Mitch and Yonko haven’t spoken in a year. As children, they were inseparable, raised together in an orphanage outside Tokyo—but ever since the sudden death of Mitch’s brother, they’ve been mourning in their private ways, worlds apart. In the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe, they choose to reunite, finding each other in a city undone by disaster.
Tsushima imbues these traumatic and transformative decades with a vivid and disturbing vitality, and uncovers in the process an unsettled zone where nothing is made whole, and not even the dead can rest ... Tsushima writes in a fluid, ambiguous present tense that muddles the distance between past and present, self and other. The reader is always right there with the character, suspended in a static moment of thought or trapped within their recursive stream of consciousness, circling revelation without ever arriving there ... Frankly astonishing.
Much more than a whodunnit: it is a brilliantly layered commentary on postwar Japan ... Despite the grave subject matter, the novel’s tone, preserved faithfully in Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda’s expert translation, is gentle and warm, suggesting the author’s abundant optimism for human adaptability.
As fitting of a catastrophic theme, the writing rambles, although intentionally and in a delightfully mesmerizing style, meandering from a description of a scene to a dialogue, only to be interrupted by a sound, an image or an action, like memories of a dream, or a nightmare ... The layering of the subplots involving radiation and racism, as well as personal conflict, leads always to the big question: Why? The author never gives us a real answer or pretends to try ... Traveling across time, back and forth, as well as geographically, to Europe at one point, as well as Japan and the U.S., the storytelling may be easily called a bit chaotic. But one wouldn’t expect a nuclear disaster, war or murder to be too orderly ... Strangely riveting. Wildcat Dome is Tsushima’s final work.
