マイクロバス

Nobuo, thirty-five, appears to be intellectually disabled and hardly speaks or shows emotion, yet he drives well, and daily he carries Old Yoshino, a distant relative, along the twisting coast road between Oita and Miyazaki. As the bus goes on, broken pieces of his childhood surface: over and over, an outing with his father to dig up beetle larvae near Yoshino's house, and hints that his exasperated father once threw him in among pigs, while his mother may have tried to drown herself with him, though perhaps it was Yoshino who led him into the sea. The book adds a story about an elderly woman who believes herself a mermaid.

AI-generated summary

About the book

Form

Novel

Length

220 pages in the original

Set in

Japan

First published

2008 by Shinchosha

Author's age

38 when first published

ISBN

9784103090717 (original)