the perfect world of miwako sumida goodreads

The Perfect World of Miwako Sumida is both engaging and somber. Before them was an unpaved hiking path with a small, worn sign that read, THIS WAY TO KITSUYAMA. Once they stepped out, fresh air filled their lungs and took away their fatigue. Ryusei and Chie got off at the foot of the mountain. Jizo statues stood by the roadside, some decorated with flowers. The road wound through forests and fields and across bridges over rivers.

On the journey, the bus didn’t make a single stop. Ryusei and Chie were the only passengers. The bus ride from the train station to the mountain was arduous.

In the period before mobile phones, Chie and Ryu’s attempts to trace Miwako’s final days entail a long train journey, a bus ride and a walk. Chie feels guilty for not saving her friend and Fumi worries over her brother’s despair after Miwako’s death.Ĭhie and Ryusei set out to find the woods where Miwako took her life in a small town hours from Tokyo.

The next two sections of the novel are narrated by the third-person perspectives of Miwako’s friend, Chie, and Ryusei’s older sister, an artist named Fumi. The Perfect World of Miwako Sumida, Clarissa Goenawan (Soho Press, March 2020) Regulars simply called the place Ikeda Bookshop, and I’d frequented it since high school. The placard had fallen down a long time ago, and he had never bothered to fix it. Screw holes marked the place where the shop signboard should have hung.

Yet the pair becomes inseparable after bonding at a quaint English bookstore.Īn old man named Ikeda owned a small secondhand bookshop around the corner. She values their friendship too much to risk ruining it should they date and break up. As much as Ryusei asks her out, he cannot convince Miwako to date him. The first part of the novel is told through the first person perspective of Ryusei, a tall, attractive student who falls in love with the reserved and plain Miwako. Miwako and her friends are mostly second year students at Waseda University. Goenawan captures a time-1990-when Japanese young adults have few cares apart from studying and forging friendships before separating into closely defined gender roles of salarymen and office ladies. Set mainly in Tokyo, Indonesian-born Clarissa Goenawan’s second novel, The Perfect World of Miwako Sumida, is a haunting story of friendship in young adulthood and how-even before social media-people are not often as they appear. University student Miwako Sumida has committed suicide and her small group of friends are caught completely off guard, yet determined to search for answers behind her death.

The perfect world of miwako sumida goodreads