This was Neuman's reaction to the 2011 Fukushima disaster, as experienced by Mr Yoshie Watanabe, a double-hibakusha who survived the Hiroshima bomb as a child but lost all his family to the Nagasaki one. Watanabe, retired and living in Tokyo after a long business career spent mostly overseas, is an oddly elusive character and Neuman doesn't claim to get inside his head: we see him mostly through the eyes of his four ex-girlfriends (in Paris, New York, Buenos Aires and Madrid) and through the Argentinian journalist Jorge Pinedo who is collating information from the ladies and is hoping to interview Watanabe but never quite catches up with him.

Watanabe seems to be a kind of serial exile, someone who has been made to feel by his hibakusha status that he doesn't quite belong in the realm of the living any more, and who also feels a serious disconnect with the Japanese culture that he has grown up in, but is never quite at home anywhere else either. Neuman has a lot of quiet fun with the successive layers of cultural and linguistic confusion observed by the women and with the things they tell us about postwar Japan as well as about fifties France, sixties/seventies New York, eighties Argentina and nineties Spain, and about the notions we have of rootedness and exile. When Watanabe travels to the Fukushima region in the closing section of the book and spends time talking to the — mostly elderly — residents who have stayed in the danger area around the nuclear plant despite the advice to evacuate, he seems to find an emotional connection that gives him a kind of closure.

A very interesting and ambitious book. I'm not sure if Neuman has quite got away with it in the way he did in El viajero del siglo — it's hard for the reader to deal with an opaque character like Watanabe, especially when the four women are all modelled in such detail, and it's disorienting in a novel to have a string of serious relationships that just stop without any kind of emotional repercussions. But it's certainly worth plunging into to decide for yourself. ( )

Well written; well translated; full of interesting ideas; no coherent whole; disappointing; verrrrrrrry long; no likeable characters; meandered all over the place; good, interesting structure; promised more than it delivered; missed opportunity. ( )

Gorgeous prose but I was a little distracted by the artifice of the language. Which is contradictory,I know, but what I mean to say is that at times the beauty of the words overshadowed their meaning. An overpolished feeling kept me at arm's length, especially in the sections where first-person narrators recount past experiences with the central character. These first-person observations seemed excessively formal sometimes, and a little shallow at other times.

So I'm coming out of this read both disappointed and intrigued. I feel the need to keep looking for a fictional transformation of the Fukushima disaster that goes deeper. And I want to keep reading this author. What I liked: The reflection on the two nuclear disasters that have shaped Japanese self-identity, and how these events might affect a sensitive man who had live through both. ( )

The author seems to know everything about everything. I was unconvinced by this Argentinian male’s vast store of knowledge about the Japanese, women, nuclear energy, Paris, New York, World War II, and on and on. I found it all really tedious and made it only to the 35% point. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher. ( )

‘’An earthquake fractures the present, shutters perspective, shifts memory plates.’’

Joshi Watanabe returns to a tumultuous past, in the aftermath of the devastating Fukushima earthquake in 2011. His recollections are centred around his relationships with women around the world and Japan’s position since the 40s. An ambitious premise, but the writer falls short. Extremely short, in my opinion.

Watanabe’s lovers are given what seems to be a powerful, determined and confident voice. But their desperate focus on sex diminished them in my eyes, and every character (Watanabe included) was so cold, so distant, so impossibly empty… The story takes us on a journey to Tokyo, Paris, New York, Buenos Aires and Madrid and touches, primarily, on the status of Japan following the war, the difficult questions raised by Japan’s actions during WWII but there is no mention of Japan’s unimaginable atrocities against China. Naturally, there is extensive reference to the events in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, all the way to the era of the Cold War, Chernobyl and out times.

Now there was a significant problem I faced which ruined the book irreversibly. Watanabe’s remarks were nationalistic and misogynistic. Was the writer’s intention to make him appear thus? Did his musings reflect the writer’s own opinions? Regardless of the answer, it became a chore to read once repetition and dubious political remarks got in the way. The anti-nuclear message is evident, and rightly so, but there is a thin line between so-called activism and ignorance of the historical facts. The need to justify the actions of the Japanese army during WWII while turning the blind eye to the massacre in China was infuriating. It was ridiculous. It was horrible. The remark that Germany ‘’is the bravest nation’’ because they ‘’had the guts to admit’’ the atrocities was the phrase that made me want to throw my e-reader away. Really? Does the Argentinian writer believe that a mea culpa absolves you? The torture my grandfather went through in Dachau isn’t erased by a billion ‘’I’m sorry’’. The burnt villages, the executed families, the millions of Jews, the millions of victims of the Nazis tyranny, the soldiers of the Allies that lived Hell on Earth in the battlefields of the Pacific aren’t forgotten because a politician whispers an insincere ‘’I’m sorry’’. I suggest Churchill’s biography to the writer in order to understand what it means to be a fighter to free the world from darkness. If the writer wishes to feel pity for the Nazis, the Japanese, the Turks and every army that caused terror during the WWII, there are many ‘’squads’’ he can join. I am disgusted. This is my opinion and whether others disagree with me or not doesn’t interest me in the slightest. Each one of us answers to his own private code of morality. I answer to the wound of my family’s torment during WWII.

In addition, the focus on sex was cheap, voyeuristic, degrading. One more reason for me to throw this away.

Yes, the prose may have been beautiful at times, and the spirit of each city was depicted in a direct, moving way. But, in my opinion, political and social themes were used in a lengthy lecture with the reader as the target audience. And I don’t like being lectured by writers who most obviously retain a frightening kind of political agendas. Perhaps, we should leave the tremendously talented Japanese writers to write about Japan.

ARC from Farrar, Straus and Giroux and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. ( )