And, like poor Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse 5, it’s somewhat unstuck from time (we start at the end, then we go back, we travel through to the end then we skip back again). Where this book principally differs is in the fact that we get to see a good few years of the eponymous Mr Nishino’s life through the prism of various women he had relations with.
Like with Strange Weather in Tokyo, to begin with The Ten Loves of Mr Nishino concerns an older man, and as with Strange Weather…, we see the man through a woman’s perspective. Things happen (small things, for the most part). Kawakami fans will know that her fictions are quiet, unobtrusive, not at home to melodrama or explosions or much in the way of thrilling action. I know, yay, right? For the uninitiated, and in the spirit of being inclusive and all that, Hiromi Kawakami is carving out for herself a really decent line in slightly offbeat fiction that could well unseat Japan’s number one literary export (the big M) at some point in the very near future. For the initiated, The Ten Loves of Mr Nishino is the third book from Hiromi Kawakami, author of Strange Weather in Tokyoand The Nakano Thrift Shop.
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