Eugenia

ユージニア (Eugenia, 2005) by ONDA Riku (恩田陸) won the Mystery Writers of Japan Award in 2006. The book describes a mass poisoning and its aftermath over several decades.

The family of a respected doctor in the Hokuriku town of K (which doubtless stands for Kanazawa) are celebrating a major family anniversary. A motorcycle delivery man brings alcohol and juice, saying that it is sent by an old friend of the doctor. When the family and visiting neighbours drink a toast together, all of them, including several children, die, leaving only a servant and the daughter of the family, blind middle school student Hisako.

Ten years later, one of the children who discovered the mass murder, Makiko, then in junior school, now a student, interviews those witnesses she can find about the crime. Her researches result in a book, The Forgotten Celebration, which becomes a bestseller. The book, though, has some oddities that might make you wonder what her aim in writing it was. Now, decades after that book, someone is interviewing the surviving witnesses again. Most of the chapters are a dialogue with one voice (the interviewer's) removed. A few chapters are internal monologues of characters from the present or the past, or told by an external narrator.

As the various narrators contribute, it becomes clear that most people suspect the blind Hisako of having engineered the massacre. The story becomes a kind of horror story, filling the reader with unease about what Hisako, Makiko, and the unseen interviewer are looking for. The story has 'clues' of a sort, marked bits of the narrative which are obviously going to be explained later; but the explanations when they came seemed fairly abritrary (that is I felt the writer could have spared us the clue).

In my case much of the unease was a suspicion that the story was not going to make any sense. And did it? I don't really know, to be honest. The book was something of a struggle to read; and I had lost interest long before the end. Neither the characters nor the narration were really vivid; most were dreamlike, half sedated. The format, in which we frequently switch between speakers, without an indication of the change, was probably more demanding for me, since as a language learner I miss a lot of the subtler clues that a Japanese speaker would pick up on.

Fruit sinking in a sea of wheat

If I really don't like a book, is there any point in reviewing it? So far I've only written about one book that I didn't like at all. If other people like a book and I don't, then the odds are that either I just haven't understood the book or that the rewards it offers are something for a different audience. In the future, I may just not write about a book I dislike, perhaps find something to put in place of a review. For now I hope that the descriptive parts of the review below will be enough to tell a reader if the book might interest them. It seems from the internet to be a popular book, so my own lack of enjoyment is doubtless just a personal reaction.

麦の海に沈む果実 (mugi no umi ni shizumu kajitsu, Fruit Sinking in a Sea of Wheat, 2000) is a novel by 恩田 陸 (ONDA Riku, born 1964). Fourteen year old Rise (理瀬) travels by train to her new school, a private boarding school for middle and high school students that stands on an isolated hill in the middle of uninhabited fen country. The book is written in the third person, but a prologue indicates that the narrator is actually Rise, whom we follow throughout the narrative. In form at least, the book is a mystery, but it might be better to call it a kind of horror story. (That said, I dislike reading about boarding schools so much, that the Jennings books would probably register with me as horror stories if I read them again.)

The school proves to be extremely unconventional, and full of mysteries. The headmaster dresses, very convincingly, as a woman. It is a school rule that home life effectively does not exist. Children must not ask about each others' backgrounds. All are assigned to new 'families' of fellow students. Another rule is that every student must enroll in March. This singles Rise out for unwanted attention, since she alone did not come to school in March, but on the last day of February. Two children in Rise's new family had gone missing last year; and the others debate how they could have disappeared and if they are alive or dead. In fact an unusual number of students disappear every year, which the headmaster explains as transfers to another school. Whatever happens in the school, the headmaster disposes of it as he chooses. Effectively it is his personal kingdom, and such things as an external police force might as well not exist.

The various deaths and disappearances are handled a little like classical detective story puzzles; many of the conventions of the genre crop up. But it is clear enough that this is not meant to be treated as a classical detective story, and anyone doing so will only be disappointed. Unfortunately for me, it wasn't really clear how else to approach the story. A world full of things that don't make sense might be interesting enough if there was a reasonable expectation that they would make sense when we got to the end. I somehow didn't have that confidence, which perhaps saved me some disappointment, but made the 490 pages tedious work. It didn't help that none of the characters made sense to me either. Rise's role looks like an invitation to identification for young readers (she is bullied by the mean girls, admired by the popular boys while apparently unaware of her affect on them); but it is almost as if the book is an exercise in presenting a character as the heroine without giving them any actual personality.

From the appreciation at the end of the book, I gather that it is connected, in some kind of 'story within a story' game, to another book by Onda, 三月は深き紅の淵を (sangatsu ha fukaki kurenai no fuchi o, 1997), which I haven't read.