Au’s brief tome, a novella, is another text which would appear to flirt with the genre of auto-fiction (although who is to know?) as the Australian narrator goes on a trip to Japan with her mother, who was raised in Hong Kong. In the course of the trip, the narrator indulges in a few recollections, (of kayaking on a lake, of a childhood visit to Hong Kong), and some meditations on the nature of family. With her mother, she visits museums and takes trains across the country, before their paths separate and the narrator goes on a solo walk in a more rural zone. If all of this sounds somewhat mundane, that’s because it is, unashamedly so. Au’s text doesn’t have quite the same laconic tone as the like of Chejfec or Toussaint, whose work explores a similar aesthetic of the quotidian, rather it trades on a shaggy-dog suspense, as the reader suspects that something more dramatic is bound to happen sooner or later, even though it never does. There is a moment of potential tension in the closing pages which is soon punctured, leaving the reader with the not unpleasant sensation of a leisurely stroll through a partial Japan, via Hong Kong and a volcanic lake.
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