Goodbye Tsugumi is an absolute charm of a book! Written by Japanese author Banana Yoshimoto, Goodbye Tsugumi examines the relationship between two teenage cousins in a seaside town in Japan. Tsugumi Yamamoto is the chronically ill but extremely feisty and insolent cousin while Maria Shirakawa is the cousin who develops a special bond with her as they grow up together in the Yamamoto Inn run by Tsugumi's parents.
After 19 years at the seaside town, Maria, together with her mother, moves to Tokyo to attend university and also to reunite with her father who has finally managed to divorce his first wife. During the summer vacation after her first year at university, Maria returns to the town for a final summer at the Yamamoto Inn before it is demolished.
The story centres on the adventures, friendships formed and the events that take place over the summer. Told through the eyes of Maria, the beauty of Goodbye Tsugumi lies in its simplicity and its charming portrayals of life in a quaint seaside town in Japan. Readers are brought to a place where life goes by at an unhurried pace, where Japanese traditions are observed and where the ocean is so much a part of the lives of the people living there.
It's been a while since I read a book I really enjoyed. Even the award-winning Life of Pi which I read recently, failed to touch me though I must admit I did like its quirky storyline. Goodbye Tsugumi however touched me with its unadorned prose, honesty, and keen observations of human nature. Kudos too to Michael Emmerich for his translation.
I thought I'd share a couple of excerpts which I really liked:
Maria: It's a marvellous thing, the ocean. For some reason when two people sit together looking out at it, they stop caring whether they talk or stay silent. You never get tired of watching it. And no matter how rough the waves get, you're never bothered by the noise the water makes or by the commotion of the surface - it never seems too loud, or too wild.
Tsugumi: Whenever you get something in this world, you lose something too - that's just the way things work.
Maria: Each one of us continues to carry the heart of each self we've ever been, at every stage along the way, and a chaos of everything good and rotten. And we have to carry this weight all alone, through each day that we live. We try to be as nice as we can to the people we love, but we alone support the weight ourselves.
Maria's father: Maybe one day our inner workings will get out of sync, it's true - but even if that's going to happen, precisely because that might happen, it's better for us to make lots of good memories for ourselves now, while we can.
Maria: I guess when you're out on the ocean and you see the piers way off in the distance, shrouded in mist, you understand this very clearly: No matter where you are, you're always a bit on your own, always an outsider.
Maria: The sense that the three of us were becoming friends seemed to saturate the air between us like a kind of instinct, a pleasurable premonition. People who are going to get along really well know it almost as soon as they meet. You spend a little while talking and everyone starts to feel this conviction, you're all equally sure that you're at the beginning of something good. That's how it is when you meet people you're going to be with for a long time.
Maria: It's impossible to remember the air of a festival night - you have to wait until a festival actually rolls around to get it back. Maybe you're only missing one tiny detail, but that's all it takes to keep you from reliving the perfect image, calling up the sense of being there.
Posted by DSD at February 14, 2004 12:02 AM | TrackBackbeautiful....
how sensitive the words are and how aptly described...re. 2nd last quote re. people that one gets along well with...
me want a copy of this book!
Posted by: tiggie at February 14, 2004 1:05 AM