Rainbirds is a spellbinding, pleasant read that slowly unfurls the mystery behind the victim and not the murder itself. The story is about Ren Ishida learning to grieve and trying to reconcile the older sister he once knew with the sister who ran away from home and carved out a life in a desolate town. Clarissa's prose is gentle and quiet, and Ren's thoughts read like whispered secrets.

This book is a wow. I was really able to find myself empathizing with all the characters. A gorgeous, beautifully written book..

Beautiful cover. I wasn't in love with the stilted writing style. While I surmised that talking about such a serious topic from an emotionally distant narrator was intentional, it made it difficult for me to invest in the story.

*Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for an ARC in exchange for an honest review *

The story in Rainbirds is one where literary fiction meets mystery, set in a small, fictional town not far from Tokyo.

Considered as a mystery, Rainbirds seems to transcend its genre. On the other hand, as literary fiction, there is a bit more plot and action than that particular genre is usually noted for, making it very readable for someone who doesn’t usually read lit fic but wants to dip their reading toes into it.

The story is both simple and complex. Ren Ishida comes to the tiny town of Akakawa to scatter his sister’s ashes in the place where she lived and worked. But there is a mystery about Keiko Ishida’s unsolved homicide. As the story unfolds, Ren discovers that there are multiple mysteries about her death, not limited to who done it.

Ren also realizes that he didn’t know nearly as much about his sister as he thought he did. But he can’t find closure over her loss until he investigates why she died. He begins that investigation by following in her tracks. He takes over her old job, he inserts himself into the circle of her friends and colleagues, and he even rents her old room.

In a between place in his own life, Ren is more than willing to put himself into Keiko’s in order to find out what happened to her.

But a series of dreams leads him to the deaths of two other lost girls as well as the life of a third, and it’s not until Ren follows all the clues that he is able to bring resolution to their deaths, their lives, and his own.

Escape Rating A-: For literary fiction, Rainbirds is surprisingly absorbing. For a mystery, it is surprisingly dreamlike and poetic. I certainly got caught up in the story, even though it is far from being a typical mystery. Not that in the end Ren does not find the answers that he seeks – or at least most of them.

This story is told forwards, backwards and just a bit sideways. Forwards, in the present tense, Ren goes to tiny Akakawa to pick up his sister’s few possessions and scatter her ashes. But he is drifting at the moment, having presented his thesis for his graduate degree but not yet having heard the results. He studied English and American literature because he drifted into that too. He wasn’t sure what he wanted to do so he followed in his sister Keiko’s footsteps – as he so often did.

Following in Keiko’s wake seems to be the pattern of Ren’s life. There’s a rather large Keiko shaped hole that Ren can’t figure out how to fill. So he decides to look into her death by literally stepping into the footsteps of her life. He has time, he wants answers, and he really doesn’t know what to do with himself.

But even as Ren moves into her world to see who and what she knew, he also drifts a bit backward, flashing back to their shared childhood. Or rather, to the childhood that he actually managed to experience while Keiko raised him. Their parents were physically present, but mentally and emotionally absent. Also fighting with each other too much to bother taking care of their children.

As Ren remembers just how important Keiko was in his life, and as he lives a significant chunk of hers, he dreams about a little girl in pigtails who wants him to follow her to find the secrets that bound her life.

If you are looking for a straightforward mystery, you won’t find it in Rainbirds. But Ren, in his own purposefully purposeless way, does manage to solve the mystery. He makes himself available and he listens. And he keeps listening until the truth finds him. All the truths.

Then, and only then, he can go back to the life he left behind. But his experience has changed him, and his future will be different from the one he had been drifting into. In searching for the truth of Keiko’s life, he manages to find the truth of his own.

My Thoughts:
The cover of The RainBirds is enchanting and eye-catching, and from the description appealed to me immensely. The dream sequences are hauntingly beautiful with just a touch of magical surreal creepiness and foreboding. Think of the Japanese horror films such as The Ring’ and you’ll get a sense of the mood. However outside of these genuinely atmospheric, slightly unnerving moments the book didn’t have much hold on me and at 19% I didn’t feel invested or compelled to read any further at this time.

Hypnotic book that was hard to put down once I started. I finished it in two sittings, stopping only because my eyes were heavy. Story was slow but the beautiful narration kept it bearable. Beautiful ending.

I was not very far into Rainbirds, the debut novel by Clarissa Goenawan, when I realized that this book was something special. The story follows Ren Ishida, a graduate student from Tokyo who is nearing his degree, when he gets the news that his older sister, Keiko, has been murdered.

