One Morning Like a Bird
1940. Tokyo. Japan is at war with China, and Yuji Takano is clinging to the life he has made for himself as a young poet - the company of his friends, the monthly meetings of the French Club at Monsieur Feneon's house, the days of writing and contemplation made possible by an allowance from his father, a professor at Tokyo's elite Imperial university...But the world is closing in on Yuji. His father is disgraced, the allowance is scrapped, and the threat of conscription is coming ever closer. And then there is Monsieur Feneon's nineteen-year-old daughter Alissa, a girl with her own very definite ideas of what she wants, and whose fate becomes inextricably bound up with Yuji's. In hauntingly evocative prose, Andrew Miller tells a timeless story about growing up and growing free of self-delusions, about following the heart and making the right choices in life. Vividly conveying its setting, he also draws a fascinating portrait of a bygone Tokyo and of Japan at a critical juncture in its history.
2.8 out of 5 based on 9 reviews
|
Omniscore:
|
| Classification |
Fiction |
| Genre |
General Fiction |
| Format |
Hardback |
| Pages |
384 |
| RRP |
£16.99 |
| Date of Publication |
September 2008 |
| ISBN |
978-0340825143 |
| Publisher |
Sceptre |
| |
1940. Tokyo. Japan is at war with China, and Yuji Takano is clinging to the life he has made for himself as a young poet - the company of his friends, the monthly meetings of the French Club at Monsieur Feneon's house, the days of writing and contemplation made possible by an allowance from his father, a professor at Tokyo's elite Imperial university...But the world is closing in on Yuji. His father is disgraced, the allowance is scrapped, and the threat of conscription is coming ever closer. And then there is Monsieur Feneon's nineteen-year-old daughter Alissa, a girl with her own very definite ideas of what she wants, and whose fate becomes inextricably bound up with Yuji's. In hauntingly evocative prose, Andrew Miller tells a timeless story about growing up and growing free of self-delusions, about following the heart and making the right choices in life. Vividly conveying its setting, he also draws a fascinating portrait of a bygone Tokyo and of Japan at a critical juncture in its history.
Reviews
The Independent
Peter Carty
"Miller's trademark is silken prose which gleams with acutely rendered detail. Snow at New Year lies "like laundry in the arms of the persimmon tree outside Mother's window, and like a perfect scoop of sugar on the saddle of Yuji's bicycle". When this stylistic fluency is brought to bear on Yuji, the result is a character so well realised as to engage all of our sympathies... Mostly, he is supremely successful, although his massings of humanity can be confusing, and there is a sense of a frustrating compression."
26/09/2008
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The Independent on Sunday
James Urquhart
"There are echoes of both Mishima and Murakami in Yuji's anxieties over the nature of Japanese society and how to engage with or withdraw from it, but Miller's delicate prose most closely recalls the tone of emotional restraint in Kazuo Ishiguro's early novels. By paring down the novel's action to meandering through Tokyo, and a sequence of quiet, intense engagements, Miller creates space for his expert anatomising of Yuji's bewilderment. Crisply defined characters offer a foil to Yuji's progressive ruminations, which Miller deftly coheres into a typically bittersweet resolution."
21/09/2008
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The Scotsman
Vanessa Curtis
"Miller ably conveys the frustrations of youthful ambition being quashed... The novel itself is an example of sobriety and measured prose. But in some ways Yuji, with his dogged avoidance of conscription and fruitless search for self-fulfilment, makes for a depressing hero."
10/08/2008
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The Times
Natalie Sandison
"Readers hoping for more of the full-bodied prose that swept us through the gorgeous summer of Oxygen and rattled us round the world in The Optimists will have to work harder for their kicks here. The rhythmical, almost transcendental quality of the prose has been reduced in favour of a quieter, more brittle voice that fits its aesthetic and works as an intellectual project but lacks the irresistible pull and flow of his previous novels."
12/09/2008
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The Sunday Times
David Grylls
"The prose is as delicate as a Japanese print, the plot as slow-burning as a brazier. Although one wouldn't want to side with the propagandist who crassly remarks of Yuji's poems that “people now prefer stronger flavours”, one can't help wondering if Miller's novel is too rarefied for its own good. Like its scrupulous hero, its most appreciative readers are likely to be cultured, cosmopolitan literati with little appetite for simple pleasures."
19/10/2008
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The Daily Telegraph
Helen Brown
"The frank simplicity of Miller's prose, and his search for truth in the reality of the quotidian feels (to this Western reader) convincingly Japanese. Miller places his words and plot developments carefully, like the smooth grey pebbles of a Zen garden, with all but the most essential adjectives weathered away... Sometimes this distillation of things down to their universal essence can slow the pace. I got a bit bored following Yuji about the city: drinking sake, drinking tea, drinking wine, drinking coffee."
12/09/2008
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The Daily Telegraph
Helen Paterson
"Miller does quite a line in tortured males, but in this case Yuji's self-absorbed ennui is not interesting enough to carry the narrative. He mooches around bars, frequents some lacklustre friends and generally studies his navel, without ever fleshing out into a three-dimensional character. As with the hero, so with the book, whose various themes of war, literature, Japanese culture and the shockwaves of trauma never quite gel into a living, breathing novel. There are moments of delicate prose that clearly reach for the painterly effect of a Japanese screen, but they are too sporadic to create an overall texture."
15/04/2009
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The Financial Times
Russell Celyn Jones
"There is something of Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives in Miller’s novel. But Bolaño’s tale of Mexican flesh-and-blood poets on the rampage is fierce and vitally alive. One Morning is static in comparison. Quotidian sentences such as the following slow the pace to a crawl: “The next morning Father stays at Setagaya, while Yuji, inventing some appointment with Fujitomi, returns to Hongo.” Miller is a meticulous writer, sometimes to his own detriment. He constructs people out of beautiful words but leaves out their hearts. I stumbled, too, over the many characters barely distinguishable other than by their names."
08/09/2008
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The Guardian
Christopher Tayler
"His writing aims for leanness but frequently rises to a discreet poetic flourish at the end of a paragraph; although there are jokes here and there, the effect overall is rather clinically tasteful... Miller writes observantly about the pleasures of early parenthood. But the novel's grand themes - the fallibility of the intelligentsia, the difficulty of living in more than one culture, the choice between art and life - sometimes seem like little more than intellectual grace notes. The war itself ultimately functions as a backdrop, and the over-neat tying up of Miller's plotlines makes his earlier obliqueness look mannered and evasive."
13/09/2008
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