The mystery at the heart of The Lake lies in Nakajima's past-a traumatic childhood event that has left him 'extremely frail.' As Nakajima begins to heal, in part due to Chihiro's strength, and in part through visits to the titular lake, the tragic events of his past come to light. Neither of us took these moments for granted, and they made us truly content. It felt like we were imitating some sort of lifestyle we didn't really know anything about, playing at being a happy family.

As Chihiro says, of an evening the two share a dinner of boiled tofu after work: One of the delights of the novel is Yoshimoto's finely drawn description of the tentative domestic life created by these characters. Chihiro and Nakajima, who is mourning the less-recent loss of his own mother, gently forge a bond across the divide of their collective grief. Having recently lost her mother to illness, Chihiro returns to her apartment and begins a relationship with Nakajima, a neighbor with a window across the road from her own, with whom she has shared glances, smiles, and waves for quite some time. Like many of Yoshimoto's characters, Chihiro is a bit offbeat she comes from an unusual family, and she's happy, yet lonely, living an independent life. Chihiro, the protagonist and narrator of The Lake, is a muralist living in Tokyo. Banana Yoshimoto's most recent novel to appear in English, The Lake, is decidedly a study of two, but rather than a dialogue, the short novel functions in many ways as a dyad, a painting of two figures, a complex study of those figures in relationship to the ghosts of their respective pasts, and of course, to each other. Michael EmmerichMelville House, 2011It's been said that two characters make a dialogue, and three create a scene.

The lake by banana yoshimoto