Ren travels alone to Akakawa, the small town in which his sister had lived in for the past several years, where he picks up the pieces of her life and struggles to find a way to fit them into his own. Initially intending his stay to last just a few days to speak with the police and collect Keiko’s things, Ren ends up falling into a series of strange and fortuitous events which extend his “visit” to a more permanent living situation. He takes up Keiko’s old teaching position, her old living arrangements, and finds himself falling in with her old coworkers and acquaintances.

Slowly, the pieces of Keiko’s life that she had never shared with Ren begin to unravel and expose themselves. Though Ren and Keiko spoke often on the phone prior to his death, and though he believed they were close, Ren begins to discover facets of his sister’s life that he had never seen before. As time progresses and the local police have still not found Keiko’s killer, Ren must follow the information from these discoveries and his own intuition in an attempt uncover his sister’s murderer.

The most striking thing about this novel is the atmosphere that Goenawan was able to masterfully create. Within the first few pages, I was immediately transported to this small town alongside Ren. The mood is incredibly well-crafted and thoughtful, leaving me with the subtle but haunting feeling of this small town and its residents resonating within me long after I set the book down. This book crept its way into me, in the very best way.

I also appreciated the book’s complex observations on grief, love, and loss. Though the plot follows what is technically a murder mystery, Rainbirds does not read like your average thriller. Told in a literary style with sparse and stunning prose, it is a slow-burning yet moving exploration of what losing a sibling, and at the same time finding out more about them than you ever considered, means for the life of those left behind. The sibling relationship felt authentic, and Ren’s struggle to discover what his life looks like without his sister was complex and kept me thoroughly engaged. I loved that as the story progressed, Ren not only received new glimpses into his sister’s life, but the reader received glimpses of Ren and Keiko’s childhoods together. These flashbacks helped frame the present-day plot in a beautiful way, and fleshed out the relationship between brother and sister beautifully.

Rainbirds also explores the complexities of family secrets, not just of Ren and Keiko’s family, but of the secondary characters in the novel as well. I always appreciate books that closely examine the inner-workings and veiled truths of families, and Rainbirds managed to do this in a way that was both lyrical and page-turning.

I read the majority of this stunning debut while on an overnight trip to a small town up north, huddled in bed while snow began to fall softly outside. While Rainbirds does take place over the course of a summer, the weather and mood felt fitting. This quiet, beautiful novel is not one to be missed – and if you get the chance, read it while on a trip to a small town.

I've seen Rainbirds described as a mystery, but to me it was strongest at being a story about families, secrets, and sibling relationships. The story opens with Ren, who has just found out that his sister Keiko has been murdered in the small Japanese town where she has been living. He travels to the town to settle her affairs, but ends up staying and stepping into her life. For me, the relationship between Ren and Keiko was the most satisfying part of the story, and Ren's surprise at finding out things he never knew about his sister, and his bittersweet feelings of becoming closer to her as he learns about her life in Akakawa after her death, were well depicted and very moving. I was a bit disappointed by the mystery, however. There's not a lot of tension through the story and the answers to her murder seem to come too easily without a lot of build up or clues for the reader to try to decipher. If you are interested in an easy to read family drama or slice of life story, Rainbirds would be a good fit, but if you're looking for a dark mystery, this will probably not satisfy.

Ren and his sister, Keiko were as close as siblings could be. When Ren finds out that Keiko was brutally murdered, he goes to Akakawa to tie up any loose ends. Ren is trying to figure out who killed his sister and why she abandoned him and his family in Tokyo and move away.

The story takes place in Akakawa in modern time, but does jump back to when Ren and Keiko were children. Mixed in also are a dream like state where Ren is looking at, and holding a conversation with dead Keiko.

When the news of his beloved sister’s death reaches Ren, he hurries to the small town of Akakawa where she had been worked as a teacher for the last couple of years. The police do not have many cues about the young woman’s crucial death, she fell victim to a merciless murderer and was heavily mutilated. Ren starts to ask questions himself, first the landlord where his sister had stayed and with whom she seemed to have had quite a delicate agreement. But also at her work place, there are interesting people who might know more than they would admit at first. In his dreams, Ren is haunted by a young girl with pigtails who obviously wants to tell him something, but he needs time to understand the girl’s message.

Clarissa Goenawan’s novel is set in 1990s in rural Japan and thus the atmosphere is far from the Tokyo rush that you might have in mind when thinking about young people on the Asian island. The plot moves at a moderate pace; modern media simply does not exist so people need to talk to each other to get information or to – very conventionally – send letters. Even though the motive that drives the action is an unsolved murder case, the novel is far from being a real crime novel. It is much more about the brother’s loss, a rather dysfunctional family (or rather: families since none of the families presented can be considered functional in any way) and in a way also about love or different kinds of love. It is a quite melancholy book with some rather dark and even mystical aspects.

