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One Morning Like a Bird
Tokyo, 1940. While Japan’s war against China escalates, young Yuji Takano clings to his cocooned life: his beloved evenings of French conversation at Monsieur Feneon’s, visits to the bathhouse with friends, his books, his poetry. But conscription looms and the mood turns against foreigners, just when Yuji gets entangled with Feneon’s daughter. As the nation heads towards conflict with the Allies, Yuji must decide where his duty – and his heart – lie.
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Reviews
[Yuji] is a character so well realised as to engage all of our sympathies
A revelatory perspective on an Eastern city in the second world war . . .The prose is as delicate as a Japanese print
Not only does he combine delicious literary conceits with thought-provoking explorations into the human condition, he has the rare gift of tossing out perfect sentences that make you stop in your tracks
Miller's delicate prose most closely recalls the tone of emotional restraint in Kazuo Ishiguro's early novels . . . Crisply defined characters offer a foil to Yuji's progressive ruminations, which Miller deftly coheres into a typically bittersweet resolution.
The frank simplicity of Miller's prose, and his search for truth in the reality of the quotidian feels (to this Western reader) convincingly Japanese. Miller places his words and plot developments carefully, like the smooth grey pebbles of a Zen garden, with all but the most essential adjectives weathered away. There are moments of beauty, truth and irony.
Deeply moving, written with loving attention to language, it felt like Pasternak back from the dead.
'Detail by delicate detail Miller conjures Yuji's dim, mysterious world of gradual dissolution."
Miller's Japanese characters are densely believable, and his recreation of their world is a real achievement
Miller's writing is cinematic; it has a heightened visual sense and it shifts smoothly from dialogue to mood to location. At all times the author is in command
A revelatory perspective on an Eastern city in the second world war ... The prose is as delicate as a Japanese print
Miller's Japanese characters are densely believable, and his recreation of their world is a real achievement
A quite beautifully written coming-of-age novel with a completely convincing Japanese hero
Miller's writing is cinematic; it has a heightened visual sense and it shifts smoothly from dialogue to mood to location
