Echo on the Bay
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
"Cross García Márquez and Simenon and set the piece on the Sea of Japan, and you’ll have a feel for Ono’s latest… Fans of Kenzaburo Oe’s Death by Water and Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 will enjoy Ono’s enigmatic story.” —Kirkus (starred review)
All societies, whether big or small, try to hide their wounds away. In this, his Mishima Prize-winning masterpiece, Masatsugu Ono considers a fishing village on the Japanese coast. Here a new police chief plays audience for the locals, who routinely approach him with bottles of liquor and stories to tell. As the city council election approaches, and as tongues are loosened by drink, evidence of rampant corruption piles up—and a long-held feud between the village’s captains of industry, two brothers-in-law, threatens to boil over.
Meanwhile, just out of frame, the chief’s teenage daughter is listening, slowly piecing the locals’ accounts together, reading into their words and poring over the silence they leave behind. As accounts of horrific violence—including a dangerous attempt to save some indentured Korean coal mine workers from the Japanese military police and the fate of a group of Chinese refugees—steadily come into focus, she sets out for the Bay, where the tide has recently turned red and an ominous boat from the past has suddenly reappeared.
Populated by an infectious cast of characters that includes a solemn drunk with a burden to bear; a scarred woman constantly tormented by the local kids’ fireworks; a lone communist; and the “Silica Four,” a group of out-of-work men who love to gossip—Echo on the Bay is a quiet, masterful epic in village miniature. Proof again that there are no small stories—and that History’s untreated wounds, no matter how well hidden, fester, always threatening to resurface.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ono's deliriously captivating tale (after Lion Cross Point) draws on the violent past of a Japanese fishing village. The teenage Miki's father, an ineffectual police officer, spends his evenings hosting four childhood friends who drink and gossip over the course of the narrative about the hapless Mitsugu Azamui, a local drunk who claims to have found a dead body on the beach. Miki, inspired by an ethnologist she sees on TV, begins to piece together stories of the past from the villagers while learning about Mitsugu's family connection to a local legend of murder. In the meantime, Miki tries to conceal an illicit relationship with her social studies teacher. Ono invents a close-knit rural community rife with secrets and perhaps doomed by a long-ago murder driven by xenophobia and greed, which sheds light on the larger historical brutalities of Japan's actions in Korea and Manchuria in the 1930s and '40s. As a boat from the village's past makes an unexpected, unwelcome return, Ono suggests that any possible redemption must come from an acknowledgment of history. While Ono captivates with metaphoric imagery (a red tide becomes a "huge snake, born of polluted water"), he occasionally skirts close to tasteless abjection with descriptions of lives derailed by cruelty and abuse. Still, this is worth a look.