As the book opens, Hanne Schubert, living in San Francisco, is finishing the first Japanese to English translation of a book by a celebrated Japanese author. She relates closely to the book’s protagonist and feels she thoroughly understands his personality and motivations. She is convinced her work will be acclaimed as a masterful translation. Her personal life is secondary to her work. Her son and his family live in New York, and she has been estranged from her daughter for six years. Then, she suffers a fall, which injures her brain in an unusual way, rendering her able to speak only Japanese. Feeling isolated, she travels to Japan, where she is profoundly changed by her experiences.

This book is a deep character study of a woman gifted in language but impaired in emotional connections. Hanne is intelligent, confident, disciplined, and hard working. She believes she is “right” about pretty much everything, and anyone that sees life differently is “wrong.” As her own backstory is revealed, she becomes an empathetic character. She is believable and the reader will likely know people with similar traits.

Schuyler subtly explores how people impose their own views on others rather than valuing them for their unique qualities. I think the author does a magnificent job with Hanne’s emotional epiphany. The book also imparts an appreciation of Noh, a Japanese theatrical art. I found myself riveted by the performance scenes. Highly recommended to those that appreciate novels about personal transformations.
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We all have a little cop in our heads. An inner voice that tells us what is necessary and proper to do. Many times this is the voice of our parents, a point of view that we have internalized as a child and have accompanied us all our lives. Hannah Schubert, a respected Japanese-English-language translator, also has a voice of that kind. This is the sound of her German mother, who was strict and meticulous in teaching her through language learning, hard work, devotion and without too many complaints and treats. Hannah had become a kind of replica of her mother. A responsible, serious and thorough working woman, a strict mother to her two children. Hannah is a fifty-three-year-old widow living in San Francisco. Her eldest son, Thomas, is a busy, successful lawyer who lives far away with his family on the East Coast of the United States and Brigitte, her sensitive young daughter, had cut off contact with her six years ago. Hannah knows nothing about her.

We meet Hanna at the end of a year of intensive translation work of a significant Japanese-English novel. She feels she has been very successful in her work and is almost in love with the main character - the musician Jiro. In a nostalgic fit, she goes to visit the town hall where she married many years ago to her Japanese husband whom she loved. When she leaves the building, she stumbles down the stairs. The accident has strange results. Hannah cannot use any of the languages ​​she knows except Japanese. In a fit of despair and loneliness, she decides to go to Japan to lecture at the conference she invited too. This trip will lead her to a surprising encounter.

Nina Schiller manages to build a sensitive and reliable world of a non-young woman who met with some very unpleasant truths about herself. The accident and the journey to Japan become a journey of acquaintance with her internal policeman, with its initial assumptions and as a result of its understanding and change. Of course, language and the work of translation play an essential role in the book. The interpretation is Hanna's work, the center of her life and her pride, but it is also a metaphor. Hannah believes in the power of translation to create meaning in the text. The text discusses more than one facet of understanding, communication and a gap between cultures, people, parents, and children. This is not the first novel that describes an internal change following a journey to a different lifestyle and the encounter between East and West, but this time I felt that the journey, as well as transformation, are real, complex and very personal. And the more personal the mission, the more universal it is, and the more it speaks to me, it is a unique book with exceptional qualities. ( )

Could be Spoilers
I'm not sure how I heard about this book. I should keep track.
I finished it. I read it. I wasn't sure I would but I did. It was OK. The main character reminded me of my mother occasionally, which isn't necessarily a good thing. She sure was a harsh mother. But the daughter was impossible. I am not sure if all the stuff in Japan was more than a device. But it was interesting to see her viewpoint change.

Plus I agree with the other reviewer who pointed out that the main character is an older (50's) woman who has a real life and has sex.

I enjoyed this book a lot for several different reasons: quality prose; excellent characterisation; a subtext; and an ending that was just about perfect, neither too much nor too little. Schuyler is definitely an author to watch.

Hanne, a translator, has just finished work on the book that should cement her career, but accidents and authors intervene. Now she must take a voyage of discovery, internally, and externally.

My very vague plot summary is an effort not to give away too much. There are no great twists to this book, but every event is quite integral, and I found the blurb was one of the variety which actually summarises half the novel - and there's just no need for it.

Schulyer gives us a protagonist we rarely see in fiction - a woman in her fifties. Moreover, a woman in her fifties that is not primarily a mother or a wife, is still a sexual being, and invested in her career. It's remarkable (and sad) how unusual this, and it instantly made me interested. Hanne defies archetypes - her prickly, somewhat awkward presence is believable, not always likeable, but always interesting and sympathetic.

The novel really hinges on her characterisation - it is a book about her - and it's a testament that Schulyer can takes inside someone's head so thoroughly.

Of course, this isn't just a character study. Underneath it all are deep, very crucial questions to the novel and the act of reading, about meaning; about the ways we construct and deconstruct it. And it's (mostly) rendered with light touch; through the characters and their environment rather than superimposed above them, or breaking down the walls to expand on a thesis.

It was, in my opinion, quite gracefully done. This grace extends to Schulyer's clean prose and her structure. Though the plot is not the raison d'etre of this novel, I genuinely had no idea how it would end and where it would go. I was surprised, pleasantly, especially by the ending - which I found very satisfying without that neatness that cloys sometimes. The idea of the story ending, but these lives and people going on. An excellent novel. ( )

In a trip to Japan to understand her difficulties with translating a new work by an up-and -coming Japanese author, Hanne comes to consider her relationship with her estranged daughter. This is a major character study. Not a lot of action, but there is a lot about language and expectations. ( )