Book Review: The Japanese Lover

Book: The Japanese Lover

Author: Isabel Allende

Publisher: Atria Books

Pages: 322 

Rs: 355

When there's a book titled The Japanese Lover, you can safely guess that there will be either a garden or Pearl Harbour thrown in. Isabel Allende in her new book sweeps in both clichés.

If you're looking for an elevator pitch, the story revolves around Alma, the rich, elderly widow's long-running love affair with her Japanese gardener. End of story. If it's a little more you want, then here it is: it's a love story set in San Francisco of the 1940s and 1950s when Alma Belasco meets Ichimei Fukuda. She is the waif sent over from Nazi-ridden Poland to the safe confines of her American aunt and uncle, the rich and famous Belascos. He is the gardener's son. They're thrown apart by the cruel political turbulence of Pearl Harbour. But love is all they have, and they persist through decades.

While Allende would prefer the reader to dwell on this overarching idea of love through its many problems, what one gets is a very useful handbook for the-about-to-be-elderly. Because it's not just set in San Francisco, but in Lark House, San Francisco, a mid-twentieth century care home "to offer shelter with dignity to elderly persons of slender means, which for some unknown reason attracted left-wing intellectuals, oddballs and second-rate artists". It also attracted Alma Belasco, rich, oddball, who hires Irina (another refugee from East Europe), a caregiver at Lark House. A large part of the book therefore can't help but present blow-by-blow accounts of ageing.

The narrative shifts back and forth from the past to the present: from Alma and Ichemei to Irina and Seth (Alma's grandson) the latter two forming their own love interest. It spans decades of togetherness and separation. I wish I could tell you that this is another riveting read like The House of the Spirits. Instead, let me be kind. As kind as Allende is with her characters. The book is about kindness and being accommodating. In her book people love each other, help each other, counsel (ad nauseam) each other, pay their rents on time, offer boarding and lodging to waifs and refugees, give jobs to the jobless... land to the landless... love to the loveless. The story gives you cause (or should it be pause), to stop and think, "WTF... can people really be this good?" But then you turn on the news on TV and think: "This is reality. Isabel Allende's The Japanese Lover is just a brief, balmy escape."