Book Review
Title: So We Look to the Sky by Misumi Kubo
Genre: Literary Fiction, Romance
Rating: 5 Stars
This novel is made up of five interconnected stories so like I did with Before the Coffee gets Cold I will review the stories individually and then see how they tie together. All I knew about So We Look to the Sky is that it partially follows an affair between an older woman and a younger man which is uncommon to see anyway but that it is also quite explicit which is very unusual for Asian fiction, especially Japanese.
Mikumari
In this story we are following a young boy as he has an affair with a married woman he only knows as Anzu. He met her at Comiket, an anime convention that happens in Tokyo but he has no interest in anime or manga, but when Anzu hits on him he responds to it. At this point they have an arrangement where he goes around to her apartment once or twice a week to have sex with her in cosplay and these encounters are always scripted and sometimes she paid him afterwards although he didn’t initially understand what this meant. By the time the summer approaches he and his Ryota have got jobs as lifeguards at the local pool where his crush Nana is also going to be working. As he grows close to Nana he tries to distance himself from Anzu eventually leading them to break up. However, he soon comes to realise he has formed at attachment to Anzu that Nana can’t fill and this is made worse after he sees her shopping for baby items and he imagines a life where they are together. Eventually like Anzu predicted he breaks down and returns to her but this is the first time they ever have sex as their normal selves and it is amazing for both of them. However, Anzu is going to America to find a surrogate for her and her husband’s baby because Anzu can’t have children. After learning of this the boy has a moment of self-reflection where he remembers going to a shrine in the mountain with his mother and father although never together. He remembers that he couldn’t read the name of the shrine correctly and his mother told him it was called the Mikumari Shrine. When he asks her what she is praying for she tells him all children, the ones that are alive and they ones that never got the chance to live and for some reason this reminds him of Anzu.
The Enormous Spiderweb Covering the World
The second story in this novel is Anzu’s although we soon learn that her real name is Satomi. Satomi has been bullied throughout her entire life which has a huge mental impact on her. In addition to this she lost her mother at an early age and she was still quite young when her father also died without leaving any provisions for her. Shortly after this she meets Keiichiro when he returns her phone and they begin dating, after only three dates he proposes and Satomi accepts because she doesn’t have to work anymore. We get some background into the couple and learn that Satomi is an otaku which is the main reason she was bullied a lot as a child and Keiichiro is seen as a stalker by many of the women he works with and that know him. After being married for some time, Satomi’s mother in law, Machiko begins asking them when they are going to start a family and despite trying it never happens. It turns out that Keiichiro has a low sperm count and Satomi has narrowed fallopian tubes resulting from an untreated STD in her youth making it virtually impossible for them to have children naturally. Despite this Machiko pays for them to have fertility treatments and nothing is working. It is around this time that Keiichiro and Satomi just stop trying leading Satomi to take up cosplay and soon after she and a friend, Kurumi go to Comiket. There they encounter a young boy, Takumi who see goes on to begin an affair with. Unlike the previous story we get to see the affair from her point of view which was interesting especially on her thoughts during their breakup and their last time together before she is heading to America. What was really interesting about this story was that Keiichiro was recording Satomi during her times with Takumi and her mother in law threatens to share the videos if she doesn’t go to America and during their last time she basically accepts that if her mother in law releases the videos that she doesn’t really care and she would accept a life with Takumi as she has previously thought about it and even calculated how much it would cost.
