Songs for Ghosts

This hugely ambitious story drawing on Japanese myth and legend also takes inspiration from Puccini’s Madame Butterfly. Add in ghosts and descriptions of ancient musical instruments played mainly by visually impaired musicians, and clearly this is going to be a rich mix. In her previous novel Catfish Rolling, the author, who is herself from Canada, Japan and Ireland, memorably describes the search for missing family members after a catastrophic earthquake based on the actual 2011 event. The mixture of magical realism and contemporary realities won over many readers.

This story starts with 17-year-old Adam, a gay Japanese-American still at school and who has just split up with a much-loved fellow pupil. He lives more or less amicably with his father and a much younger stepmother, but on a trip to the attic he comes across a previously lost diary dating from 1911. Written by a young Japanese girl living in Nagasaki and also torn between two worlds, her diary then becomes the book’s second narrative. Within it she describes being haunted while also hearing distant melodies.  Unbelieving at first, Adam changes his mind when her own ghost starts appearing. He eventually determines to travel to Nagasaki in the hope that all the various ghosts’ secrets plus his own questions about his true identity will finally be revealed.

The author writes how she learned to play the cello in order to make describing Adam’s own musical efforts on this instrument more realistic. This high level of personal commitment helps make for a quite extraordinary novel, crammed with glimpses of an ancient culture largely unknown in the West. Its sheer length and the density of its prose may put off some readers; for others, it could well be the most fascinating story they will encounter this year.