One Hundred and One Ways

Here we have another book about love - love not only between men and women, but also love between mothers and daughters. So far so ordinary, you might think. After all, what is a novel without some kind of relationship? And, as usual, love must never come easy. Thus the relationships in this novel are all fraught with failures to communicate. However, this debut novel breaks some new ground, and the narrative is “masterfully” written. (Sorry, but I can’t think of the “mot juste.”)

The story is told from the first-person perspective of Yukiko “Kiki” Takehashi, a doctoral student living in New York City. She is recovering from the death of one boyfriend, Phillip, and trying to have a normal relationship with her fiancé, show more Eric, whom she suspects of having a “Asian girl fetish.” In between the episodes that she relates about her life, she also tells us about her namesake, her grandmother Yukiko, who lived the life of a geisha in Japan before the Second World War. And we also learn about Grandmother Yukiko’s daughter and Kiki’s mother, Akiko, who is living frozen in time due to being abandoned by her husband, Kiki’s father, whom she had run away to marry against her mother’s wishes.

In addition to the cross-cultural, cross-continental, time-spanning stories being related, there is also an element of magical realism. Phillip has come back from the dead and appears sporadically, but persistently, in Kiki’s apartment. What does he want? Why doesn’t he speak to her? Why can’t she release her memories of him so that she can pursue a normal life?

Kiki dreams about meeting her grandmother someday, and as she dreams she thinks of all the things she would like to say to her and ask her. One of these questions is: “What price a woman’s life, if all it consists of is loving one man forever?” Later she reflects on the “bleak possibility that all is not perfect in the best of all possible loves; that in the happiest of all marriages, regret is still a fact, sacrifice still a necessity.”

All in all, a very entertaining first book, and now I am off to find her second novel, “Once Removed,” published a few years after this one. show less

This is one of my favorite books.