BOOKS | FICTION
Bird Life by Anna Smaill review: the strangeness of life in Japan
This is a deeply affecting novel about a grief stricken outsider and a woman who can talk to animals
Flavours of Japan: Anna Smaill
ALAMY
The Sunday Times
In Ueno Park in Tokyo, a young foreign woman lies on the ground, her face contorted with anguish, “an awful thing to behold … Like coming across a person with their clothes removed in public.” Passers-by politely step around her, until one Japanese woman walks towards her with remarkable dignity considering she is wearing only one shoe, “a dereliction miraculously transformed into chic by the alchemy of her disdain”.
This opening scene of Anna Smaill’s second novel, after her 2015 Booker-longlisted debut, The Chimes, is beautifully controlled with the expertise of the poet she also is.
Dinah Glover is a New Zealander who has recently arrived in Japan to teach English. Still traumatised by the death of her brother, Dinah seems, as she says,
