Echo on the Bay

Ono’s deliriously captivating tale (after Lion Cross Point) draws on the violent past of a Japanese fishing village. The teenage Miki’s father, an ineffectual police officer, spends his evenings hosting four childhood friends who drink and gossip over the course of the narrative about the hapless Mitsugu Azamui, a local drunk who claims to have found a dead body on the beach. Miki, inspired by an ethnologist she sees on TV, begins to piece together stories of the past from the villagers while learning about Mitsugu’s family connection to a local legend of murder. In the meantime, Miki tries to conceal an illicit relationship with her social studies teacher. Ono invents a close-knit rural community rife with secrets and perhaps doomed by a long-ago murder driven by xenophobia and greed, which sheds light on the larger historical brutalities of Japan’s actions in Korea and Manchuria in the 1930s and ’40s. As a boat from the village’s past makes an unexpected, unwelcome return, Ono suggests that any possible redemption must come from an acknowledgment of history. While Ono captivates with metaphoric imagery (a red tide becomes a “huge snake, born of polluted water”), he occasionally skirts close to tasteless abjection with descriptions of lives derailed by cruelty and abuse. Still, this is worth a look. (June)