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 There are some hilarious incongruities in the novel, occasioned by the fact that thoughts are more uncensored than speech. And Nanase’s clairvoyance also gives rise to some unusual dramatic moments: in chapter 4, for example, Nanase narrowly escapes rape because she is able to read her attacker’s intentions.
Reviewed by P.P.O. Kane
The Maid
By Yasutaka Tsutsui
Translated by Adam Kabat
Alma Books, March 2010
ISBN: 9781846880995
The main character in this novel is Nanase, a maid who can read minds.
In each chapter she enters a different household and encounters thereby a new physical or moral ill – whether that be dirt and filth or vanity and infidelity or incest and violence. Nanase is rather like a novelist: she participates in the emotions of each family member, and her clairvoyance is a curse as well as a gift.
The Maid might be characterised as episodic, since each chapter is a variation on a theme. Perhaps chapter 5 is an exception. There, Nanase learns something about her father’s ESP abilities and the origins of her own unusual talent. But this quest for self-knowledge is not developed further in the following three chapters.
There are some hilarious incongruities in the novel, occasioned by the fact that thoughts are more uncensored than speech. And Nanase’s clairvoyance also gives rise to some unusual dramatic moments: in chapter 4, for example, Nanase narrowly escapes rape because she is able to read her attacker’s intentions.
Only in the closing paragraph of chapter 6 does the author lose me rather - the import here is that women are happier when they are beaten, a quite repugnant point of view – otherwise he uses his conceit well and to the reader’s enjoyment. He puts many an inventive spin on the possibilities opened up by Nanase’s gift, even allowing her to play a quasi-malicious role in the lives of others.
This is a ‘slipstream’ novel (to use the fashionable term) and quite a good one as it happens. The translation by Adam Kabat is excellent.
About the reviewer: P.P.O. Kane lives and works in Manchester, England. He welcomes responses to his reviews and you can reach him at ludic@europe.com
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