This is a collection of three short stories, novellas actually. Each story has a young woman as the main character. The first one is watching closely her childbearing older sister, the second one is visiting the boarding house where she used to live as a student - now almost empty - and the third one is experiencing a life crisis at the orphanage managed by her parents, where she also grew up.
Ogawa’s care for detail, both physical and psychological, draws the reader’s attention to the scenes and the circumstances of the stories in a very peculiar way. I felt that the author was playing with my deepest emotions when, for instance, the lady in the boarding house is looking for what could have been the blood dripping corpse of her cousin and turns out to be a honey oozing beehive instead. Or when the girl at the orphanage is sadistically harassing a toddler, ending up being discovered by the guy she loves, possibly losing him forever as an undisclosed consequence.
I really felt distraught and upset, something not even splatter movies directors are able to achieve. Pretty impressive.
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