Lisa's Reviews > A Man

Who are you? Who would you be if you could leave your life and be someone else? Would you have regrets? Does your identity change with your experiences? And can you love someone if their life is based upon a lie?
These are the questions Kiichiro Hirano asks in his novel A Man.

This is my first foray into Japanese literature and I was intrigued by this look into modern Japan and the philosophical bent of this novel.

The 2011 earthquake plays in the background throughout the novel. It brings up the aftermath of the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake in which the Japanese Army, the police, and vigilantes murdered an estimated 6,000 ethnic Koreans, Chinese, other foreigners, and Japanese socialists. The story's protagonist, Kido, is a middle-aged third generation Korean-Japanese lawyer. As right-winged Japanese become more xenophobic and hate speech and anti-Korean demonstrations increase (sound familiar?) Kido begins to expand the question of "Who am I?" into "Did I make the right choice?"

Through most of the story Kido is investigating a dead man. A widow discovers that her husband is not the man he claimed to be, so Kido sets off to find out who he really was and what happened to the man he declared himself to be. During the course of the search Kido explores his own identity.

"To throw away everything and become someone else--imagining doing this undeniably aroused in Kido a certain beguiling excitation. It was not necessarily only in the midst of despair that someone might be placed at the mercy of such a yearning but also when happiness was interrupted by ennui."

“What is the past to love? Kido wondered as he thought about Rié’s late husband. I suppose it’s a fact that the present is a result of the past. In other words, one is able to love someone in the present thanks to the past that made them the way they are.”

"... it’s not as if you love someone once and that’s it. You renew your love again and again over the long haul, through everything that happens along the way.”

This is a slow paced novel; it gives you plenty of time to mull over the questions Hirano poses and perhaps come up with some answers for your own life.