What's the fascination of the sky-blue house?

Taro, who grew up in Osaka and formerly worked in a hair salon, now works in a Tokyo office at a five-person company that manages PR for other firms. He is divorced and lives alone in an eight-unit apartment building, the View Palace Saeki III, in Setagaya Ward that is scheduled to be demolished. He has one friend, a co-worker who moves to Hokkaido during the course of the novel. Ten years ago his father died and Taro keeps the mortar and pestle in which he ground his father's bones in a kitchen cabinet:

"The mortar and pestle never got moved," Tomoka Shibasaki writes in her novel Spring Garden. "Taro was a disorganized person, and he worried that if he moved it, he'd forget where it was. He also worried that if it wasn't somewhere visible, he would forget that his father was dead. Sometimes he got the feeling that he'd already forgotten—about his father's death, and about his existence too."

Taro's building has eight units, four on the first floor, four on the second; these are identified by the Chinese zodiac: Pig (which is Taro's), Dog, Rooster, Monkey on the first floor, Sheep, Horse, Snake, Dragon on the second. Taro therefore thinks of the woman who lives upstairs in the last apartment as Dragon Woman who seems about his age, a little over thirty. Taro spots her on the street: 

"She was wearing a creased T-shirt and jogging bottoms, with a beanie that he guessed was to cover unkempt hair. It was not the sort of look you would go for if you were expecting to be seen by anyone. In fact, the combination of the hat and her black-framed glasses made her look pretty suspicious."

Her surname is Nishi, and she tells him "my kanji looks a lot like the kanji for the Rooster." She is an illustrator and a comic-strip artist. "Her main jobs are "making comic strips out of readers' stories submitted to a job-seeking portal and a cooking magazine site, and individual commissions for magazines and adverts." She is single and independent and also apparently has no friends or family.

Nishi is obsessed by a sky-blue house and its garden the View Palace Saeki overlooks. The house "looked like the sort of grand, Western-style mansions that had sprung up in certain areas of Japan in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The horizontal wooden planks were painted a vivid sky blue, and the roof tiles in terracotta, was a flattish pyramid, with a decoration at the top shaped like the tip of an arrow."

The house was built in 1964 by a Taro Gyushima, an advertising director, and his wife, Kaiko Umamura, a stage actress. They had produced a coffee-table book of photographs titled Spring Garden about the house that Nishi first encountered in high school. That couple moved out years ago and are divorced. A young family now apparently lives in it.

I've lifted three quotes from the novel to give you a sense of Polly Barton's polished translation and because Taro, Nishi, and the house are the novel's three characters. The book, which has no chapter breaks, flows smoothly from Taro's point of view to Nishi's. Confounding reader expectations (this reader's anyway), there is no romance between Taro and Nishi. They have meals together, they drink together (Nishi drinks far more beer than Taro), the eventually are able to visit the house's interior together, but there is no romantic spark, and Nishi eventually moves away from Tokyo.

Tomoka Shibasaki was born in 1973 in Osaka and began writing fiction in high school. She graduated from Osaka Prefecture University and worked in an office while writing fiction. Her first novel, Kyō no dekigoto (A Day on the Planet), was published in 2000. In 2003 the book was adapted by  into a film of the same name. In 2006 Shibasaki won a MEXT Award for New Artists for Sono machi no ima wa (Today, in that City). In 2010 she won the Noma Literary New Face Prize for Nete mo samete mo, a first-person story about a woman who falls in love, loses her boyfriend, then meets a man who looks identical to her disappeared boyfriend but acts completely differently. In 2014, she won the 151st Akutagawa Prize for Haru no niwa (Spring Garden). 

Spring Garden is an interesting novel because there is no conflict—unlike what they teach you in writing class. Taro does not seem to want anything, not even a closer friendship with Nishi. Nishi wants to see for herself the bathroom in the sky-blue house, but that does not feel like much of a goal and she hardly has to overcome real challenges to eventually reach it.

