母影

A girl in the early years of primary school, who has no friends and no place of her own at school, spends her time lying low behind the scenes at the massage salon that employs her mother. Behind the curtain her mother 'repairs the broken parts' of customers, who make odd noises; the girl can tell something is not normal but has no words for it, and her mother seems to suffer more each day. Told entirely through the child's partial, physical way of seeing, which never sorts things into good and bad, the story follows her as she reads how others react to her, as she is picked on at school, and as she hopes her mother's 'strangeness' will go no further.

AI-generated summary

About the book

Form

Novella

Length

124 pages in the original

Genres

Family (assigned by AI)

Set in

Japan

First published

2020 by Shinchosha

Author's age

36 when first published

ISBN

9784103521426 (original)