5.0 out of 5 stars
Great Novel on a Most Unique Love Affair, Jun 30 2011
This review is from: The Lake (Hardcover)
Banana Yoshimoto's "The Lake" is an engrossing, exhilarating, look at a love affair between two misfits, Chihiro and Nakajima, on the verge of adulthood. Elegantly translated by her long-time translator Michael Emmerich, Yoshimoto weaves a most beguiling tale via her descriptively sparse prose. Moving to Tokyo soon after her mother's death, Chihiro spots one day from her apartment window, an odd young man staring out of his apartment window, Yoshimoto, with whom she develops both an intellectual and physical attraction. She'll realize that he's the victim of some unusual psychological trauma sometime in the youth. When he invites her to visit two friends who live alone by themselves beside a lake shrouded by trees, she concludes eventually that Nakajima and his rural friends may have belong to some bizarre religious cult she's heard of. This terse jewel of a novel offers one of the most fascinating love affairs I have read in fiction; Yoshimoto is definitely one of Japan's greatest living writers, having created in this novel, two characters that are as memorable as any I have read in Haruki Murakami's novels.
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