I'm really not sure what to say about this book. It's not like it's a godawfully written, painful experience (as was one other book I recently read as an award judge); it's just so completely not my thing. And it's my contention that good work can convince any reader of its merit, however distant from that reader's aesthetic "comfort zone."

Haruki is a Brazilian illustrator; he's completely Brazilian, knows no Japanese, nothing about Japan. And yet he's been asked to illustrate a new translation of Basho's haiku/travel journal Saga nikki. He gets a copy of the Japanese text to get a "sense" of it, a woman in the Rio subway gets curious and asks him about the book, they have coffee and dinner together, and he invites her to come with him to Japan for research. She does. They don't sleep together; they hardly even talk. Celina stays in Kyoto while Haruki goes off to Tokyo. They both visit sites associated with Basho. At the end of the novel, he comes back to Kyoto.

It's told through third-person narration (close to either Haruki or Celina) and excerpts from three journals: Haruki's, Celina's, and Basho's. The journals are full of scenery and descriptions that are oblique at best; the narration, even when it privileges us with a character's thoughts, is composed largely of gaps, omissions, silences.

Celina is at first described only through her memories of her time with someone named Marco. We gradually learn—traveling backwards through her memory of his hands on her body, the day they met, times they spent together—that they are no longer together, that Celina made the break, that they had a daughter named Alice, that Alice died in a car crash when Marco was driving and then Celina broke it off with him.

Haruki is similarly unable to think about someone. Between the lines of his journal entries and the narrative sections, we learn that her name is Yukiko, that she's Basho's translator, that she's married and had an affair with Haruki which she ended a year ago, that he liked to draw her, that she suggested him to her publisher as the illustrator for this edition. I think there's also something there about knowing vs. not knowing the language of your heritage, maybe expression in language vs. drawing, but it's too ethereally expressed.

I don't know what we learn about Basho.

Normally I wouldn't have the least patience with this sort of indirection and "poetic" delicacy, but I kept it up because I was reading this for an award jury. I knew the obliqueness and compression was part of the point—the novel is framed around haiku, after all—but I just couldn't compile it into any kind of coherent sense of the characters and their feelings. The backwards sequence of revelations felt fundamentally dishonest; I don't think people really, literally "cannot bear to think about" the painful episodes in their lives unless they've resulted in some real, literal mental illness (like PTSD). Instead, this felt like coy nostalgia, a kind of narrative flirtation with the reader—one that fails.

I should also comment on the translation. I read the entire book in English and a good chunk in Portuguese, precisely for the purpose of judging the translation. On a macro scale the things I have trouble with were present in the original. But on the small scale I was tripped up several times by the translator's choices in English; here's a selection:
p 29: "Lagoa, the lagoon in Rio": why give its Portuguese name, which simply means the English word, when it will never be referred to again?
p 30: "excluded only myself": the chronic hypercorrection—should be "me"
p 50: "lived her days out": why not "lived out her days," which is much easier to parse?
p 56: "where no one has tread": the past participle is "trod"
p 61: "we take outside with us the sweets": this sounds like the sort of convoluted syntax in which amateur translation from the German results
p 69: "abysm" instead of the much more common equivalent "abyss"

... Enough. Clearly some people (Brazilian readers, the people who published the US edition) find more value in Lisboa's poetic language than I do. I probably shouldn't have been asked to judge this book. (I requested only fiction, no poetry, and indeed I got fiction. Just a very poetic variety of it.) But if it had been well-enough done and well-enough translated, I think I could've learned to appreciate it. Maybe not enough to choose it for the prize, but enough, perhaps, that I wouldn't have felt like I had to drag myself through the last half of what is really a very short book. ( )

This review was first published in Belletrista.

It is interesting to read a book that you are certain will be a love story—though you aren't sure whether happy or ill-fated, requited or unrequited—only to find yourself perpetually poised, waiting for that romance to start. Haruki, an illustrator of books, and Celina, an embroidery artist, meet by chance on a subway in Rio de Janeiro. He is attracted to her and she is somewhat intrigued by him or, it may be, simply by something new in her life. Haruki has a commission to illustrate a journal of the Edo poet Matsuo Bashō, and he wants to travel to Japan to Rakushisha, the Hut of Fallen Persimmons, where Bashō stayed while writing much of it. On impulse, he invites Celina. Quite improbably, even while thinking that she wants to answer no, Celina accepts. Some kind of relationship between Haruki and Celina seems inevitable. From their deliberations as they think about the possibility of just sex or of a deeper relationship, it seems inevitable to them, also.

And yet, time seems to stall once they reach Japan. Lisboa catches that moment of something impending, neither occurring nor abandoned, and prolongs it. As Haruki and Celina use this break from their normal lives to reflect, they reveal parts of their pasts that have left them emotionally caught, unable to move beyond a certain condition: Haruki is in love with a married woman who, though she cares for him, will not leave her husband; Celina has some misfortune in her past that leaves her scarred and wanting no one close to her.

As the two separate, he to research his illustrations and she to explore, I found myself contemplating the numerous haiku that fill the story as Haruki reads through Bashō's journal. I find a kind of stillness in haiku, arising from the fact that they are based upon a single moment of perception by the senses rather than interpretation or explanation, and that same sort of stillness seemed to pervade the story. It had that same quality of a moment caught up out of time and presented to the reader. There is no table of contents or chapter numbering but, intrigued, I stopped and paged through the book and counted 17 chapters, corresponding to the 17 morae of a haiku.

Beyond this resemblance in form, Lisboa has structured the story to include the juxtaposition of two ideas that is essential to a proper haiku, the internal comparison that can be either a contrasting or a mirroring of images. Bashō's poem of leave-taking from Rakushisha sets the summer rain against an image of departing and, in a conscious echo, Haruki and Celina, though physically apart, experience the same moment of watching "the gentle rain that begins to fall" as they make their decisions about their emotional lives—whether to accept where they are or to move on.

Lisboa's prose is beautiful, even in translation. There was something crystalline and unfussy about it that delighted me. For all the apparent simplicity of the language, however, it is a book that requires close attention; it is not something to be read while drowsy on the beach. It is full of unheralded switching between timelines, unsignaled changing of voices, and a use of pronouns that demands awareness. I might have preferred it without this approach; it was an extra effort that did not seem to enhance the theme or mood. However, that is my only complaint about this story that has left me thinking about it well after I finished reading it.

  Summer rain
    Papers torn off
    Marks on the walls
      --Bashō's last poem at Raskushisha ( )

Um ótimo romance de Adriana Lisboa, sensível e surpreendente a cada passo. E são muitos passos entre o Rio de Janeiro e Kyoto. ( )