Review: The Translation of Love

The Translation of Love by Lynne Kutsukake
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This story was so beautifully written and wrapped up. As I neared the end, I was worried on how Lynne Kutsukake will tie the loose ends, but the last four or five chapters gave me a feeling of gratification; a feeling of completeness. (Although I would have loved to know more about what happened to Wada and Lieutenant Baker.)

The book is told in different points of view of key characters living in Japan at the wake of World War II. These characters are neither extraordinary nor historically famous. In fact, they could be anyone from the Japanese masses. And yet, all had their stories beautifully told by Kutsukake's amazing prose. When all tied together, they form one authentic picture of Japan's culture, and a jarring picture of one of the biggest events in Japan's history.

I guess this is one of the reasons why I'm starting to fall in love with historical novels. You know how the history will play out--you've read about it, studied it, or heard accounts of it--and yet the story is still so surprising and unpredictable. You realize that there are so many eyes you can view it history from and still feel varying emotions. Reading historical fiction like this allows you to experience the past through eyes of even the simplest man.

It's also a book of language: of how emotion transcends all lingual differences and cuts across all races. Of how powerful a commodity words are for humanity.

Understandably, it took a while for me to finish this book. It is not a suspense or a mystery novel, and so I did not blaze through it as I would on gripping thrillers. It's not a book that has a prize in the end. It's the type of book that you slowly go through, digesting the philosophical and even the simplest of phrases.


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"..his goal was simply to be a conduit through which words in one language would pass and be transformed into words of another... But once he started working, he came to see that the words were not just letters or symbols on the page. Each word was bursting with emotion. There were the emotions felt by the writer and by the reader, but also by him, the translator caught in the middle, reading secrets between lovers or dark truths shared."

"How should a man live? Maybe there was no answer. How to live? How to be? Just day by day. Going forward. And then? Just live."

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