Hauntings and dreams and grief. And my eyes welled up all the time. And I thought about what it means to be an employee in some places. What a strange and unique relationship you have with bosses and coworkers! I am glad of the gentleness that she writes about because I see it everywhere all the time and it’s important to show the world how it is and can be.

Not sure how to rate this. It was full of great lines and interesting thoughts, but there just wasn't enough to it.

There is something vaguely unsettling about reading fiction set in Japan - especially fiction by Banana Yoshimoto. One ends up feeling like she's in a parallel universe, talking about a country and experiences that can only happen to those people. Emotion run deep and intense, experiences are bizarre and unpredictable, nothing can be pinned down to realistic experience. And yet, at the end of it all, everything can be explained by the fragility of human nature and emotions. It's a kind of magic only Japan can weave, I suppose. A country whose people seem smart and efficient on the outside but are teeming with the burden of unanswered questions and life lessons yet to be discovered on the inside.

Yoshimoto's fiction always makes me think that my own culture/country is brutal, in that it throws reality in my face and gives me no space to deal with it. Maybe this is why I enjoy it - it is a nice medium for me to contemplate the things I've left un-thought of so far. It's an excuse for me to unburden myself as well.