Institutions of modernism Book

This is a strange and beautiful book. It's definitely not for everyone; I can see the slow pacing, the odd movement through time, and the deliberate simplicity of the writing style putting some readers off. For me, however, it worked really well––I found it gorgeous and heartbreaking. It has love and death and war and poetry and tragedy and humanity, and I loved the characters.

I was initially a bit wary of reading a historical novel about Japan by an American author, for fear that it would be exoticized dreck (e.g. Memoirs of a Geisha, ugh), but fortunately The Snow Fox avoided those pitfalls. My knowledge of Japanese history is pretty much limited to the Edo and Meiji periods, so I can't really judge the novel's historical accuracy, but its world felt very solid, and there was nothing that jumped out at me as being off. Also, this sounds odd, but the writing style, which is simultaneously plain and lyrical, felt to me very much as though it had been translated from Japanese, although the novel was written in English.