A review by sharkybookshelf
Touring the Land of the Dead by Maki Kashimada

2.0

Two novellas: Natsuko and her husband visit a resort frequented by her now bitter mother during her affluent childhood; The lives of four unmarried sisters living in an old-fashioned Tokyo neighbourhood are interrupted by a newcomer.

These two novellas really didn’t do it for me. The titular story didn’t particularly grip me and rapidly became too repetitive. There were some interesting insights into the financial expectations of supporting family and in-laws as well as societal attitudes towards disability, and there’s a lot around the importance of keeping up appearances and shame, which seem to be driving forces in Japan. Such societal insights are one of the reasons I love translated fiction, but they weren’t enough to compensate for a story that just didn’t hold my interest.

As for the second novella, well… It was incestuously erotic and weird and uncomfortable to read. I haven’t read the original story on which it is based (The Makioka Sisters), but I am not sure what the point of it was - the subsumption of one’s identity into one’s family? I don’t know, and frankly, I don’t really care - it was not for me.

Two novellas with interesting glimpses of Japanese societal expectations, but respectively too dull and too weird to hold my interest.