There would be two types of people: a small group of individuals including myself who praise this book and call it a masterpiece, and the rest would be absolutely disgusted by it.
It starts us off with Hana in 2008, on the eve of her marriage to Yoshiro. She meets her adopted father Jungo on a Ginza streetcorner one rainy night so they can go together to have dinner with her fiancé. Her very first words are “my man was walking this way”. We find out soon enough that they have a sexual relationship, although the details of that are not made clear at first. But this is a rabbit hole of a book, pushing backward through time, and with each step back in time, we learn more about the terrible nature of their relationship. Sakuraba peers into the head of a victim of childhood abuse and pulls out the threads of gaslighting and need and abandonment and desire that wind together and lead to a child trying at all costs to protect their abuser and stay with them because that is the only love they have every known and if it were to collapse, they too would be destroyed. It’s disturbing to read and at times grotesque.
Consider this your content warning for assault and abuse of all kinds. This is a dark book from start to finish. Don’t reach for it if that is the kind of thing that sends you to a dark place.