a gesture life

going back to my roots here, but i'll be talking about a gesture life today :) i really adored this book, actually. the writing style was gorgeous and i love reading introspection, and there's just so much to discuss. i think the book has three major things it can be broken down into: hata's relationship with his daughter (& lover mary burns), hata's relationship with society at large (liv crawford, lenny), and of course, his relationship with k.

the book itself revolves around a man currently living in new york. he's retired, and is basically the poster boy for an unreliable narrator, which is always pretty fun. addressing his relationship with his daughter at first: i thought this was so excellently written. it's probably a tad bit of projection on my end, but i adored seeing hata's own view of his treatment of sunny, and how that's also colored by his own impressions of his childhood. he's also an adoptee, like sunny, and it clearly shows. there's a line in the book where he's talking about how it would be more shameful for him to die and have illicit photos sent to his parents because he was adopted, and you see a similar sort of standard applied onto sunny the whole while. a lot of the book is detached, and purposefully so: even when he's meditating on his treatment of sunny and of her piano-playing in her childhood (which naturally becomes a point of contention when he keeps insisting that keeping the piano is for himself when it's clear that he does want her to continue playing) and when he's thinking about how she behaves later (which is, i guess, promiscuous but exaggerated by hata himself). naturally, a book in this format needs its protagonist to be multifaceted in order to be interesting, but i just loved seeing the constant flipflops hata makes between his insistence on conforming to social norms, his prioritization of sunny out of perceived obligation over mary burns, and his later scorn of her being driven from his idea of her being dirtied for having sex (mr misogyny over here being awfully stereotypical about things). his reunion with her made me quite satisfied, really. i hate stories where the children are expected to suck it up and passively deal with what happened to them back then, and so i think the half-strained, half-not relationship they had towards the end was perhaps for the better.

anyway, with society at large: the beginning of the book sets you up with the image of him as someone awfully fixated on being perceived well by society. at the start, his first meeting with mary burns is one where he is awfully aware of her being on his porch. he overthinks the welcome letters he receives, and he over thinks the get well soon cards he receives as well. this also becomes better towards the end, but i feel like it's within reason. the wikipedia summary of the book basically makes it appear as though he's fully healed by the end of the book, but i take issue with this. even at the very last few pages, you get reflections from him on how he'd like to be remembered, even if only in a passing line from liv crawford, his real estate agent. and in fact, it's not really a state of healing at all. the reason he's removing himself from everyone else is essentially because of his bad luck. he's overly paranoid about drawing harm to sunny and her son (which honestly, i don't actually mind as much anymore. least he could do). he's almost in a worse place than when the book started, to me. anyway, i thought it interesting that his hollowness was such a prominent part of the novel. there's little substance to him outside of fretting about the wants of society, and that's even true when he's a wwii soldier, which is a nice leadin to the third part.

this is probably the most contentious bit. i think so far that i've made it seem like i'm relatively neutral on him. mostly, i am, but i do lean towards hating the guy. i did really enjoy the book as a whole, but my outstanding critique would probably involve the fact that he doesn't actually seem to do much meditation on how fucking terrible of a person he was during the war. he passively drank the propaganda fed to him and didn't bat an eye at the word volunteers in reference to literal "comfort women", or more aptly put, sex slaves. a key component of his character is essentially cowardice: he's too cowardly and too confined by societal regulation to really do much of anything. sunny thought of herself as an unwanted child because of hata's rigid conformity to making his house so perfect (which doesn't take a genius to figure out; she tells him pointblank that all her friends like him better than they do her); mary burns can't tolerate hata for his passivity; the outstanding reason for liv crawford approaching him originally was because she was a businesswoman after his house (which she gets. i would say bless her, but i've little respect for realtors). this is true back then, too; the whole situation with k is the result of him being blinded and awfully naive for a person so empty and so cowardly. she asked him multiple times to give her the knife, or a gun, or some variation of that so that she could at least choose her own death. he doesn't even grant her this, and i felt that it was so revolting of him. she ultimately dies, by the way. horribly gruesome death, and then there's nothing expanded on afterwards (one of my other qualms with the book). it's the kind of thing where you knew it'd end that way, and he's so gross in his passivity and in his insistence on conforming to the norms and his discarding of humanity in pursuit of that. i think that's ultimately what the book is about; he values connection but only to the point where he can be remembered, and in pursuit of that shallow sort of thing, he both sabotages any possibility of a meaningful relationship and also is a horridly passive person, which might be the worst thing of all to be