I forgot which bit was pretending and which bit was me.
Emily Itami, Fault Lines
Fault Lines was partially my last read of 2021 and my first completed book this year. Emily Itami’s debut novel paints the portrait of Mizuki, a Japanese mother and housewife, walking the thin line between comfortable familiarity and thrilling possibility. When a magnetic man named Kiyoshi stumbles into her path, Mizuki grabs hold of the chance to reclaim the woman she once dreamed of becoming. As her story of self-discovery twists toward its inevitable conclusion, Mizuki finds herself making a choice between what she desires and what she needs.
What can I say, it was a pleasure to follow Mizuki along her bumpy road filled with bliss one moment and despondency the next. Atmospheric is the one word I would use to describe this story. It’s the kind of honest depiction of struggles with relationships, motherhood, and infidelity that inspires thought on a deeper level beyond black and white. Itami tells Mizuki’s story through glimpses of her memories, passing moments shared with her detached husband, and internal musings creating beautiful prose. It isn’t often that you read a story like this about a complex and conflicted woman.
Reading this novel reminded me of the feeling I had watching Lost in Translation for the first time, following a young American woman named Charlotte through Tokyo as an invisible foreign visitor. An overwhelming sense of loneliness permeates both of these stories as the women attempt to find their own happiness beyond indifferent relationships. If you’ve ever felt like you were stuck in a current, helpless to change direction, then you will see a bit of yourself in this story.
Mizuki’s journey toward self-discovery encompasses what it means to be a woman caught up in cultural and societal expectations. Women exist within a binary; they can only be the selfish career woman or doting mother, but never something of both. Exhausted with the domestic monotony she has fallen into with her husband, she begins an affair with a man named Kiyoshi, who reminds her of what life used to be (or could have been); filled with interesting people, glitzy bars, and the shimmering lights of the city. She yearns for something more, everything she feels she cannot have.
Itami handles Mizuki’s affair with Kiyoshi in a way that really struck me. It isn’t posed as being good or bad; there is no moral judgment made on behalf of the author or characters. Mizuki’s husband and Kiyoshi are simply representative of desires at odds with one another. Kiyoshi offers her everything she thought she wanted, giving her the chance to live a different version of her life, to see what might have been if the scales had tipped the other way. Every serious subject in this story is handled in a bitingly honest and graceful way. At the heart of Itami’s story is what it means to be a woman today.
Something about Mizuki’s story felt comforting, maybe it was just nice to watch a woman be unapologetically, imperfectly human without unfair judgment dripping throughout the text. Even after all of this writing it’s difficult for me to describe this book accurately, and I think you do need to read it to full understand how it works. I adored this book and gave my first read 5 stars.
The Rummy Writer 