Mizuki is a Japanese housewife. She has a hardworking husband, two adorable children, and a beautiful Tokyo apartment. It’s everything a woman could want, yet sometimes she wonders whether she would rather throw herself off the high-rise balcony than spend another evening not talking to her husband and hanging up laundry.
Then, one rainy night, she meets Kiyoshi, a successful restaurateur. In him, she rediscovers freedom, friendship, and the neon, electric pulse of the city she has always loved. But the further she falls into their relationship, the clearer it becomes that she is living two lives—and in the end, we can choose only one.
Funny, provocative, and startlingly honest, Fault Lines is for anyone who has ever looked in the mirror and asked, who am I and how did I get here? A bittersweet love story and a piercing portrait of female identity, it introduces Emily Itami as a debut novelist with astounding resonance and wit.
What I Rated:
Cover: 4.0/5
Story: 4.0/5
Pacing: 4.0/5
So Good I Forgot The Outside World Existed: 3.5/5
Gave Me All The Feels: 3.5/5
What I Think:
It’s the little things, like using your book title in the story, that make me tingly all over. If you know, you know.
Let’s get into the review.
Mizuki Yano chose the path not less traveled. She chose to marry Tatsu. She had two children. She is now a housewife and a mother in modern day Tokyo. She did, and continues to do the things that are socially acceptable, though not with quite the same devotion as the other housewives and mothers in her social circles. She is lost and sad, and the catalyst for change comes in the form of a gorgeous younger man who sees her for who she is when she’s not playing by the socially expected rules.
The story takes place over several months, and is written in first person. Emily Itami is not playing by the conventional storytelling rules. By all accounts “Fault Lines” should read as dry and long winded, and Mizuki should come across as melodramatic and far too invested in navel gazing. And yet none of that is true. The writing is exquisite, and what we have here, is a beautiful and sincere accounting of a life that feels like a costume, that is told with the directness and honesty of a journal entry.
Reading “Fault Lines,” it was as though I’d stepped onto a cross country train ride, sat next to a lovely stranger, and listened as she reviewed a portion of her life that was significant, but buried deep inside her, for fear of how the truth of it would tear everything apart.
Much like a cross country train ride, the pacing is on the slower side, but it doesn’t drag. I didn’t find myself getting bored or checked out. On the contrary I was very invested.
I am pleasantly surprised by how much grace I was able to extend to the protagonist. She’s a morally grey character, and yet her insight into herself made it easy to push my mind past the black and white thinking that can sometimes present itself when encountering something like infidelity. I was caught up in the elegance with which she shared how lost she felt, and how this secret relationship brought her back to the piece of herself that wasn’t a wife and wasn’t a mother.
Emily does a great job of capturing the achingly beautiful melancholy that seems as much a part of the protagonist as her being Japanese. If I could’ve I would’ve devoted however many of my paychecks were necessary to commission James Earl Jones or Shohreh Aghdashloo to read this gorgeous story to me at bedtime.
I mean, look no further than these two absolutely gorgeous sentences:
“It was naive of me to think that expressing your distaste for something means you can resist all the forces of family and friends that propel you toward it.”
“But there are days when the flame of my anger is just about put out by a flood of sadness, and on those days, when he walks out, I crawl to the bathroom, where I can lock the door. I wouldn’t want the kids to walk in and see me crying.”
One of my other favorite things about this story was Emily’s depicting Japan and Japanese culture in a way that is immersive and unapologetic. I found myself thinking, this is how it’s done! No explanations, and no taking for granted that your readers won’t understand and will need to be spoon fed every detail. We get Mizuki’s life, written in as straightforward a way as possible. Now Emily does have a glossary in the back of the book with definitions of foods and such, but I’m glad she wrote about Japan and being in Japan the way she did.
If you are looking for a character driven story about a complicated human who feels deeply, and is trying to understand how to navigate both the grief and the joy that can come with having chosen one path over another, then this is the story for you.
