Re-released as a movie tie-in as All of Us Strangers

Orphan Harada is in his mid-forties, divorced and lonely. A scriptwriter for a faceless production company, he lives in an empty Tokyo apartment tower, with one other resident. By day the road is hot and busy, with corporate tenants – by night Harada and Kei, a girl with a secret, occupy the building. Harada decides on a whim to visit his home suburb of Tokyo. It is there he sees what seems to be his father but looking the age of his death thirty-five years before. His father takes him to his old home, where he meets his mother, in identical shape. Totally original storyline, touching on grief, the power of mind over matter, and of love. Complete with a horrific twist. ( )

Couldn’t put it down. Translation felt off at times so I’ll probably reread in Japanese at some point ( )

We find the narrator Hideo Harada, 47, soon to be 48, and recently divorced. Having become emotionally distant from his wife it was he who asked for the divorce, only to be hit hard on two levels - Akayo gets most of the money; mere weeks after the divorce, Mamiya, a producer colleague, informs him that he is going to start dating Akayo.

Hideo lives on the top floor of a building that has slowly been converted from apartments to offices and it's where he both lives and works as a writer. He twigs early on that despite the highway thundering past directly outside, the building is preternaturally quiet. He works out that apart from one place on the third floor, he is the only person to be in the building after hours.

One day, to escape another night on his own and feeling a tad nostalgic, he takes the train out to where he gew up and ends up in a theatre. The performer on stage gets heckled and it's this point that everything changes.....the heckler is the spitting image of his father, who died aged 39 when Hideo was 12.....

The two men strike up a conversation, and the two men end up going for a beer....and finds the man married to a woman who appears to be his dead mother.

Over the next few weeks Hideo is torn between two sets of people...the couple who admit to being his dead parents, which makes no sense but he still can't stay away, and Kei, the woman in room 305 with whom he has started a sexual relationship.

The ghosts are having a detrimental effect however, which Hideo can't see, even when he looks in the mirror when people tell him how sick he looks. Finally it takes an intervention from his old colleague Mamiya, for him to make the necessary breaks and work on his health.

Narrated by Hideo, this is a fairly short book at 200 pages. There is a lot of self reflection as to why his parents seem to have returned now, what their departure when he was 12 really meant for him and his intimacy with other people, especially his now ex wife. Visiting his parents now, even though 10 years older than them, allows his to get some comfort in doing the things he never got to do as a child such as eating ice cold watermelon, playing catch in the street etc

There doesn't seem to be the consideration that this is a man heading into depression and a mental breakdown....it seems to be a straight ghost story. As you can tell from the names this book is set in Japan, and written by a Japanese author. I don't know if this is a standard Japanese ghost story or not. The translated text is rather sparse and clean but there's the occasional word that seems at odds with the rest of the narrative.... Mamiya uses a rosary near the end which has a different connotation for western Christian readers than what the author probably meant. The father figure,whist traditionally formal the first few meetings, starts using some slangy type words later on, possibly to denote how informal things had become,but it does jar the reader a little. Akayo and Shigeki (the son) are one dimensional, with one token "it was your idea" style conversation with Akayo and a rather jilted contact with Shigeki after everything had happen. Not sure what these scenes were meant to add to the story.

This was first time reading Taichi Yamada. This book struck me as very similar to Tomoyuki Hoshino's ME. Both authors are riffing off Haruki Murakami's brand of magical realism, but lack the startling charm of the pop phenom enfante terrible.

Yamada's prose is readable, depicting the main character's thoughts transparently. The main character writes for television. Yamada himself wrote for television. The book reads like a television script in some ways. This led to the same dilemma Hoshino's book had, as well as Seicho Matsumoto's Pro Bono. They keep recapping at the beginning of each chapter, as if the reader can't be trusted to remember what happened twenty pages ago. In a sense it's just dumbed-down crime fiction. But is rather bland in terms plot, character motivations, twists, humor and suspense.

There was very little to absorb me in this book except for the laid-back air, the cozy mystery at the heart of the novel, which, if you read the product description, lays it out for you plainly. It's meant to be a quick read, demanding little thought. A disposable conceit, and is completely unconvincing in my opinion.

If you've finished all of Japanese crime fiction's best examples, you might give this a try. Comparing this to Shuichi Yoshida's two English translations, Yamada looks like a joke. If I am to believe the author bio, he's attained celebrity status in his home country. Perhaps it's an acquired taste, like Matsumoto. That's why I plan to at least try his other novels. ( )