 70s, as he recounts the ways his life fell apart, and how began to further unravel leading to homelessness and further drinking. He thinks a lot about how different versions of himself would see where he is now. The opening line quoted above works to show how he struggles with the vicissitudes.
The book most reminds me of No Longer Human, but also America is in the Heart, where someone, experiencing an existential crisis is also impacted by the alienation he feels within an immigrant context.
