Reviewed by Jeanne
As the book opens, our narrator, a young postman, has been
met with devastating news: he has a
stage 4 brain tumor and will be lucky to live six months. Frankly, his doctor will be surprised if he
makes it another week. Stunned, he goes
home to his cat, Cabbage, and contemplates his fate.
Then Intervention occurs—and it can’t be called Divine
Intervention, because it is via the devil.
He has a bargain to offer: if the postman picks one thing to disappear
from the world forever, he can have an extra day of life. Simple, no?
Ah, but of course there is a catch. The devil has to approve the choice, so making dust or roadside trash go away is not
going to happen—as the devil says, “C’mon now, what do you think I am, the
maid?”
No, the item has to be important.
As the narrator weighs each choice, imagining how the things
fit into his life and what they mean to him and others, he reflects on his past
and his relationships. Most of all, he remembers something his mother always
said: “In order to gain something, you
have to lose something.”
While this is a thoughtful and sometimes poignant book, it’s
also pretty funny. The devil shows up
wearing a brightly colored Hawaiian shirt and is more used car salesman than
Prince of Darkness. He also likes to play jokes, as when he enables Cabbage to
speak. There are other things I’d like
to mention, but this is such a slim book—about 150 pages-- that it’s too easy
to spoil.
I have to say that it covers some of the same ground as the
recent The Travelling Cat Chronicles by Hiro Arikawa, which I loved, but
Kawamura’s work is lighter in tone. I read this one to fulfill a Book Bingo
square (‘read a translated book’), which just again proves how much fun it is
to expand one’s horizons.
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