I’m not too well versed in Japanese culture, but from my impression of it I take it that it explains a lot of the more, how shall I put it, eccentric? deviant? elements within this novel. Teacher-student, brother-sister even, there’s the type of stuff that I imagine you could only find from a novel set in Japan. Mercifully our author dabbles in these primarily for humorous effect.

Not to worry though, most of that is besides the point. The story opens with Ren Ishida, graduate student, at a small town named Akakawa, following the murder of his sister Keiko. We are in the nineties, and the police are practically hopeless in solving the case–they have no leads to follow, and those around Keiko couldn’t imagine why anyone would target her.

Ren feels at a loss for what to do, both for his late sister and for himself in life. The local cram school, where Keiko had been a teacher at, is desperate to fill her vacant role, and extends an offer to Ren. He accepts, hoping it will help him find out the truth behind what happened. He will end up discovering many secrets, both of Akakawa’s residents and Keiko herself.

More than anything else, this novel is about falling out of line and the pain that it inflicts to everyone involved. It’s a recurring pattern in the novel, one that I admittedly didn’t realize until the end. I went back and tallied up the occurrences across all the characters, coming up with a staggeringly high count.

The consequences of these occurrences are revealed bit by bit as Ren picks up each new clue, until finally, the full story of what happened is laid out plain before our eyes. The truth is dark and sordid, one where love serves as a destructive but unstoppable force.

This novel might at first appear to be a subtle endorsement of playboys and a patriarchal society, but reflection on who causes pain and who bears the pain in this world will tell otherwise. The essence of this story is not within the present narrative; it is all in what has already happened and cannot be undone.

There’s also elements of magical realism interspersed within the novel through recurring dreams that Ren has–a mysterious young girl is trying to tell him something. What I think is done really well about these segments is that we have the freedom to choose what to believe. A hundred percent, we could take it at face value and embrace these dreams as supernatural, but we can also settle for a psychological explanation, that deep down, Ren understands what has happened, and these dreams are his subconscious trying to let him know.

The weaving of the plot in this novel is astounding. There are just so many intricate details dispersed throughout the story, details that stay submerged in your mind until a revelation, upon which they all arrange themselves together to form an unmistakable picture. The writing is light and straightforward, the story is riveting to follow, I absolutely loved this novel.

A line from the author’s note

This is unrelated to the book, but the first line of the author’s note got me thinking a lot: “I used to read a lot as a kid–at least a book a day.” At first I thought that second part was crazy. A book a day? As of late I usually take a bit under a week to finish one. But then I realized that it’s not all that crazy, especially for children, when we account for both their amount of free time and what they’re reading.

The free time factor is obvious, so many of us back then had our noses in a book constantly. I remember coming home from middle school every day and just lying prone on the floor next to a window, popping open a book until it was time for dinner. (I’m pretty sure reading like that made me nearsighted, unlucky haha). If I didn’t have any homework I might continue after dinner all the way to bedtime. With a routine like this it was pretty normal for me to blaze through multiple books in one week.

I think what we read as kids also contributed to the apparent speed of our reading. One of the libraries I go to has two floors: downstairs for the small kid and YA books, upstairs for grown-ups (and also world languages). I’ve picked up a few books from downstairs recently since technically I’m still supposed to be in that age range, and what I’ve noticed is that they read a lot faster compared to what I get upstairs, taking at most two days. I can’t exactly pinpoint why–some of the grown-up books I get have paragraphs as dense as a brick, but others, like Rainbirds, have short paragraphs and constant dialogue to break them up further. Maybe YA is just simpler to digest.

Nowadays YA fiction tends to infuriate me. The gaping plot holes, the happenstances, the stupid plan our annoying brat(s) finally come up with that inevitably goes wrong, which they of course manage to somehow salvage in the end. Unluckily for me I picked up an egregious case of that trope, and I finished it in just one night, staying up late out of spite to not have to continue reading it the next day. I probably should have just stopped reading, but I very easily get trapped in the sunk-cost fallacy when it comes to books.

That’s not to say that I can no longer enjoy YA books, far from it in fact–I finally picked up Percy Jackson. While it’s simple and shallow compared to a novel like Rainbirds, I do think its popularity is warranted. I definitely want to go back and catch up with the couple of series I followed religiously as a kid now, if I can even remember. Wings of Fire was one of my all time favorites, although I remember being asked by a classmate, “isn’t that series for girls?” Which of course didn’t stop me from reading it. Oh middle school, what a time of our lives.