The Third Love feels like both a statelier and a slightly weirder Hiromi Kawakami novel than perhaps we are used to. Yes, it’s a rumination on life and love as we’ve seen in the likes of The Nakano Thrift Shop and The Ten Loves of Mr Nishino but it’s also a bit of a period costume romp and a twisty-turny tale of time-travel dreams. Bear with us.
“The real world consists of separate fragments, so many it’s almost impossible to get an overall view, yet we are able to create our stories by stringing a few of those fragments together in some kind of order, right?”
Our narrator (our main narrator, we should say) is Riko, who we meet as a young girl, infatuated with Naa-chan, a family friend who is slightly older than she is. Her infatuation is one of the things that sustains her at school, where she likes to spend a lot of time reading books and avoiding other children; it is here she befriends the school janitor, Mr Takaoka. Fast forward a few years and Riko and Naa-chan are together, married if you can believe it and we learn that Naa-chan is a bit of a serial adulterer (one of the key themes of the book is the difference between how women from different periods of time reacted to their partner’s infidelities – but we’ll get to that). Riko becomes aware of one affair, and then another affair (with a woman who has been teaching her to play a musical instrument) and then a third affair (which leaves Naa-chan quietly devastated – he was in love with the daughter of his CEO and eventually the daughter was spirited away by her brothers and the affair was brought to an end that also saw Naa-chan sidelined at work). By this point, Riko’s marriage is in quietly desperate trouble, but neither Riko nor Naa-chan really talk about it, they just go on with the business of living their lives, albeit subtly separate from one another. It is roundabout this point that Mr Takaoka (older than her but looking younger than he had twenty or so years before) comes back into her life and they start to talk about magic, conversations which give rise to dreams.
In Riko’s first set of dreams, she goes back to the Edo period (1603-1837) and becomes a young woman called Shungetsu who is sold by her parents into indenture in what you might call a house of ill repute, starting as a sort of handmaiden to the oiran (which is the Edo equivalent of a sex worker) before, in time, graduating to become an oiran herself. The Edo dreams are vivid and consecutive. We follow Riko’s life month by month and also her life as Shungetsu, Edo time passing far faster than ‘real life’. To begin with Riko observes Shungetsu like a shadow, occupying Shungetsu’s life while she is sleeping (with the sense that Shungetsu’s life continues, unobserved, while Riko is ‘awake’); as the novel progresses, these lines blur somewhat (to the extent that Riko will tell us that she doesn’t know who voiced an opinion or thought a thought, her or Shungetsu). Following a conversation in waking life with Mr Takaoka, a version of Takaoka (called Tanaka) appears within the Edo world (and later Riko and Takaoka talk about it. and Takaoka says that Tanaka is partially him, as if Tanaka is a vessel Takaoka occupies, in the way that Riko occupies Shungetsu). In the dream world (which may not be a dream world, may in fact be historical reality that Riko is occupying somehow), Shungetsu and Tanaka become lovers (which isn’t allowed) and decide to run away together. Their eventual fate prefigures (foreshadows?) what happened with Naa-chan and his lover and also stories from Tales of Ise (which are directly referred to in the novel).
If all of that feels complicated, well, it is – but Kawakami writes with a lucid clarity and even though there are a great many narrative strands to keep separate in your head as you read, it rarely becomes bogged down in the kind of ‘who said what to whom and when and why and what now?’ you find in, say, spy fiction.
We’re still only about half way through the book, though, and more complication is to come. Riko and Naa-chan have a baby and Naa-chan doesn’t do very much to help and so Riko is run ragged – and it is during this period of being run ragged that she begins to dream time-travel again, this time to the Heian period (794-1185). Here she is the handmaiden to a young princess who is married at the age of 13 to an older more worldly-wise sort called Narihari. We are treated to much in the way of world building here, so we see how the palace works, where everyone sleeps, how gossip works, what people think about religion etc alongside the changing cultural shifts that were going on at the time (a growing disaffection with China, for one thing); but we also see how the princess’ marriage to Narihai fares (he’s given to the odd affair, which is sort of fine and accepted at first, until he falls hard for another princess, known as the Gojo princess, and starts to suffer as a result – itself an echo of both Naa-chan’s unhappy affair and what happened to Tanaka and Shungetsu in the previous bit of dream time travel). Once again, Mr Takaoka makes an appearance (as Narihari’s brother who is a Buddhist monk) and once again there is the weird buzzing hum between Riko’s world and the handmaid’s world. And then Riko starts to inhabit both the handmaiden and the Gojo princess at the same time…
While it’s all as well written as her other books, there is a sense that The Third Love is both overly complicated (I mean, duh if you’ve got this far in the review eh?) but also weirdly random (it’s like Kawakami wanted to write about the ways in which modern marriages differed from relationships in times past and came up with the idea of dream time-travel and then leashed the three different time periods together with what is essentially a McGuffin. Your willingness to suspend disbelief (or rather to leapfrog disbelief and accept where Kawakami takes you) may determine your overall enjoyment of the book.
Any Cop?: Not our favourite Kawakami to date but a sense, we think, of a sort of se change in her writing; it’s going to be really interesting to see where she goes from here.
Bookmunch 