April 2018 "The Love We Share Without Knowing" Discussion <Caution! Spoilers May Be Present!>

[Art, Stay home, stay safe.]

Have fun.

[Art, Stay home, stay safe.]

When it comes to the theme of this particular book, *full disclosure* I am biased, after years of living in Japan I get to relate to 99.9% of the people and events described (so far). I find myself enjoying the book immensely even though it is not a genre I particularly enjoy reading.

Kate, I will hold off on recommending this book until I am through reading it but that might take a few days. Not in the least because it is a struggle to read but rather that every story so far is pretty intense and requires a bit of digestion and contemplation afterwards. The author is undoubtedly talented.

The themes are far from being light or cheerful, with death (and suicide) featuring in abundance, consider yourself warned.

[Kateblue, 2nd star to the right and straight on til morning]

I think I might be glad i didn;t buy it

[Art, Stay home, stay safe.]

Kateblue wrote: "I think I might be glad i didn;t buy it"

I would not be as hasty saying it as that!

Pretty much every story I've read so far was alright, with each and every one of them having at least one or two lines that made me put the book down and think on it (hard to recall the last book that made me do that).

If they were making a remake of the Twilight Zone set in Japan, half the stories would be perfectly right up that alley.

[Kateblue, 2nd star to the right and straight on til morning]

How is this a novel? It sounds like short stories?

[Art, Stay home, stay safe.]

Kateblue wrote: "How is this a novel? It sounds like short stories?"


The reader is introduced to a particular set of characters in the first story and as the story unfolds you get the feeling for the location the novel is set in. In the mean time you get fleetingly introduced to secondary characters who carry influence that is not all too apparent until you read the following story. And so it goes on and (so far) on, one story adding to the previous and prepping you for the next one.

Hard to say anything else till I'm done with the book.

[Oleksandr, a.k.a. Acorn]

I finished it, liked it but wonder why it was nominated. It is a nice literary novel that worth reading, but hardly SFF.

[Art, Stay home, stay safe.]

I suppose it was meant to be read as a magical realism/fantasy, but admittedly it is quite out there on the fringe.

[Art, Stay home, stay safe.]

I believe that the initial impact on the reader (fuelled by somewhat dramatic reviews) can be slightly overwhelming due to some of the themes introduced. I however found it nowhere near as depressing as some of the readers claimed it to be. Yes the topics are somewhat hard to digest, but the messages I found hidden between the lines were those of hope and possibly even of redemption (if not by characters, then by the readers who could relate to them).

Liked the majority of the stories and how they fit together, but Midori's tale and that stupendous way for the events to end more or less back where they started (from the viewpoint of the reader) was in my opinion beyond just a "neat" ending for the novel. It was a perfectly natural fit, not a stunt.

A beautiful novel worth rereading.

[Oleksandr, a.k.a. Acorn]

I don't think it was depressing, at least for me. Even suicide story is not that dark, it is more like 'tomorrow won't bring anything new, so why live it'

[Bryan, Village Idiot]

I scrolled down to the end of this without reading a thing. I'm still reading the book! I mostly just wanted to get the (NEW) off the list.