Review: Lizard

Lizard by Banana Yoshimoto
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"This town breathes in all the universes that people in this city have in their heads." - Newlywed

My first read for the January in Japan challenge is a book I've had on my shelf since I first started collecting books from allover the world in 2012. I read Kitchen by the same author and must have let this one linger. It is a story collection, always an unnamed narrator and generally one other person who they are in relationship with, confronting a big life decision or dealing with residue from the past (the author calls it fate and karma.) The narrator voice is male as often as it is female, and sometimes I'm almost but not 100% sure. The characters are willingly thoughtful, philosophical, internal. Most stories take place in Tokyo. The author dedicated them to Kurt Cobain if that tells you about the era in which she wrote them.

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