title: The North Light by: Yokoyama, Hideo published: 2023-10-12 read: 2023-12 preview

Having been in Japan a few times, sometimes also as long as a week or so, I feel comfortable with Japanese culture. That also involves a bit of knowledge of some of the queer historical facts, with respect to the last world war, the Geisha culture, and so on.

Naturally, I am extremely far from any serious expertise on the country but, I can well imagine the protagonists of this book – or other Japanese books I read – carefully navigating their path through this fragile society.

Fragile? I think so, since it is intricate, and functioning in a certain manner creating eternal fragile stability.

The north light is an architectural book. That is, its main characters are architects, or related to those. In particular Aose, whose narration we are reading. Aose works in a small architecture firm, with five employees, and he is somewhat their star architect after he designed a house that ended up in a book listing Japan’s 200 most important designs.

That Y residence, as it is called, is important because of the way it incorporates light, and in particular north light, in the interior. “Build a house you would want to live in yourself”, the assignment was.

It’s a bit of a detective novel, this book, so I won’t tell you more. But Aose goes on a path finding the reason why he had to build this house. While, in the meantime, joining a competition for the design of a museum for the paintings of a fictitious Japanese painter Haruko Fujiyima, who lived in Paris and whose 800 or so paintings were only discovered after her death. And his daughter, wife, boss, and his wife, are all involved in one way or another. Even Bruno Taut, an architect who fled Germany in the 1930’s for Japan and died in 1938, plays a rather prominent role.

The book beautifully connects all characters, and that makes the narrative singular. I consider that a good thing. Of course I read the book translated, and it saddened me a bit; at times the translation, I find, is slightly awkward:

It had been very rare for Aose to be invited to a classmate’s house. Whichever school he was at, the ‘dam kids’ were considered a nuisance by everyone; they might as well have been called ‘damn kids’.

Still: worth a read. It took me a week, giving you an idea of how engrossed I was in the story.