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When Keiko Ishida is murdered, her brother, Ren, visits the provincial Japanese town just outside Tokyo (the fictional Akakawa) to pick up the urn with her ashes and attend a memorial service with her coworkers.
But he soon finds himself drawn into her life, wanting to know why she was stabbed in the middle of the night, on a street near where one of her students lives. The police have no clues. Ren is offered a job at the same cram school she taught, tutoring night-school students in English, and also winds up with the same living arrangements when he goes to pick up her personal effects. The politician Kosugi Katou offers Ren free lodging in his house, in exchange for Ren reading for an hour a day to Katou's wife, who has not spoken a word since the mysterious death of their young daughter.
As he enters Keiko's world, Ren slowly comes to know more about his older sister, who was once his protector. As Ren peels away layer after layer, he finds that the polite and kind Keiko was not as perfect as he thought and, in fact, kept many secrets from him—including why she left Tokyo to begin with.
RAINBIRDS is not your usual crime fiction novel. It's a slow-moving story written in language that is very spare and steeped in magical realism—Ren's insights often come in dreams. It's also a story about Ren, who, in his 20s, still has much maturing to do and who grapples with grief and the loss of perhaps the most important woman in his life. Ren does eventually solve the mystery of his sister, but even that is done in a quiet manner.
While the novel seems simple as times, it is evocative and weaves its magic around you, pulling the reader into Ren's world. In the end, it's an intricate, powerful novel that will stay with you.
§ Lourdes Venard is an independent editor who divides her time between New York and Maui.
Reviewed by Lourdes Venard, April 2018
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