Kaho Nakayama
Sentimental Education
(Kodansha, 2000)
349 pages
A sweeping love story that shares the title of Gustave Flaubert’s influential work and has been compared to Fingersmith by Sarah Waters.
Nachi was abandoned by her mother on the day she was born. She spent her first three years in an orphanage before being adopted by a childless couple. Even after she grows into a beautiful woman—an accomplished architect with a husband and daughter—the emotional scarring of her early childhood compels her to maintain a lonely detachment in her own world.
Rio’s parents weren’t much more than juvenile delinquents. They each abandoned her in their own turn, and she was raised amid yakuza and then by her mother’s family. In junior high school, Rio discovers the drama of the theater, and channels her passionate energy into acting, as well as writing and directing plays.
Little surprise that when these two meet, it’s like a lightning bolt. Perhaps their early abandonment issues are what enable their connection, but the bond between them is immediate. Although Nachi is unhappy in her marriage, she cannot imagine leaving her child and doing to her daughter what was done to herself. Nor can she live without Rio, though, and she must confront the damaging loss that has motivated the choices she has made up until now.
Nakayama’s prose quietly inhabits the lives and minds of these two women. Charting the emotional development of each of them, the narrative characterizes Nachi and Rio’s pain and loneliness in the years leading up to when their paths cross, and the blissful intimacy that they discover once they find each other. The reader is enmeshed in their sentimental idiosyncrasies and their star-crossed love affair.
The author:
Kaho Nakayama was born in Nagoya, Japan, in 1960. She graduated from Waseda University in Tokyo. Nakayama led a theatrical troupe—acting, writing, and directing—before she made her literary debut in 1993 with The Stoop-Shouldered Prince.
In addition to the bestselling Sentimental Education, she has published several novels, including Bones of an Angel, which won the Asahi New Writers’ Literary Award, and To the Abyss of the White Rose, which received the Yamamoto Shugoro Prize.
Nakayama’s finely-honed prose, intense lyricism, and dreamy flights of imagination have established her distinct literary style, and her new works are always eagerly awaited by her avid readers.
SAMPLE
The best thing for Nachi was that this house had a cat. The presence of the small, silent animal, the soft touch of its fur, the creature’s warmth—these things soothed Nachi’s loneliness. Little Nachi brought the even smaller cat into bed with her. Nachi liked to sleep with it curled up on her chest. In fact, all she really wanted was for someone to treat her the same way. Nachi had found something onto which she could lavish her affection. By the way that she cared for the cat, she was unconsciously projecting her own desire to be loved.
Nachi was not able to accept her adoptive parents’ kindness. Chiyo took her along when she went shopping, and even when she offered to buy her things or asked Nachi to tell her if there was something that she wanted, Nachi refrained, saying that she didn’t need anything. This always seemed to make Chiyo sad. Nachi was completely disinterested, lacking any self-assertion. At the toy store or the candy counter, seeing other children whining, Buy me this, buy me that, Nachi instead watched their parents’ faces, peering at their expressions with baited breath, expecting hysteria to break out at any moment. Offended by their children’s selfishness, wouldn’t they abandon these kids someday, somewhere? Children couldn’t survive on their own, they had to rely on their parents to take care of them. For that reason, children shouldn’t displease their parents. Unaware of this, these children who foolishly bawled and flailed about like monkeys seemed extremely pathetic to Nachi.
But to adults, she must have seemed like a pitiable child. She wore the clothes that Chiyo bought for her without a single complaint, but on the other hand, she never seemed happy either. When Chiyo was late picking her up from the nursery, even when she was the last one and had to wait with the head teacher, Nachi never seemed sad. It was as if she had already given up.
Sometimes Chiyo was late picking her up and she was the last one but Nachi didn’t think there was anything she could do about being left behind like this. One day, suddenly, people had appeared to adopt her, so if one day, suddenly, no one came to pick her up, it wouldn’t seem strange to her. She wondered what would happen to her then. Maybe she would go back to the protective home. Or perhaps the nice head teacher would take her into her own home.
She expected nothing from anybody. That was the one thing that the young Nachi had learned to get by on in this world. She was a lot like a stray cat. She silently ate the food that was offered to her, but she didn’t trust people. She wasn’t used to being held or caressed, so she bared her claws. She had the ability to instantly discern which people might give her food and which people might throw rocks at her. No matter how hungry she was, she never played up to anyone. She was prepared to accept whatever fate befell her. She licked and nursed her wounds herself. Like a cat, her eyes were startlingly limpid. And she knew, instinctively, that she was alone from the day she was born until the day she died.
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