'There are times in your life when something happens, after which you're never the same. It may be something direct or indirect, or something someone says to you. But whatever it is, there is no going back.
'Paris: 1989. Recently retired police inspector Auguste Jovert receives a letter from a woman who claims to be his daughter. Two days later, a stranger comes knocking on his door…
'Set in France and Japan, The Snow Kimono tells the stories of Jovert, former Professor of Law Tadashi Omura, and his one-time friend the writer Katsuo Ikeda. All three have lied to themselves, and to each other. Their lies are about to catch up with them.
'A quarter of a century after the award-winning bestseller Out of the Line of Fire, Mark Henshaw returns with an intricately plotted, beautifully written novel that is both a psychological thriller and an unforgettable meditation on love and loss, memory and its deceptions, and the ties that bind us to others.' (Publication summary)
Dedication:
To my wife, Lee.
I could not have a better companion
with whom to share this great adventure.
Epigraph:
I can be sure that even in this tiny, insignificant episode
there is implicit everything I have experienced,
all the past, the multiple pasts I have tried in vain
to leave ehind me...
ITALO CALVINO
If on a Winter's Night a Traveller
On his return, after many years' absence,
Kenji-san went to see his blind friend.
He told him of Abyssinia, that mysterious land,
of his many adventures there.
'So, Keiichi,' he said, when he had finished.
'What do you think of Abyssinia?'
'It sounds like a magical place,' his friend said,
as if returning form a dream.
'But I lied to you,' Kenji-san said. 'I was never there.'
'I know,' his friend replied. 'But I was.'
OTOMO NO TSURAYUKI
The Night of a Thousand Brocades
'I have always found reading Japanese fiction—admittedly in translation—to be something of an out-of-body experience, as if one were watching a reflection in a pond. When one reaches out to touch it, it shimmers and disappears. I do not know whether that is a function of the language, or an artifact of translating the language, the literary culture, or my imagination.' (Introduction)
