J-Lit Review #10: The Third Love
Reviewing a forthcoming novel from Hiromi Kawakami.
I assume most of my subscribers will be familiar with Hiromi Kawakami. Perhaps you have read Strange Weather in Tokyo, People from my Neighbourhood, The Nakano Thrift Shop, or her most recent book, Under the Eye of the Big Bird.
Today, I will be reviewing The Third Love, a novel that was released last year by Granta but is coming out later this year from Soft Skull. I have an early copy of the Soft Skull edition and have not yet read the Granta one.
I reviewed Under the Eye of the Big Bird earlier this year and although I did not find it to be a brilliant novel, I certainly admired Kawakami’s vision and courage. It is a strange and daring book that jumps around in time, with a plot spanning—if I recall correctly—thousands of years in the future. I really admired her for trying something so audacious.
This new book is much more successful and yet equally audacious. Once again, it involves huge leaps in time but this time they go back into the past rather than into the future. I felt it was a far more coherent and enjoyable read due to certain consistencies with characters and plot. It was bold and weird and experimental but nonetheless the sort of novel you can get into and appreciate on more basic levels.
The book begins with the words “Long ago” and this is sort of the key to the novel. It is a phrase repeated many times (sometimes as “Long, long ago”) and indeed the novel features many jumps back and forth between past and present, with discussions about the feeling and nature of time, and many instances of time speeding up or slowing down. If this sounds off-putting, then don’t worry. The author handles it so skillfully that the book is not a challenging read.
Essentially, it is a book about love, as you might expect from its title. It is a long discussion of love and what that means. I won’t go into it too much because it is explained towards the end of the book and although not exactly a spoiler, I feel it is better for the reader to encounter it organically through the author’s efforts rather than mine. But I will say that the book looks at romantic love, sexual love, familial love, love for children, platonic love, and various forms of love in between. Many relationships are depicted, some of them conventional and others quite unconventional. They often seem to involve characters that are iterations of other characters from different time periods.
It is also a book about what it means to be a woman and what gender relations have been like in Japan for a period of a thousand years. That does not mean it is a dull philosophical treatise or a political lecture. No, the author has a pleasantly discursive style that fits nicely in with a narrative that moves at just the right pace. (She sometimes slows down and sometimes speeds up, but always the story moves along just as it should.)
The protagonist is a woman named Riko who lives in modern-day Japan but—and this is not entirely explained—she develops the ability to go back and inhabit the bodies of a few women from earlier periods. One is from a few hundred years ago and the other from about a thousand years ago. Riko goes to sleep, dreams, and then tells us about the world she sees there. At times, she is able to influence those past events and seems even capable of communicating with the women whose bodies she inhabits. Sometimes the narrative blurs as she ceases to be a viewer and more or less becomes those women. (I say women but I suppose they are girls for part of the story. However, the early maturation of humans from boys/girls to men/women is a theme discussed here and of course in the past people became adults earlier.) At other times, the first-person voice partly shifts to a third-person one as she views even her modern self as detached from her viewing perspective. This helps the reader navigate the value systems and customs of a world totally alien to the modern Western reader (and presumably modern Japanese ones as well, though I get the feeling certain sentences have been added by the translator as a means of explanation).
It is through this odd and very playful narrative that Kawakami talks about changing ideas of love and the development of gender roles in Japanese society. Both were quite fascinating for me. The novel felt extremely well-researched and there were meticulous details about those earlier periods but I cannot say for sure how accurate they were given that I know little about ancient Japan. Through the jumps between past and present, and the comparisons made, the reader gets a history of love and sex as well as much insightful criticism of modern-day Japan. I felt this was all extremely well-handled in large part because it was so discursive. Kawakami writes in a very casual, informal way as though her protagonist is talking with a friend. She ends certain sentences with “right?” and says things like “I know I’m repeating myself but…” Indeed, the novel is fairly repetitive but these little insertions excuse that to a degree and it never felt like a flaw to me.
The repetition that I mention is not entirely accidental. It is used to show the cyclical nature of time in a Buddhist sense. At least that’s my reading of it. We often see characters repeating throughout history, by which I mean a person we know from one time period seems to exist in another. Events re-occur as well. At times I felt like perhaps Riko was visiting earlier lives in her journey through reincarnation but by the end I did not feel this was really a correct reading. Still, I think it is an exploration of the Buddhist idea of reincarnation, with people repeating their loves and attitudes and actions over a thousand years. There are several hints at this later in the book, though I will not mention them specifically here.
Throughout the whole novel, I felt engaged by the character of Riko and was thoroughly drawn into the worlds of the past that she entered through her dreams. I enjoyed the jumps in time and I liked how believable most of the characters were. The philosophical, theological, and political discussions were very well-handled and I thought this was one of the best modern Japanese novels I’ve read. I realise the author probably would not appreciate the comparison but I believe it to be flattering when I say that this book reminds me of the very best of Haruki Murakami, which is to say it is believable yet magical, always inventive, and pushing the reader to think without offering obvious explanations. Ultimately, though, with this book and several of her others, Kawakami is becoming such an original writer that the comparison is only made for the sake of potential readers. If you enjoyed that element of Murakami’s work, you might appreciate this novel.
The Third Love is currently on sale from Granta but as I said earlier the edition I read was a forthcoming one from Soft Skull. It will be released in October 2025.
The Granta edition is on Amazon here. It is available directly from the publisher here.
The Soft Skull edition is available for pre-order via Amazon. There is some more info from the publisher here.