New Year’s Resolution

It’s to use this blog as a reading journal and record everything I read for a year. One of my first reads of the year and a fine start was an absolutely cracking ghost story, STRANGERS, by a Japanese writer, Taichi Tamada. The narrator, a middle-aged scriptwriter, divorced, disillusioned, takes a sentimental journey to the Toyko suburb where he grew up and where his parents both died when he was twelve. He meets a man and a woman who closely resemble his dead parents and returns again and again for the comfort of being with them, but things are not what they seem in more ways than one . . . The novel is a little like THE TURN OF THE SCREW in its use of a possibly unreliable narrator and rivals it in scariness, but it’s also a touching exploration of love and loss and grief.