Kakuta Mitsuyo - Woman on the Other Shore

Kakuta Mitsuyo - Woman on the Other Shore -

When timid housewife Sayoko lands a job with Platinum Planet, a travel-housekeeping company run by Aoi, the two women forge an unlikely friendship. Seeing Aoi’s example, Sayoko learns to assert herself and the unmarried Aoi gains the kind of deeply-trusted friend in Sayoko she hasn’t had since high school. That’s pretty much the plot to Mitsuyo Kakuta’s 2005 Naoki Prize-winning novel Woman on the Other Shore. You could be forgiven for thinking that it sounds as dull and annoying as one of those melodramatic, “empowering” women-centered movies on the Lifetime channel. It’s not. cover art WOMAN ON THE OTHER SHORE MITSUYO KAKUTA (KODANSHA INTERNATIONAL) AMAZON Instead, Kakuta presents us with a rarity: a complex exploration of friendship in its depth, fragility, and necessity. There are two stories at work in this novel, told in alternating chapters that converge at the end. The first is the story of Sayoko working as a housekeeper at Aoi’s small travel agency-sliding-into-housekeeping company. Though it’s not overtly stated at first, the steady shift toward housekeeping is due to either a drop in the travel business or Aoi’s impulsiveness, or a mixture of both. Sayoko doesn’t receive any encouragement to work from her husband Shuji and weathers numerous disdainful barbs from her mother-in-law. The second story takes place years before when Aoi was a teenager. She has just moved from the city of Yokohama to the small provincial town of Gunma. Aoi had been subjected to so much bullying at her old school she begged her parents to move so she wouldn’t have to endure it anymore. ! Uwagi: Oprawa lekko zarysowana i wytarta. Brzegi stron minimalnie zakurzone.