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One Morning Like a Bird [Paperback]

Andrew Miller
4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
RRP: £7.99
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Book Description

23 July 2009

Tokyo, 1940. While Japan's war against China escalates, young Yuji Takano clings to his cocooned life: his beloved evenings of French conversation at Monsieur Feneon's, visits to the bathhouse with friends, his books, his poetry.

But conscription looms and the mood turns against foreigners, just when Yuji gets entangled with Feneon's daughter. As the nation heads towards conflict with the Allies, Yuji must decide where his duty - and his heart - lies.



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Product details

  • Paperback: 384 pages
  • Publisher: Sceptre (23 July 2009)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0340825154
  • ISBN-13: 978-0340825150
  • Product Dimensions: 13.1 x 2.6 x 19.7 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 158,328 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Review

'[Yuji] is a character so well realised as to engage all of our sympathies' (Peter Carty, Independent)

'A revelatory perspective on an Eastern city in the second world war . . .The prose is as delicate as a Japanese print' (David Grylls, Sunday Times 2008-10-20)

'Not only does he combine delicious literary conceits with thought-provoking explorations into the human condition, he has the rare gift of tossing out perfect sentences that make you stop in your tracks' (Claire Allfree, Metro 2008-10-20)

'Miller's delicate prose most closely recalls the tone of emotional restraint in Kazuo Ishiguro's early novels . . . Crisply defined characters offer a foil to Yuji's progressive ruminations, which Miller deftly coheres into a typically bittersweet resolution.' (James Urquhart, Independent on Sunday 2008-10-20)

'The frank simplicity of Miller's prose, and his search for truth in the reality of the quotidian feels (to this Western reader) convincingly Japanese. Miller places his words and plot developments carefully, like the smooth grey pebbles of a Zen garden, with all but the most essential adjectives weathered away. There are moments of beauty, truth and irony.' (Helen Brown, Daily Telegraph 2008-10-20)

'Deeply moving, written with loving attention to language, it felt like Pasternak back from the dead.' (Tom Adair, Scotsman 2008-10-20)

'Detail by delicate detail Miller conjures Yuji's dim, mysterious world of gradual dissolution." (Natalie Sandison, The Times 2008-09-13)

'Miller's Japanese characters are densely believable, and his recreation of their world is a real achievement' (Christopher Tayler, Guardian 2008-09-13)

'Miller's writing is cinematic; it has a heightened visual sense and it shifts smoothly from dialogue to mood to location. At all times the author is in command' (TLS 2008-10-09)

'A quite beautifully written coming-of-age novel with a completely convincing Japanese hero and a precisely, lovingly rendered evocation of imperial Japan' (Harry Ritchie, Daily Mail 2008-10-09)

From the Author

I have long had some curious affinity with Japan. I cannot remember exactly when it started, or how. Was it when, as a young schoolboy, I clambered into the hands of a giant bronze Buddha in the grounds of a London museum? However it began, I became a haphazard Japanophile, and in 1994 I went to live there, finding it as rich in contradictions as anywhere else on the map. My home was on the edge of that sprawling megalopolis that is modern Tokyo, a frustrating, exhilarating city, its style a kind of Blade Runner Gothic. It is, I think, a very different place to the 1940 Tokyo Yuji Takano uneasily inhabits in One Morning Like a Bird. American bombers and Japanese town planners have done their work with great thoroughness. Even the broad and sometimes treacherous Sumida river, a place celebrated in countless poems and stories, is all but buried under concrete now.

Writing the novel, I sought to recreate pre-1945 Tokyo from books and photographs and films. There were moments when I was struck by the sheer oddness and difficulty of what I was doing. Not only was the story set in Japan but the action is seen exclusively from a Japanese perspective. I remembered, however, a similar unease when writing Ingenious Pain, and facing the problem of entering the experience of a man living in the mid-eighteenth century. Was Yuji's world more foreign to me than that? It might conceivably be less so. And what is more fundamental to the practice of fiction than the belief that all of us share some common material, something that remains impervious to cultural difference, or to differences of gender and age? Writing is a tool of curiosity. I wanted to find out how it felt to be Yuji Takano. I wanted to live as a young Japanese poet. I wanted to be twenty-five again!

I started the book in the months before my daughter's birth. Pregnancy, birth, babyhood, parenthood, all quickly assumed an importance I had not entirely planned for. Children toddled or crawled or skipped into the manuscript as though the text's surface was full of half-open doors. Yuji, self-regarding, and imagining himself to be some sort of Asian Arthur Rimbaud, is totally unprepared for them. I thoroughly enjoyed his discomfort; it was, of course, the mirror to my own.

It is January 2008 as I write this, and wet as a Japanese June. My daughter and the novel have passed their third birthdays. The child is pretty much perfect, the novel very much not so. I encourage myself with the thought that imperfection, like asymmetry, is part of the Japanese aesthetic, though who that will convince, Heaven knows. It is time, however, to get onto my creaking knees, and with much formality, and a deep bow, to slide the book across the mats towards whoever that is sitting there so patiently in the shadows... --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.


