The extrasensory is an emotion scattered uncontrollably over reality, a mad rush full of passions, feelings of ecstatic fullness or even air emptiness. Water is a challenge for the senses. As soon as it passes like a whisper of a stream, it becomes a violent and grave scream in a cascade. Hence its symbolism with life itself with its calm channels as well as its floods, its meanders and its deltas.
Kawakami is one of those authors who makes you perceive what always escapes in any metaphorical transition from stream to mighty river or vice versa. Because beyond the strange placidity of observing our waters defeated by the inertia of time, there is consciousness. In other words, the discovery that, indeed, the river will never again be the same opportunity to cool off, before the darkest clouds awaken their darkest sparkles.
A brother and sister return to the home of their childhood, to the place of happiness, desires and forbidden secrets about to be revealed. Luminous memories mingle with those that break through, devastating everything: the delicate touch of linen mixes with the tumult fleeing the attack with sarin gas; the painful silences of the family with the sound of mountain insects.
With the almost artisanal mastery that characterizes her, Hiromi Kawakami once again builds a fragile and sensual world in which sparkles and shadows embrace in a unique way. Written after the tragedy of the earthquake and tsunami that devastated Japan in 2011, this novel embodies, with all its contradictions, the desire to live after the catastrophe.
You can now buy the novel "Suddenly I hear the voice of water", by Hiromi Kawakami, here: