The Only Gaijin in the Village by Iain Maloney

The book takes its title from the snippets of An English Dictionary of Japanese Culture which start each chapter. She takes us into the filthy underbelly of the ‘floating world’, where women are objects to be enjoyed then cast aside, and where promises last only as long as the sake. Yet mixed in with the sentimentality is an unblinking exploration of Nagasaki’s all too physical sides. The city is something of an oddity in Japan – the open window left when the country closed its doors for hundreds of years – and Copleton’s descriptions endow it with the otherworldly quality Kazuo Ishiguro brought to the city in his early work. The question to which Amaterasu is seeking an answer in those bottles is simple – if I had done things differently, would my daughter still be alive today? The twisted roads that led Yuko to be in Urakami Cathedral – ground zero for the blast – at exactly that moment are contained in the diaries she left behind and in the letters the man who claims to be Hideo carries from his adopted parents.Ī Dictionary of Mutual Understanding is a love letter to Nagasaki.

Layers are peeled back to reveal deeper hurts and further wrongs. This seems like enough sadness and horror for one life, but we are just getting started. Yuko’s husband Shige never made it back from the war.

Her daughter, Yuko, along with Hideo, died on August 9th 1945. The arrival of a man who claims to be her dead grandson, Hideo, overturns the barricades she’s built between herself and the past. Elderly and widowed, she is resigned to a life with only a bottle and regrets for companionship. One of those is Jackie Copleton, whose debut novel A Dictionary of Mutual Understanding, delivers on the promise of that earlier short story.Īmaterasu Takahashi and her husband Kenzo fled to America in the aftermath of the Nagasaki atomic bombing. Among the headline names were some emerging writers that are now making bigger waves. In 2011, in order to raise money to help the survivors of the Japanese triple disaster, Cargo Publishing brought out A Thousand Cranes, an anthology of Scottish writers.

The Only Gaijin in the Village by Iain Maloney