Book: WATER MOON

Author: Samantha Sotto Yambao

Published by: Bantam

Price: Rs 799

Literature from Japan is often steeped in surrealism, with authors like Banana Yoshimoto and Yoko Ogawa crafting intricate worlds that blur the lines between magic and reality. The bizarre thus coexists seamlessly with the mundane in Japanese fiction: in Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore, a man can fluently speak to cats; a convenience store always seems to have just what one needs in Sonoko Machida’s The Convenience Store by the Sea; in The Chibineko Kitchen, bowls of food served in a restaurant can bring back the dearly departed momentarily.

In this same vein, Samantha Sotto Yambao leads her readers into a peculiar pawnshop nestled within the banal confines of a ramen shop in Tokyo. However, only those who truly need it can find the pawnshop.

The novel begins with Hana, the owner of the pawnshop, waking up one morning to find that her father has vanished and that her store has been ransacked. It is at this moment that Keishin, a customer, stumbles into the pawnshop and offers to help Hana locate her father and recover one of the store’s most prized items.

Their sojourn bends the scientific laws of time and space, which Keishin, a scientist, holds dear. The duo jumps through time gaps, moves through two-dimensional paper towns, visits a library of lost things and lives with ghosts who do not remember their deaths. Life will never be the same for Keishin, who — along with the readers — begins to question the very nature of reality. For Hana, Keishin represents a choice, one that has the potential to change the course of her life. In the end, both of them must make choices and learn to take responsibility for the consequences.

Water Moon’s strongest bits are when Yambao breaks and restructures the world as we know it to conjure new worlds within it. She plays with the laws of physics and, in a delightful stroke of whimsy, she uses a scientist as one of her protagonists to upend these laws. In the worlds that the author conjures, paper cranes can fly and puddles can take you to the homes of your loved ones. These are places we could dream of but would have a hard time accepting as reality. Like us, Keishin is initially sceptical about the thin line that separates the magic from the real and is perplexed about how easy it is to cross it: “Compared to all the hours of work I need to do in a lab just to prove a hypothesis, jumping into a pond is… relatively easy.”

Yambao’s book is just like one of her magic puddles. Once the reader overcomes the initial scepticism, it is rather easy to relax and let one’s grip on reality loosen — “You can go anywhere. Be anyone. All you have to do is walk through a door.” In opening the portals to these fantastical worlds, the book starts a dialogue between the certainties of science and the limitless possibilities beyond it.