The third love A novel

The scintillating latest from Kawakami continues in the vein of Strange Weather in Tokyo with a story of love and life lessons told through a Japanese woman's dreams. Thirty-something Riko is married to her childhood sweetheart, Naa-chan, who cheats on her repeatedly. She has a chance encounter with Mr. Takaoka, the janitor at her former elementary school, who teaches her how to magically inhabit the bodies of those living in historical periods while she dreams. She first visits Edo Japan as a young girl sold into sex work. There, Riko meets a version of Mr. Takaoka, who becomes one of her paying clients, though they don't appear to have sex. Back in her own life, Riko gives birth to Naa-chan's son, Toji. Irritated that Naa-chan isn't helping with childcare, she retreats to her dreams, becoming the servant girl for a princess during the Heian period. Again, Mr. Takaoka appears, this time as a Buddhist monk. The historical settings blend seamlessly with Riko's present-day narrative as she gathers a millennia's worth of women's perspectives and comes to expect less of men ("I have to accept that the knight on the white charger is just a human being"). Readers will be transported. Agent: Jacqueline Ko, Wylie Agency. (Oct.)

A woman in contemporary Tokyo dreams of other lives--as a courtesan in Edo, then a lady's maid in the ninth century--all to help her confront the stages of love in her own marriage. An intertextual story of longing, fidelity, and the role of women in Japanese culture, the novel begins with 2-year-old Riko falling in love with Naruya. Though they eventually marry, it is an unhappy arrangement--she worships Naruya, but he is an unrepentant womanizer. With the help of former monk Mr. Takaoka (who shares the name of a ninth-century Buddhist prince), she learns a kind of magic: to enter nightly into a single, continuous dream, one that lasts for years and that she remembers when she's awake. These dreamworlds span years of her waking life. First she is Shungetsu, from the Edo period, a child sold to work in the Yoshiwara pleasure district, where she learns to become a courtesan. Mr. Takaoka enters her dreamworld in the form of samurai Takada, and the two fall in love. When this story comes to its tragic conclusion, an even earlier narrative springs up: She is a lady-in-waiting during the Heian period. Her princess is married to Narihira, who, like Naruya, conducts countless affairs. The prose, conversational and effervescent, belies the depth of the novel's complexity; both dream narratives take their frameworks from other texts:The Tales of Ise, partially written by the ninth-century poet Narihira, who is the hero of Riko's dream, and the 1987 fantasy novelTakaoka's Travels by Tatsuhiko Shibusawa. Riko can dream these stories because she's read the sources, but her own life is also a reflection of these framing texts, and so we get them in triplicate, variations on a tale of female submission, negotiation, and freedom. Weaves historical fiction, Japanese literary icons, and meditations on love into a novel that's remarkable on many levels. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.