I ended up finding this book frustrating.

It had a really good premise to pull me in with this group of children witnessing the drowning of another child, but as the plot developed it found it more and more enigmatic with no real conclusions or character arcs that made any sense to me.

The writing was beautiful with lots of imagery particularly surrounding the colours green and orange. Unfortunately, I failed to make sense of it so I'm afraid it was wasted on me. The changing perspectives and timelines along with the lack of speech marks were disorientating.

Ultimately, I just didn't feel clever enough to follow what the author was trying to do here. There were themes that never seemed to go anywhere, character arcs that ended in them abruptly dying and an enigmatic prose and plot that just became frustrating.

Sorry, not one for me.

This honest review is given with thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for this book.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an ARC of this book.

The book is definitely very philosophical, maybe too much so and some of the timelines and perspectives are a little unclear. But otherwise, I like the translation. It feels unforced, real. It has brought me closer to a period in time in Japanese culture that I knew very little about. And yet, some chapters/sections felt a little long-winded. The children were at the pond when the little girl fell in but it’s is a lot of reiterating and even some repetition.

It is mortifying to read that the mother of the (possible) killer covers for him. This was definitely a hard read especially as through the entirety of the book it was so clear how much the death of the little girl impacted all the children and their mothers. It is ironic that the mother of the murderer felt so superior to the orphans and the adoptive parents.

I also don’t quite understand the conversations in the book. People “talk” to each other in their heads, they have conversations with someone that isn’t even there. It confused me. Overall, I must admit, I didn’t quite understand the book. Especially the ending.

First I want to give my thanks to NetGalley, Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Yuko Tsushima for allowing me to read this ARC!

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐.5/5

I was really looking forward to reading this book, but unfortunately, it didn’t quite resonate with me. Despite being just over 250 pages, it took me 25 days to finish, as I struggled to follow the characters and their timelines.

That said, I appreciate how the story captures the harsh realities faced by GI children and the challenges of being biracial. However, I felt that the narrative became too fixated on the Murder of Color Orange, to the point where it overshadowed other aspects of the story. At times, I found myself wishing the characters would simply confront the truth or move forward, rather than remaining stuck in their unresolved pasts.

While this book wasn't for me, I can see how it might appeal to readers who enjoy introspective and layered narratives about identity, trauma, and justice.

This is also the first time that a book cover didn’t appear on my Kindle, which was a bit disappointing

A modern novel about Japan dealing with issues from biracial children and their treatment after WWII ( nicknamed Wildcats ) to the Fukushima nuclear disaster and a murderer triggered by the colour orange. In the beginning, I found the writing style and translation difficult to follow and dizzying structure but after a while, you get used to it and get your bearings. The topics hit on the truth of Japanese society issues and are a form of protest against injustice and conservatism of Japanese society. The writing is elegant, true to the form of literary fiction there is a threading of the colour orange that is skillfully placed throughout the novel drawing us into the mystery aspect of the novel and keeping the reader drawn into the story.

Thanks to Netgalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for this ARC. This is my honest review.

While the writing was sometimes beautiful, the story was so disjointed and unorganized that I felt very removed from the book.

The characters and their motivations didn’t make much sense to me. There are heavy subjects here, but I had a hard time focusing when I already felt so disconnected, and as a result much of this story fell flat for me.

I think this was simply a case of me being the wrong reader for this novel, because I get the sense that someone with more knowledge of Japanese culture would get much more out of this book. I would still recommend this to the right reader.

the writing style is intense, iunterwoven, and a bit hard to understand at times, but it's still so beautifully written and the charactes are awesome. 4 stars. tysm for the arc.

4 stars

Honestly, I was a bit reluctant to start this because so far I haven't read anything from Yuko Tsushima that really grabbed my attention, but this novel is my turning point. This is the first Tsushima novel that had me gripped from the start to the finish. Going back from the past to the present, over the course of 60 years, the novel explores the themes of guilt, loss, grief, shame, and discrimination within the post-war to modern Japanese society through multiple character POVs. All of the topics are well explored and expressed through the lives of the characters, making it a very compelling story.

This is a chilling story about guilt and how that guilt can follow you throughout life. This book is well written and will take your breath away in some places.

This story follows the lives of Mitch, Yonko, and Kazu, and something that's been haunting them since childhood. All of them are mixed-race raised in the same orphanage, and it's not easy being one in Japan.
To be quite honest, I am not a fan of this book by Yuko Tsushima. There are many inner dialogues and most of them don't use proper quotation mark that I get so lost trying to figure out our speaker at the time. The book discusses important topic that's quite heavy. Unfortunately I like this one less than Territory of Light by the same author.

I had a lot of trouble following the storyline with the multiple characters whose names changed depending on the time period. You really have to work to follow each individual character. The English-speaking reader could use some help with this perhaps in the form of an annotated list of characters. However, the theme of the book and the way that the lives of these children played out was truly fascinating and done very well. Once I realized how the book was put together and what the author was trying to achieve, I appreciated it and it did keep my interest. I can well imagine how it works so much better in Japanese; no doubt this would be a challenging work to translate. It would certainly be an excellent choice for a book club that examined the historical reception of mixed race children in Japan.