The Orgasm from 2035
This story is Nana’s as she comes to learn that pictures and videos of Takumi having sex with a housewife have been posted online. Initially she is hurt by this information as she really likes Takumi but after watching the videos she realises that someone else has posted these online as the post contain Takumi’s name and address but don’t show clearly who the woman is which means Satomi’s mother in law followed through on her threat. We learn about Nana growing up and how she was always overshadows by her genius older brother, Yusuke until he became involved in what I would call a sex cult practising Tantrism preparing for the end of the world in 2035. While Yusuke’s behaviour doesn’t change rapidly at first he soon goes missing for months before his friend, Hinata is able to locate him and their father brings him home. In the aftermath of all this Nana is trying to maintain her relationship with Takumi who is currently extremely depressed and is having trouble getting aroused by anything. Nana doesn’t understand this until she attempts to sleep with Hinata only for him to explain that sometimes when you love someone you can’t have you project those images onto other people like he had with her or you self-destruct which is what Takumi is doing. When a massive rainstorm threatens to flood Nana’s house, Nana ends up trapped in her brother’s bedroom with her mother, brother and Takumi while they wait for the rain to pass. When it finally does Nana realises that even though she is mad at Takumi she understands his actions and hopes that one day they might be able to have a normal relationship.
A Goldenrod Sky
This story is Ryota’s, Takumi’s best friend as we learn he is from a very poor area known as the projects and all the kids there are basically seen as write offs but no one understands what it means to be a project kid. Ryota is currently caring from his senile grandmother as his mother is almost completely absent from his life and his father Yoshio committed suicide a few years ago. Ryota’s interactions with his mother made me extremely angry as she provides him money but not enough to survive on meaning Ryota works two jobs and while she is supposed to take care of the rent, utilities and Ryota’s school fees it soon becomes clear that she isn’t doing that. In addition to that the saving left to him by his father and the money he saved from working she steals from him before vanishing into thin air presumably with her new boyfriend. Ryota is struggling to deal with all of this when Takumi’s videos are leaked online and this leads him along with Akutsu, Nana’s friend to distribute the pictures because Ryota feels that Takumi has no right to as depressed as he is when his life has been nothing but good compared to his. Ryota ends up becoming good friends with another convenience store employee, Taoka as he helps Ryota get his grades up and provide him with the focus and drive he has needed. Taoka lost his job as a teacher after he was found to be in possession of child pornography but that doesn’t stop him from helping Ryota and Akutsu whenever he can with no ulterior motive. At the end of this story, Ryota is at his wit’s end with how to care for his grandmother and Taoka helps him get his grandmother into a hospital and gets he linked up with a social worker who will help him out with fees, bills and anything he needs help with. It was sad to learn that Taoka had been arrested towards the end of this story using a similar method on those children as he had with Ryota and Akutsu but he’d never shown an ill intentions towards them and even went above and beyond to prevent them from ending up like their parents or like him.
Pollen Nation
The final story in this collection belongs to Takumi’s mother who runs a birthing clinic along with Mitchan. We briefly get to see her life before and how it has mirrored her son as she was sexually involved with an older married man before she met the man who would become her husband and Takumi’s father, so she understands completely what he is going through right now even if she hasn’t said anything. Her job is a very difficult but rewarding one as she brings many children into the world but she also has to watch many die as they don’t survive or are stillborn. She seems to be coping really well with Takumi’s disgrace and her friend Doctor Lui helps her through it too and there seems to be a slight romantic tension between them although it doesn’t go anywhere in this story. However, she is heartbroken for her son when someone learns a child’s urn on the doorstep containing ashes that might or might not belong to a child with a note claiming it is Takumi and Anzu’s child. She has to watch her son get better only to suffer another major setback however, the thing to bring him out of his depression this time is his teacher getting pregnant and Takumi is around the majority of her pregnancy and when she comes to stay at the clinic to give birth, Takumi is there waiting for the child to come into the world.
Overall, So We Look to the Sky centres around the key event of Takumi’s affair with Satomi being made public and it is essentially an interwoven tale about how he, Satomi deal with the repercussions of this as well as his mother, his best friend and his would-be girlfriend. These stories really focused on the human elements and how flawed the characters are which was really interesting to see. While this book is quite explicit in the first two stories especially by Japanese standards it isn’t anywhere near the explicit literature we see in Western culture so don’t let that put you off reading it. 5 out 5 stars, highly recommended.
Buy it here:
Paperback/Hardcover: amazon.co.uk amazon.com
Kindle Edition: amazon.co.uk amazon.com
I received this review copy from NetGalley & Edelweiss
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