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| 📕10-word summary: A glimpse into a mid-thirties freelance copy editor’s inner life. 🖌6-word review: Sometimes great, sometimes excruciating protagonist’s dialogue. |
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| 💭Compelling quote: “As long as you’re living on this planet, you have to be serious about something, but it’s better to be serious about a limited number of things.” | |||||||||
| Description:* Fuyuko Irie is a freelance copy editor in her mid-thirties. Working and living alone in a city where it is not easy to form new relationships, she has little regular contact with anyone other than her editor, Hijiri, a woman of the same age but with a very different disposition. When Fuyuko stops one day on a Tokyo street and notices her reflection in a storefront window, what she sees is a drab, awkward, and spiritless woman who has lacked the strength to change her life and decides to do something about it. As the long overdue change occurs, however, painful episodes from Fuyuko’s past surface and her behavior slips further and further beyond the pale.*From goodreads.com’s synopsis. | |||||||||
| Thoughts: I saw this book in my BookBub email, and it sounded interesting, perhaps because the protagonist was a copy editor. I went back-and-forth between not liking and liking this book, and ended up on the “like” side, as per my 4-star rating. Several times, I had to tell myself that I was frustrated with the main character because she was an introvert when she sometimes either took forever to answer somebody’s questions, or just didn’t answer them at all. I found all three of the main people she interacted with during the story — Hijiri, Mitsutsuka, and Noriko — quite interesting. I also liked how this book did not have a “Hollywood ending.” | |||||||||
See the rest of the books I’ve read in 2025 and previous years: 2024 | 2023 | 2022 | 2021 | 2020 | 2019.
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