I felt sorry for the young protagonist most of the time. He is quite lonely and now with his beloved sister gone, he got nobody to rely on anymore. His childhood memories were quite depressing and it is a wonder that from what he and his sister experienced they didn’t develop any serious mental illness. There is something intriguing about the other characters, too, albeit I assume that this is also stemming from the fact that they are portrayed in a fairly typical Japanese way, eccentric to some extent, which is rather unknown or unusual for Europeans. What I found quite interesting is the fact that the writer herself isn’t Japanese, but for me, her novel is thoroughly Japanese concerning the atmosphere and the characters.

I am not sure if the reviewers that gushed about this book read the same book that I did. Where they saw spare prose and magical realism, I saw clumsy sentences and sloppy plot structure. It didn't help that I thought the main character was a jerk. I am not sure if cultural differences contributed to my inability to connect with this story, but I have read other stories from Asian writers and never had this much trouble. I just felt it was a mess and could not wait for it to be over.

A quiet, thoughtful book about grief, with a mystery at its core and lovely insight into small town Japanese life.

This is one of those quiet, steady books I feel it's impossible not to like. There's nothing loud or bombastic about the storytelling here, and while the premise—a man whose sister is brutally stabbed to death moves to the small town where she'd lived for more than a decade in order to settle her affairs and perhaps uncover the mystery surrounding her death—is an interesting one, it's almost secondary to the real work that's going on internally for each of the characters. There is a reveal at the end, but again, the book would have been as satisfying and readable without it. If you love emotional, dreamy narratives that are restrained yet powerful, you'll love this book.

One more book in my quest for Japanese settings. This is framed as a murder mystery, but it felt to me mostly like the author was channeling Haruki Murakami. This may be a very good thing for you, depending on how you feel about that author. Unfortunately for me, I find him rather pretentious, misogynistic and overrated. I can't call the book overrated since we've got a debut author here, but I did find the novel more literary in its ambitions than in its execution. If you like Murakami, you'll probably find it more of a success.

The protagonist is a detached young man named Ren whose sister Keiko was stabbed to death. The two siblings hail from Tokyo, but Keiko has been teaching English at a cram school in a small town about an hour outside the city. Ren, being the disaffected drifter of a protagonist that he is, ends up taking her old job and moving to this town, because he chose the exact path that she did in college (having no better ideas).

Ren really has no idea how much he misses Keiko, but he begins to realize how important she was to him as he learns more about her life. I can't say that he really investigates her death, but he does make some effort to learn more about her and starts getting depressed that he didn't know more about her. She was his older sibling and protector growing up, but he had let her do the work of maintaining their relationship as adults and now he's pretty much alone, never having bothered to make any other real friends. His girlfriend gets fed up with his nonchalant lack of commitment and breaks up with him, and his only other friend from his past life is just some guy he'll go out with to the bars once in a while to pick up girls with.

Speaking of girls: it's hard for me to believe that this was written by a woman because it reads so much like male wish fulfillment. Ren is a chick magnet, to put it mildly. I have no idea if the hookup culture is that different in Japan, but all he has to do is go out to a bar in order to find someone to sleep with. He tells the tale of a sexy motorcycle babe in his past who wanted to get with him, his boss and secretary at the school he works at seem interested in him too, and he's obsessively stalked by one of this students. This particular "relationship" seemed squickiest of all to me. This is a seventeen year old girl throwing herself (for some reason) at a 30 year old man who is her teacher.

But Ren can't really give himself to anyone because he realizes that all along, he's been in love with his sister. Also squick. This realization does motivate him to figure out what happened to her.

And I confess, after reading this book, I still don't know who killed her! In looking at other reviews, apparently other readers got a solution, but I really did not. I was skimming a bit towards the end, because I really didn't like Ren, but I find it odd that I totally missed it. But I guess I did! This does seem to me to be a failing of something that bills itself as a mystery novel.

Rainbirds is a mystery that builds slowly, winding its way around you as you get further and further to the edge of your seat. I don't normally read literary thrillers, but this was fantastic. I loved the sense of place Clarissa created in rural Japan, as well as the diverse cast of characters that popped up throughout this story as Ren attempted to solve his sister's murder.

I would highly recommend to any crime lovers out there who like a bit more focus on character and how the crime itself affects those left behind.