Thank you to NetGalley for an advance copy of this book. It's the kind of story that stays with you and makes you think.

Mitch and Yoko meet again, a year after the death of Mitch's brother. All of them were raised in an orphanage outside Tokyo and they consider themselves family.

I was looking forward to reading this book, but I can safely say it wasn't for me. Parts were beautiful, the old woman, living alone with grief, for example, parts were confusing.
Overall it just didn't grip me.

I received a copy from NetGalley in exchange for my honest opinion

This one didn’t live up to my expectations. Its subject matter is weighty, grave and interesting - Japanese orphans, sometimes the product of rape, sometimes just the byproduct of war, explore their identities, alignments and alliances against a background of murder and nuclear catastrophe. All rather unusual and at times original. And yet it reads flatly, in a monotone of delivery that loops between timelines, perspectives, continents and identities. I became confused and deadened, rather than compelled. Perhaps there’s a cultural gap. But I was disappointed.

one of my favorite authors. the writing is excellent and the story is once again very original. i'm so excited for the release!

First published in 2013, Yūko Tsushima’s dense, demanding novel revolves around themes of contamination, guilt, shame and discrimination in Japanese society. Shifting between past and present, it unfolds over the course of sixty years, presented by multiple narrators whose voices frequently overlap and intertwine. These are people whose memories are as vivid as their current realities. At the centre of Tsushima’s story are Mitch (Michio), Kaz (Kazuo) and Yonko (Yuriko), friends since early childhood. Mitch and Kaz are representative of those once contemptuously referred to as “Konketsuji” or “the children of mixed-blood.” They’re the stigmatised offspring of Japanese women and American servicemen based in Japan post-WW2, some the result of consensual affairs, others of violent sexual assault. Mitch, Kaz and Yonko are connected through three women who also met early on in life: one ran the Yokohama orphanage where Mitch and Kaz were abandoned as babies; the other Sister Yae adopted Mitch and Kaz; the third, Yonko’s mother, became part of their ‘found family.’

Through the intersecting experiences of Mitch, Kaz and Yonko, Tsushima examines issues of alienation and identity, challenging cultural myths of a homogeneous, monoracial Japan - shored up by notions of the importance of heritage, purity of blood. Mitch and Kaz also symbolise those aspects of Japanese history that’ve been suppressed, suggesting a Japan in which denial’s deep-rooted: from the brutalities of the postwar years through to responses to events like the Fukushima nuclear disaster. Denial that’s underlined by Mitch, Kaz and Yonko’s inability to come to terms with a mystery from their childhood, the death of another orphan Miki from unknown causes, possibly an accident, possibly murder because of her biracial identity. Miki’s orange skirt, the one she was wearing when she died, feeds into the intricate imagery around light and colour that surfaces throughout Tsushima’s novel.

Tsushima’s title hints at aspects of her preoccupations. The dome refers to Runit Dome, a nuclear waste facility linked to US nuclear testing between 1948 and 1958, the aftermath of which was left unconfronted. The orphans in her narrative are sometimes compared to wildcats, animals that Tsushima associated with invisibility, heard about but rarely seen, rather like the possible radiation spreading after Fukushima. Her investment in the fate of orphans like Kaz and Mitch also operates as a plea for a more diverse, inclusive Japan. But Tsushima is interested too in postwar America, bringing in references to Nixon, to Vietnam, and to other aspects of American policies and politics – making it clear that Japan’s ills are not unique. Those biracial orphans adopted by Americans are shown to suffer as much as those who remained in Japan. It’s a piece that could be difficult to follow at times, stretches of conventional prose are abruptly disrupted by fractured monologues or passages that read more like prose poetry. I found some sections moving and powerful, others awkward, slippery or overly ambitious. But despite its ultimate unevenness, I thought this was a fascinating, sometimes haunting, portrait of Japan, of pervasive personal and cultural anxieties. Translated by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda.

I appreciate the premise of this book but I couldn’t get past certain elements. It felt difficult to really connect with some elements here. Felt a bit too magical for me.

This is a great book, I loved the cultural moments and how it went over different ways that cultures mourn. I think it felt a bit too YA for me with all the coming of age but other than that part it was pretty good

Thank you to NetGalley, to the author, and to the publishers for this ARC in exchange for an honest review!!!

There was something very compelling to me about the set-up, the plot centered on the history of Japan, and I truly enjoy Tsushima’s writing style, but not my favourite of hers, I wonder if part of that is the ARC version and if some of the translation roughness will be smoothed out in the final copy. Specifically, there were so many repetitive passages and phrases and I wondered if something had been lost there from the Japanese… it felt quite wooden. The beauty of the writing was what struck me with other Tsushima works and I wasn’t quite getting that here.