Product Description

Middle-aged, jaded and divorced, TV scriptwriter Harada is forced to set up home in his office, situated in a high-rise apartment block overlooking Tokyo's busy Route 8. One night, nostalgic for his lost childhood, he decides to visit the entertainment district of Asakusa, the city's dilapidated old downtown area, and there, at the theatre, he meets a man who looks exactly like his long-dead father. So begins Harada's ordeal, as he's thrust into a reality where his parents appear to be alive at the exact age they had been when they died so many years before. Although they may be apparitions, he takes solace in seeing them, in spite of the damage it seems to do to his health. Can Kei, the mysteriously fragile neighbour with whom Harada begins a tentative relationship, save him from the ghosts of his past?

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #235266 in Books
• Published on: 2005-01-20
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 208 pages

Review
"'An eerie ghost story written with hypnotic clarity: quickly paced, intelligent and haunting with passages of acute psychological insight... Yamada is amongst the best Japanese writers I have read.' Bret Easton Ellis; 'Highly recommended... A cerebral and haunting ghost story - more a "Whoizzit?" than a "Whodunnit?" - which completely wrong-footed me.' David Mitchell"

Guardian
'Memorably uncanny … the powerful mood of Strangers lingers well after its graceful, downbeat ending has passed.'

Daily Telegraph
'Restrained and moving … what might have been a simple ghost story evolves into a psychologically acute portrait.'

Customer Reviews

A mesmirising ghost story
Sometimes you pick up a book and find yourself so lost in the story that whenever you put it down -- if you can put it down -- that you find yourself thinking about it, and counting the hours, minutes, until you can resume reading it again.

When I initially picked up Taichi Yamada's Strangers, a slim volume with slightly too-large print, I had no idea what to expect from it. Little did I know the stranglehold it would have over me for the three days it took me to read. Every time I had to close the book, owing to my deep and abiding need for sleep during a hectic working week, I did so reluctantly. And every morning I'd wake up, a little knot of excitement in my tummy, knowing that this magical, haunting, little book was awaiting my eager eyes.

Paradoxically, as much as I could not wait to reach the final, chilling conclusion, I also did not want the story to end, and I admittedly dragged it out for at least a day longer than was truly necessary.

Strangers is one of those beguiling tales told in simple, hypnotic prose. The first person narrative by 48-year-old Harada, a depressed and slightly jaded TV scriptwriter living in Tokyo, is strangely addictive despite the sometimes clunky sentence structure and the not-quite-right dialogue littered with American slang (perhaps a fault of the translator rather than the author?)

The story opens with Harada admitting that life as a newly divorced man has left him a little cash-strapped. Unable to afford a nice home, he is now living in an apartment that was once his office. His aching loneliness is mirrored in the silence that surrounds him each night, the only resident in a seven-storey building on a busy traffic route. The silence unsettles him.

This unsettled feeling gets worse when he discovers he has a neighbour living on the third floor, an attractive 33-year-old woman, whom he suspects is as lonely as he is. They have a nodding acquaintance but Harada lacks the courage to ask her over for a drink. This creeping unease turns to shock when he finds out that his longtime collaborator, Mamiya, is going to marry his ex-wife. And just when you think things couldn't get worse, or the narrator couldn't possibly begin to feel any more confused or out-of-sorts, on a spontaneous visit to the suburb in which he grew up he runs into a man that looks exactly like his long-dead father.

From here on in, the story becomes slightly surreal and totally mesmirising, as Harada resumes contact with the parents that left him orphaned at the age of 12. His mother and father seem not to have aged since their deaths and he grapples with the realisation that a "thirty-something couple could not possibly be the parents of a 48-year-old man". Harada finds himself living in a kind of twilight world, unable to determine what is real and what is not...

At its most basic level Strangers is a ghost story, but the simple detached prose style belies a much deeper pyschological anaylsis of modern life and how the relationships between men and women, parents and children shape our personalities and our lives. While the core of the story is eerie and edgy, this is not a horror story but a very human tale about grief and longing. I found it enormously sad and know the mood -- and memory -- of this book will stay with me for a long, long time. If only every book I read was like this!

Victorian gothic comes to modern Japan
Although this is ostensibly a ghost story, it fits the genre of mystery more easily than the genre of horror.

The narrator, Harada, is a recently divorced TV script writer, coming to terms with his loneliness. He is deadpan and analytical in his delivery. Some of the phrasing does seem a little staccatto - and I see that another reviewer found the sentences rather complicated. I agree. It reminded me, if anything, of Sheridan LeFanu's victorian gothic mysteries - written at a time where ghosts were to be investigated and understood rather than feared.

The storyline is certainly odd: Harada meets up with his long dead parents and visits them for tea. Although he knows it to be wrong, his curiosity drives him on. Meanwhile, the rest of his life and relationships rapidly take a turn for the worse. The novel (novella?) perhaps suffers from brevity. With more space, the characters might have been enlarged a little, and perhaps the narrator made a little more likable; a little warmer. Having said that, the story does move on apace and this takes attention away from the lack of empathy with Harada.

The cover talks of a bizarre twist. I'm not sure it is really a twist - it is pretty obvious from early on that something is not quite right. One is left guessing what exactly it is that is out of kilter and I suppose the revelation does have some element of surprise. It's hardly a twist on the scale of The Crying Game, though.

Overall, the book was a good read. It managed to hold my interest but without being exceptional. I don't think I gained much insight into either Japan or the supernatural but at the same time, it was as good a way as any of passing a Sunday afternoon.

Haunted
This book is simply beautiful. It's a pretty weird novel, but the prose is spare and perfectly used - a real modern masterpiece, it has a subtlety lacking in many novels. Not to mention how brilliant the characterization is. Six months after reading it, I am still truly haunted by it.