Product Description

A woman is trying to contact Kasama Tsuneo at a crisis point in his life. But she won't reveal her identity. Kasama is an immigration officer in Tokyo, struggling to live a 'normal' life after an event that happened eight years previously, when he lived in the USA. His arranged marriage is looming, and he's seized by a strange emotional fit. And then the disembodied voice begins. All Tsuneo can do is desperately chase this woman, and the mystery behind what happened eight years earlier over the sea.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #146638 in Books
• Published on: 2007-03-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 208 pages

Review
"'Highly recommended.' David Mitchell"

Guardian
Exquisite ... Yamada's carefully nuanced atmosphere of melancholy yearning is as light as a crow's feather.

Daily Mail
It's shivery, seat-edged stuff, evocatively translated by Michael Emmerich.

Customer Reviews

Compelling read
Quirky, spellbinding, surreal, haunting, supernatural are words I would use to all describe this amazingly compelling novel.

Kazama Tsuneo is an immigration officer in Tokyo, struggling to come to terms with a dark secret that happened 8 years previously when he was living illegally in America. He starts to hear a woman's voice in his head. Is he having a supernatural experience? Is she a ghost? Or is he suffering the effects of being bi-polar? The story follows him trying to trace this voice and it comes to a weird, yet satisfying conclusion. This book was a page-turner for me and I highly recommend it.

Very tame and dull.
"Unsettling" , "ethereal", "shivery, seat-edged stuff" say the reviewers. If ever there was a reason to ignore the glowing reviews that decorate the covers of works of fiction, this is it.

At no point did this book come across as shivery or unsettling. As the title suggests - this chap spends most of the time seeking out the source of a voice inside his head - which would be fine if the voice had any kind of mystery or intrigue about it; their conversations are dull, as is the woman he speaks to and by the end of the book I couldn't care less about the outcome.

Ironically the quote that adorns the back cover is the only accurate representation of the book:

"Lately... I've been hearing a voice."

And that's pretty much it.

Subtle but enjoyable
The book was a lot shorter than I expected it to be but it was an enjoyable read for me on two train journeys (as I finished it already) it is kinda original but subtle throughout, it was quite interesting even though it takes a short while to get to the point, quite hard to give a review as it's hard not to give anything away, but I do reccomend it, not one for younger readers though as it could be quite boring for them. It is a very hopeful novel giving you a good thought and feeling at the end.