Wildcat dome A novel

Originally published in 2013, this impressionistic if baffling story of three childhood friends by Tsushima (Territory of Light), who died in 2016, spans from Japan's post-WWII occupation by the Allies to the Fukushima nuclear accident. Mitch and Kazu were adopted together from an orphanage for the mixed-race children of American GIs. When they're eight, they and their playmate Yonko witness the drowning death of another girl from the orphanage, but their memories of exactly what they saw, and whether a neighborhood boy named Tabo pushed the girl into the water, are blurry. As they grow up, Mitch, Kazu, and Yonko forge their own paths, but they reunite decades later after learning of a series of unsolved murders. Since the victims were all wearing orange, the same color worn by the girl who drowned when they were children, the trio suspect Tabo is the killer, and the novel climaxes with their visit to Tabo's mother. Along the way, Tsushima jumps through time to jarring effect, as when she flashes forward to Kazu's death from a fall. Composed of awkwardly fitting parts and puzzling tangents, such as Mitch's vision of radioactive jelly after the Fukushima disaster, the narrative fails to cohere into a unified whole. Readers will have a tough time with this one. (Mar.)

Enigmatic, elegant novel by one of modern Japan's leading novelists. A mother whose son has died surrounds herself with bathroom tissue, "as though she were trying to convince herself that she was worth less than a roll of toilet paper." She fears that her son was a serial killer. And everywhere, as Tsushima writes, "the end of the world is here, now," an end wrought by "a tsunami so big you couldn't believe your eyes," bringing on--after Hiroshima and Nagasaki--Japan's third nuclear disaster. That disaster has had the effect of making the impossible happen: Mitch, who hates Japan, has returned home to the apartment that his late friend, Kazu, bequeathed to him. Death stalks Tsushima's novel, whose protagonists, she slowly reveals, are the mixed-race children of GIs who abandoned them and whose mothers, grieving but without recourse, put them up for adoption, some to be taken off to distant lands. Tsushima writes empathetically of those children and the racism they endured: "At the orphanage, being Black was normal, and Mama never said anything about it," says Kazu. That the keeper of the orphanage was a kindhearted woman who sincerely believed the children would be happier abroad does not help: One arrives in America only to grow up to die in Vietnam, and in any event all harbor a terrible secret from childhood that grows in intensity even as the adult orphans enter their 50s. Part ghost story and part noir thriller, Tsushima's narrative unfolds carefully, small details building even as Tsushima draws broad connections: the color orange sets the killer off, the soldiers who murdered Chile's dissidents in 1973 wore orange uniform shirts, the Americanized orphan died in a jungle doused with Agent Orange, and, as Mitch observes quietly, "Time surges forward and keeps blowing back." A superb literary mystery that leaves readers, like the protagonists, constantly guessing. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.