The Nature of Things

A reader who was expecting a lot of drama and excitement from this spare and slender (less than 200 pages) novel would be sorely disappointed. It is a narrative of a year in the life of a recently separated young mother and her two-year-old, turning three-year-old in that year, daughter. It is a meditation on what it was like to be a single parent, a woman, in postwar Japan. The time frame of the novel is not mentioned but it can be assumed to be the '70s. The book was published in 1978. The book explores this young mother's coming to terms with her new life, learning to stand on her own two feet and become independent. It also details her relationship with her young child and the surprising fact that she sometimes leaves the sleeping child alone in her apartment at night while she goes out to run errands. As a mother, this seemed appalling to me and I wondered if it really was accepted practice at the time or if it simply was a product of the writer's imagination. While th...