Admittedly, I picked up Emily Itami’s apparently critically acclaimed debut novel, Fault Lines, I did so because of how short it looked. As my friend said, “sometimes there’s nothing wrong with a short novel.” And she’s right. I actually really, really enjoyed this!
Mizuki, our narrator, is a Japanese housewife who’s been thrust into the shadows almost oblivious to anyone in her life. She feels that time she spent in America pursuing a different life has made her incapable of fully fitting into the life she’s meant to be living. Yes, she’s a devoted mother of two young children and one very hard-working husband, but it’s as if none of them treat her like a person anymore.
That all changes one day when she meets, on several accidental occasions at first, a stranger named Kiyoshi. From there, we are escorted through all of the parts of Mizuki’s life, both past and present. When she was young, her candy-making father in a very small town encourages Mizuki to study in America for her last year of high school. This year in New York changes Mizuki’s trajectory for a very long time. Instead of coming back to Japan to go to university, she instead stays in New York to pursue a career in singing. She’s got talent, but so do so many others in the US.
Finally, she moves back to Japan, but to Tokyo, the New York of Japan. She manages to get regular gigs for quite some time, but just as she’s puttering out on this particular career path, she meets her now husband, Tatsuya. He’s handsome and fun and their marriage is a successful and fulfilling one for a really long time. Then at some point, kids, getting busy, and just life in general gets in the way. Tatsuya hardly ever looks Mizuki in the face and she’s left to care for her kids night and day. I don’t envy Mizuki.
It’s during Tokyo’s fashion week that Mizuki’s life takes a sharp pivot. This is one of the few instances where Mizuki feels like part of her past life comes back to her, and she lives it up in her finest clothes, getting a little trashed with her international friends, and parading around the lighted streets of designer stores in the rain. This is where she meets Kiyoshi, a handsome man who treats Mizuki like she is a person worth a million bucks and then some. From there, they start a bit of an affair until she comes to realize that her happiness will ultimately make no one in the situation happy.
I really, really liked learning about Mizuki’s secret life, as well as her past that makes her feel like a bit of an alien. In some supplemental materials at the end of the novel, Itami writes that she wanted this complex story to have no villains. Sure, what Mizuki did was “wrong” by most people’s standards, but thinking back at everything I read, I too didn’t classify anyone in the story as a villain. They are all just people, just like us. Highly recommend this read!