I guess it has to do with the country. Period. That’s the only plausible reason I have for loving books set in Japan. No matter who writes them really. It is the truth. Give me cherry blossoms, the quietness, the stillness, the perfect days kind of situation, and I am hooked to a piece of fiction set in the Land of the Rising Sun.
Nick Bradley writes with a touch of optimism, hope, grace, and full of life’s extraordinary and ordinary situations at the fore. Lives intersect in this one – that of a translator who has to translate a book (finally finding purpose in her life), and of characters in rural Japan she meets because of that – of the relationship she witnesses of a grandmother and a grandson with tragedy at its heart and yet the sublime never leaves the prose.
It is a simple narrative, and it is not without its moments of me struggling with Flo, the protagonist – of what she really wanted and how she viewed others. At the same time, Bradley’s writing is on the nose – every detail is laid out, everything about a restaurant or a store, or even a house – all is spelled for the reader, and while normally it wouldn’t have worked for me, this time it did.
Four Seasons in Japan is a book on the sidelines. It is about literature, about life, loving, the purpose we carry, and strangers we meet, who become integral to our lives.
