It’s a fairly long novel, and although it took me a while to finish it, I found it very engaging as an epic novel. Although Japanese is my first language, I live in an environment where English and French—languages that are not my native tongues—are spoken. In that context, I sometimes keenly feel a distance that, no matter how hard I try, I can never fully bridge. Reading this novel made me reflect anew on that “linguistic distance” I had vaguely sensed all along. I also found the conflict...
