beautifully written, intruiging and haunting, especially given the author's personal background. still thinking about it months later
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This surreal and existential Japanese novella packs a sensory punch that will leave you wanting more.
Oyamada crafts an eerie and frightening exploration into loneliness and the many holes it casts us into. We follow our dazed and dreaming narrator Asa who has just dutifully joined her emotionally distant husband back in his small hometown, where the cicadas drone like fighter jets and mysterious animals slink the streets at night. We join her as she tries to parse through her new reality, be it factual or a series of anomalies.
This one is for everyone who has ever felt like a stranger in their own life, and pairs amazingly with sidewalk cafes and springtime.
Mar 20, 2024
A widowed mother in her forties goes on a trip to a cabin in the Austrian mountains and wakes up one morning to find that she is trapped there by an invisible dome. She is alone, save for a few animals who are the other characters in the story. Everything outside of the dome is dead, their corpses frozen in the positions in which they suddenly passed. A coffee cup halfway to their lips, dogs curled at their feet. The book is written as a log of her years in the dome, on the final pieces of paper she can find in her cabin. The result is an extended soliloquy that jumps between the past and present to account a life shed of time and societal expectation and instead ruled by the rhythms of nature and the necessity to care for herself and her animal companions.
I read it this year, have already done a reread, and I still want to read it again after typing this out! It’s surrealism lite and an ecofeminist meditation on death, isolation, memory, and the nature of reality. Can’t recommend it enough!
“But if time exists only in my head, and I'm the last human being, it will end with my death. The thought cheers me. I may be in a position to murder time. The big net will tear and fall, with its sad contents, into oblivion. I'm owed some gratitude, but no one after my death will know I murdered time. Really these thoughts are quite meaningless. Things happen, and, like millions of people before me, I look for meaning in them, because my vanity will not allow me to admit that the whole meaning of an event lies in the event itself.”
Dec 21, 2024
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with the recent news of a movie based on this in production, i have to tell everyone to read it. it’s a fantastic and eerie exploration of loss
Jan 28, 2024
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i listen to this album and after nearly every song think “this is literally the best song ever”
the starting trio of freak/tin man/steamroller is so incredible
Oct 2, 2024
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it's boutta be a donna summer summer
May 28, 2024
first photo in my camera roll, saved from tumblr in 2012. absolute classic and i still think of this all the time
Feb 24, 2025