Nevertheless, the book held my interest all the way through. (Pace, writing class.) As much as anything, it is a lament for a passing time. The sky-blue house will be torn down. The View Palace Saeki will be torn down. The neighborhood will change. Spring Garden turns out to be surprisingly moving.

You will never think of "Biafra babies" the same way again

The flag of independent Republic of Biafra was red, black, and green with half of a yellow sun in the center. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's powerful novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, is set in Biafra, which declared independence from Nigeria in 1967 and then suffered a three-year war of attrition. Now I know—really know—how the words "Biafra babies" meaning "starving infants" enter the lexicon.

The action begins in the early 1960s and follows the interwoven lives of three characters:

—Ugwu, a boy from a village who goes to work as houseboy for Odenigbo, a professor at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. Ugwu is twelve or thirteen when he enters the Master's service.

—Olanna Ozobia, the daughter of wealthy parents and twin sister of Kainene. The twins have just returned from London where they obtained advanced academic degrees, and Olanna moves from Lagos where her parents have a mansion and lavish lifestyle to Nsukka where she teaches in the university.

—Richard Churchill, a young, white, English ex-pat who wants to write a book about Igbo art and moves to Nsukka, a center of Igbo culture. 

Olanna becomes Odenigbo's lover and, eventually, his wife. Richard becomes Kainene's lover. The book evokes intellectually stimulating evenings in Odenigbo's living room with people from the university as they discuss and debate politics, society, life. We learn about the tension between the Igbo in Biafra, Nigeria's south, and the Hausa in the north. The French and British ignored tribal cultures, loyalties, and languages when they created independent states. 

There is tension between the Christian Igbo and the Muslim Northerners, between the economically aggressive and successful Igbo (called by the Northerns "Africa's Jews" because of their success in business) and the rest of the population. Odenigbo and his friends are intellectual revolutionaries, disgusted by the corruption (which is rampant) and inequality in Nigeria. Then there's a coup and Igbo soldiers take over.

We learn about it listening to Odenigbo's radiogram. "There were more announcements later—the prime minister was missing. Nigeria was now a federal military government, the premiers of the North and West were missing—but Ugwu was not sure who spoke and on what station because Master sat next to the radio, turning the knob quickly, stopping, listening, turning, stopping. He had removed his glasses and looked more vulnerable with his eyes sunken deep in his face."

More guests than usual arrive and they celebrate: "'If we had more men like Major Nzeogwu in this country, we would not be where we are today,' Master said. 'He actually has a vision.'" And then there's a counter coup, the Igbo soldiers are slaughtered, and war begins in earnest.

The novel is divided into four sections. With my very rough dating they are: The Early Sixties (1962-67), The Late Sixties (1967-68), The Early Sixties (1963-64),  and The Late Sixties (1968-70). When I first finished the novel, I wondered why Adichie decided to interrupt the continuity with the extended flashback. On reflection I've decided that the flashback, which dramatizes the tensions between the Odenigbo and Olanna, between Richard and Kainene, and between the sisters, is actually a relief from the growing trauma of the war.

Was it a more brutal war than other wars? Probably not. The Igbo, traditionally a military people, were outgunned and overwhelmed. The British and the Soviet's supported the Nigerians and their planes bombed and strafed Biafran towns and villages. We see the war from the point of view of the people who are being bombed and strafed and starved and conscripted. One of the more moving sections of the novel is Ugwu's being picked up by the military and impressed into service.

While Adichie evokes the war and the suffering and the hunger, she does not editorialize. Readers can draw their own conclusions about the war's effect on different people—the quietly heroic, the profiteers, the cowardly, the frightened, and the starving children. And that, as the saying says, truth is the first victim of war.

It is a long book, 543 pages, but I was sorry when it ended. The war does eventually, harrowingly end, Adichie supplies a brief coda. But I was so invested in Ugwu, Olanna, Richard, and Odenigbo I wanted to know more. How is it even possible to remake lives after such national trauma? It is, I believe, a sign of the novel's power that it provokes such a question.