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Customer Reviews

4.2 out of 5 stars
4.2 out of 5 stars
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
11 of 12 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars From the little known world of 1940s Tokyo 2 Feb 2009
By A Common Reader TOP 50 REVIEWER VINE™ VOICE
Format:Hardcover
Andrew Miller has created a memorable interpretation of life in Japan as the encroaching climate of World War II changed the lives of his characters forever.

The story is focused on Yuji Tanako, a young man who has been fortunate enough to live on an allowance provided by his father, an eminent professor at the elite Imperial University in Tokyo. However, Yuji's father loses his tenure over mildly critical comments against the Emperor, and as the story opens, Yuji's allowance is scrapped.

Yuji has started to make a living as a writer, having published Electric Dragonfly, a book of poetry (in a nice touch, we see Yuji going round second hand book stalls to seek out his book and place it at the top of the pile). He works occasionally as a hack writer providing commercially-sponsored articles for magazines and newspapers. He also is a member of a literary circle led by a Frenchman, Monsieur Feneon, whose 19 year old daughter, Alissa, exerts her own charms on Yuji at a later stage of the book.

A main theme of the book is the gradual encroachment of the war on Yuji's life. Young men he knows have already been conscripted, and he has only avoided it because of a congenital chest problem which for now has disqualified him (as time progresses, the front-line demands more and more previously exempted men despite their medical problems which are not after all such a great concern).

Yuji has a rich inner life, and it is interesting to see where the author has populated his thoughts with a Japanese flavour, seemingly at odds with some of the European ideals found in the books which Yuji so admires.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
3.0 out of 5 stars Takes a long time to get going 23 Jan 2012
By S. B. Kelly VINE™ VOICE
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
For the first hundred pages, I wondered if I was going to persevere with this, which surprised me as I've always found Miller very readable. He writes beautifully here, as always, but the story is very slow to get going and I had serious problems with the viewpoint character: Yuji. He is spoiled, lazy, self-important (he published a volume of poetry that sold 37 copies) and has the infuriating habit of repeating things that people say to him back to them, which makes it astonishing that he doesn't get slapped several times a day.

The novel begins to take off only when he gets involved with Alissa, mixed-race daughter of his French friend, who simultaneously attracts and repels him with her otherness. As the war with China rages on (and the reader knows that a catastrophic war with the US is just round the corner), it seems that Yuji's weak chest will no longer save him from the draft. At this point he stops faffing about and starts behaving like a man and not a spoiled boy. It took a long time, but I finally cared what happened to him.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars A worthwhile read 25 April 2010
Format:Hardcover
This novel grew on me slowly. At first, I found it hard to remember all the Japanese characters with their Japanese names, and re-reading sections was essential (a practice I don't mind if the end result is worthwhile, and this time it was). It also took me a while to warm to the protagonist, Yuji. However, by the end of the book I had found it a very moving and elegantly-written novel. Yuji grows on the reader just as he grows and matures as a young man trying to find his way.

I don't know much about Japan, but it captured the culture convincingly, at least for me.
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars A brillliant writer back on form 28 May 2009
Format:Hardcover
Because I loved his other books, I was disappointed not to like The Optimists, and when I started reading this novel, I was afraid it, too, might disappoint. However, once I got used to its Japanese pacing, I found myself looking forward each day to reading more. By the last quarter of the book, I was staying up far too late, captured by the story and by the struggles, internal and external, of the young protagonist. This is a masterful effort by a great storyteller with a beautiful grasp of language who is never afraid to try something new. I highly recommend it, along with Oxygen and Ingenious Pain.
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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful
By Jackie
Format:Paperback
Ingenious Pain is one of my favourite books, so when I spotted that Andrew Miller had written a book set in Japan, a country I love reading about, I was very excited.

The book is set in Tokyo during WWII and focuses on Yuri, a young man who is unable to fight due to ill-health. He becomes friends with a French trader and his family, but as the war progresses this friendship causes him to have to make some difficult decisions.

As with all books written by Andrew Miller the writing is very good - it is simple, but effective. The book is well researched and explains the lives of the Japanese during the war well. My only criticism would be that it lacks the Japanese atmosphere that I love to read about - I can't picture the sights, sounds and smells of 1940s Japan - this is a minor problem though. The characters are all well developed and believable, and the plot, although not having a fast pace, is engaging.

The lives of Japanese civilians during WWII isn't something I've read about before, so seeing things through their eyes gives a whole new layer to the European war stories we are so used to reading.

I admire Andrew Miller for branching out into a new area and being able to create such a diverse range of books. I will continue to keep an eye out for his new releases and this book will ensure he keeps his place on my list of favourite authors.

Recommended.
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