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4.5*

Now this is a character driven novel in all its glory. I have always thought that such novels are the hardest to write. They can easily become an over-emotional, repetitive cliché. Character driven novels aren't meant to be a description of feelings at every given moment. They are meant to be exactly what Yukio Mishima wrote in After the Banquet.

Kazu is the owner of a high class restaurant in Tokyo. Nowadays, we would probably call her a self-made woman. Kazu's struggle to rise from poverty is never directly described but it is hinted at quite often. When we find Kazu she's already a middle aged woman, rich and independent with little more to expect from life as she has achieved all that is possible for her to achieve.

Or has she?

Kazu falls in love and eventually marries Noguchi, a respected member of the Radical Party. The problem is that Noguchi, a thoroughly unpleasant man, is never conquered by those qualities that everybody else seems to love in Kazu: her tireless energy and enthusiasm for life.

Their incompatibility is made obvious when Noguchi decides to run for political office. Kazu, unbeknownst to her husband, starts to campaign on his behalf, obviously doing a far better job than Noguchi ever would. When her husband finds out, he is furious. Noguchi is an interesting object of study because under all his lofty ideals and political integrity , he is a rather selfish and self-centered man. The feelings and actions of the woman he married are completely foreign to him. Not only he doesn't understand his wife, but he also doesn't understand people - common people. Unlike Kazu who clearly has the "common touch" as Kipling would put it.

To cut a more complex story short: Noguchi looses the elections. In the meanwhile, Kazu had decided to mortgage her restaurant in order to help the campaign. Her husband and her debts force her to sell it. Kazu realises at the end that she doesn't want to sell it. She ends up divorcing her husband because of her decision to keep the restaurant.

The restaurant, Setsugoan, begins as the symbol of Kazu's unchanging and easygoing life. Kazu reigned supreme there, unchallenged and loved by her maids (who insist on returning when it reopens at the end) and by her clients. When Kazu marries the restaurant looses its interest because there were other more compelling challenges for her to face. When those challenges disappoint her - both politics and her husband's character - she realises that she had what she wanted all along. Setsugoan becomes a Return to the old but at the same time, the beginning of something new, something far better than it initially was. At the end, there is a sense of belonging that wasn't there in the beginning.

What is this story about, then? Can someone's nature change? Can we change? Does Kazu change?

Kazu's nature never changes. She divorces Noguchi because she realises that we cannot go against what we are. And Kazu was a woman with a constant need for enthusiasm, for solving problems, for people. The life of a retired politician's wife, living in the suburbs of a huge city, could never suit her.

But still, Kazu changes. She gains a self-awareness she didn't have before. She faces up to her fear - which was her main motivation to stay with her husband - of being forgotten and dying alone. She realises that it is better to die alone than to live alone.

Some reviewers have focused a lot on the question of politics, on the corruptibility of men, on the nature of democracy. But I couldn't help but feel that this was but a peripheral question, a way for Kazu to understand herself and her surroundings. And to become reconciled with what she was.