Terrific book if you didn't need the last 20 percent

Love Kills is Edna Buchanan's ninth Britt Montero mystery. She should have known better.

Buchanan is a Pulitzer Prize-winning crime reporter who spent eighteen years on the Miami Herald as a crime reporter, covering over 5,000 violent deaths, some 3,000 of which reportedly were homicides, or about three a week. She took a one-year leave of absence from the Herald in 1988 to write her first novel, Nobody Lives Forever. Published in 1990, the thriller was nominated for an Edgar Award and later became a television movie of the week. In 1992, she published her popular Britt Montero series with Contents Under Pressure. Britt, like Buchanan herself when she was a reporter, sleeps with a police scanner by her bedside and never lets go of a good story, and Love Kills is a good story gone bad.

After a Prologue in which a construction crew uncovers a decomposed body, a victim obviously murdered. Although the Cold Case Squad has a good idea of the victim's identity, Buchanan does share it with the reader. We do learn the victim's wallet contains a card which had Britt's name and phone number.

The book proper begins with Britt herself as the first person narrator. She and a friend are on a small, unnamed Caribbean island. Britt, a reporter on the Miami News, and the friend, a photographer from the paper, find an intact camera washed up on the beach and shoot the last three frames on the roll. Britt is recovering from a trauma I assume occurred in the last book. This is the first Edna Buchanan I've read, and she handles this background skillfully. You need not have read the series to understand Love Kills. Vacation over, the women return to Miami and to work.

The dead man we now learn was Spencer Nathan York, America's most active kidnapper. "A hired gun for divorced fathers, he called himself the Custody Crusader and was a combative foe of what he described as a growing tide of feminism that had swept over the family courts, depriving fathers of their rights." Britt had interviewed York and—separately—the parents of a child he kidnapped in an unusually brutal snatching incident. Many people had good reason to hate York, and in alternate, third-person point of view sections of the book we follow the cold case detectives as they work.

The pictures on the recovered camera are shots of a blissful young couple on their honeymoon on a rented yacht. It takes almost no work to establish who they are and their tragic story. There was fire and explosion on the boat, which sank, killing the wife, and leaving the husband adrift to be rescued by the Coast Guard. Dreadful, but accidents happen.

Britt begins digging. Marsh Holt had swept his bride off her feet although endeared himself to her parents, who came to see him the son they never had. After a short romance and engagement the happy couple took off for their dream honeymoon.

Except. 

A short while later, the Coast Guard happens to intercept drug runners and Britt realizes that the smuggler's boat is the is one that supposedly sank with the new bride. And Holt has disappeared, leaving no forwarding address.

Which is not much of a challenge to a hot shot reporter like Britt Montero. In short order she establishes that Holt had been married before. And all three brides died in unfortunate accidents on their honeymoon. Holt is not the grieving bridegroom Britt had interviewed before he left Miami and disappeared, but an exceptionally clever and heartless serial killer. 

I cannot think of another book in which I was so engaged for the first 80 percent and wanted to throw across the room in the last 20. Buchanan's writing is lively, the dialogue sparkles, the twists—in the first 80 percent—terrific. We learn only after 50 pages of Britt's narration that she's pregnant—a surprise, but one that works. There's an exciting set piece in which the cold case detectives chase a fugitive around Miami that reminded me of Carl Hiaasen.

What doesn't work (for me at least) is Britt's winding up in a cabin in Alaska trying to rescue Holt's latest conquest in partnership with—as she learns too late—Holt's male partner and true love and being rescued at the last minute by a female Miami police captain who had also been the lover of the father of Britt's child. Is all that clear? In the book it's clear but also preposterous. 

I can imagine that one of the challenges of using your reporter's background and war stories in fiction is that often what really happens—the coincidences, the mistakes, the wrong turns—in real life sound preposterous in fiction. Perhaps Britt could have connected with and unknowingly working with Holt's partner, and perhaps she could have followed Holt and his most recent bride to Alaska on the paper's credit card. But I don't believe it.