Moshi Moshi

This book was a perfect fit for my quiet mood when I started reading it (yesterday), but today I wasn't feeling it; I had to force myself to finish. LOTS of skimming is the only way I made it through. The best parts throughout were the food descriptions.

Healing. A star. Yoshimoto healed her own grief and mine.

This book had a wonderful quality of pulling me into a trance. Banana Yoshimoto's writing is like a soft ephemeral melody. It has the Japanese attention to details, and cherishes the mundane. Little encounters, good food, the comfort in rituals. There's not a lot of plot, a daughter and her mother grieve for a recently passed father. They move to a new part of town, and try in their own ways to reinvent themselves. This is also a love story about Shimokitazawa, the neighborhood in Tokyo they move to. By exploring the local shops and restaurants, by establishing new patterns, they learn about each other, and slowly heal.

That was what a town was made of.I could sense the daily movements and patterns of people i hadn't even known about few years ago coming in and out of this town like breath. I wasn't alone. There were other people, people I didn't know, coming in and out of this town, too, the same way, and all of that was how a town was made.