A modern woman dreams of life in classic Japan

While I believe that many people in Japan believe in reincarnation (which, one could argue, makes as much sense as a belief in heaven), and while Hiromi Kawakami never mentions reincarnation in her latest novel, The Third Love, it is one way to understand the story.

Riko, a middle-class homemaker and mother in her forties, tells the story. She fell in love with Naruya—Naa-chan—when she was quite young and he was almost twenty, began having sex with him in her teens, and married him. She takes koto lessons from a neighborhood woman, Michiko-sensei, and her closest friend is the school janitor, Takaoka-san.  The novel's first fifty pages introduce these characters and sketch something about them.  Naa-chan has a  lover in Kyushu. Michiko-sensei has a son. Takaoka-san disappears on travels for long periods. On page fifty, Riko begins dreaming about her life in Edo-era Japan (1600-1868).

She is a girl in a poor rural family--one with too many mouths to feed.  Her parents sell her and she becomes an indentured servant in Edo's Yoshiwara or red-light district. She eventually rises to become an oiran (a high-ranking courtesan) named Shungetsu. (Much of how this happens this will sound familiar to Memoirs of a Geisha Geisha readers.) She falls in love with a customer a middle-ranking samurai and eventually tries to run away with him. It does not end well.

In the next section she is a lady-in-waiting to an aristocratic princess in the Heian-era (794-1185). I was interested that  Kawakami tells readers a lot more about the sex lives of promiscuous Heian aristocrats, both male and female than than The Tale of Genji or The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon tells readers (or I've been reading the wrong translation). She falls in love with one of the princess's admirers, someone reminiscent of Prince Genji, the "Shining Prince." It does not end well.

If Riko is the reincarnation of these two other women, it is unusual that she is able to recall those earlier lives not only in her dreams but when she's awake. Moreover, her friend Takaoka-san may be appearing in those dreams as her samurai love in the Yoshiwara and as the prince lover in the Heian court. If Naa-chan is her first love and Takaoka-san is her second, who is her third? I think that is a question readers of this thought-provoking novel (translated by Ted Goosen) will have to answer for themselves.