What’s Left Of Me Is Yours by Stephanie Scott
Within the Tokyo underworld there is an industry which exists to break up marriages. It is known today as wakaresaseya - agents who, for a fee, can be hired by one spouse to seduce the other and provide grounds for divorce on favourable terms.
When Satō hires Kaitarō, a wakaresaseya agent, to have an affair with his wife, Rina, he assumes it will be an easy case. But Satō has never truly understood Rina or her desires and Kaitarō's job is to do exactly that--until he does it too well. While Rina remains ignorant of the circumstances that brought them together, she and Kaitarō fall in a desperate, singular love, setting in motion a series of violent acts that will forever haunt her daughter's life.
As Rina's daughter, Sumiko, fills in the gaps of her mother's story and her own memory, Scott probes the thorny psychological and moral grounds of the actions we take in the name of love, asking where we draw the line between passion and possession.
Hardback available via Waterstones.com(£14.99) here or Blackwell’s here.
Stephanie scott is a Singaporean-British writer who was born and raised in South East Asia. She read English Literature at the Universities of York and Cambridge and holds an M.St in Creative Writing from Oxford University.
She was awarded a British Association of Japanese Studies Toshiba Studentship for her anthropological work on WHAT'S LEFT OF ME IS YOURS and has been made a member of the British Japanese Law Association as a result of her research.
She has won the A.M. Heath Prize, the Jerwood Arvon Prize for Prose Fiction, and runner up in the Bridport Prize Peggy Chapman-Andrews First Novel Award for an early draft of the manuscript.
Review
What’s Left Of Me Is Yours was one of the first books that I received on NetGalley last year when I started out on this amazing book blogging journey. It still haunts me! I was so pleased to have been offered a place on this blogtour as it is a beautiful piece of literature. It’s prose is sublime, it’s narrative is outstanding, it taught me so much, it also devastated me. Stephanie has written a book which will live on in my memory for decades to come and completely deserves all the praise that she has been receiving for it.
This book is based on the true life story of a man who was employed to break up a marriage and then ended up being convicted of killing her. He still insisted he loved her. A book that may have the tag of being a thriller is so much more than that. It’s really a deep love story. That between Rina and Kaitaro but also the love between Rina and her daughter Sumiko and between Sumiko and her grandfather.
The story swaps between perspectives throughout the book. It focuses on the love affair between Rina and Kaitaro but also fasts forward to Sumiko trying to find out how her mother really died and what Kaitaros role was in this.
The amount of cultural detail to be found within its pages is vast. This book has been meticulously researched and you would never know that this hasn’t been written by a Japanese writer. I have learnt so much from this book. From the practice of wakaresaseya, to the Japanese legal and penal systems and about everyday Japanese life. I had never heard of the process of wakaresaseya before reading this book. This is where normally a husband employs an agency to send someone out to seduce their wife. This then is used in evidence to help enable the husband to get a divorce. I always forget that for such an incredibly advanced nation Japan still has a very traditional way of looking at things. Divorce is not granted unless there has been adultery, hence the growth of the wakaresaseya industry. It was the level of planning and researching that went into these ‘cases’ that struck me. Nothing was left to chance and no detail was spared. Agents manipulate themselves into whoever they needed to be. However, the person that Kaitaro showed Rina was the real him and they actually fell in love.
I totally fell in love with Rina. Maybe it was because there were parallels that I could see with my mother’s life. Leaving a husband she no longer loved and a constricted life to beginning to find out about herself. The image of Rina painting in her overalls is one that will always play in my mind every so often. What impressed me was a young woman who was willing to go against all of Japanese culture to become free and happy. The bravery and courage that must have taken took my breathe away.
I am going to be honest here that because I am such a prolific reader there are a lot of times that I forget the plots of books that I have read. There is only so much space in my brain apparently. I did not need to reread this book to write this review. It has been sitting there in a hidden place in my brain as I knew it was special. It has this clarity, a beauty. It has wound its way into my heart. I remember all the small details like the dungarees, as well the scene in the park and also eating the ice cream on the beach. I can feel the wind of the sea from their summer house and Kaitaro’s village.
This review will never really do justice to ‘What’s Left Of Me Is Yours’. I don’t have the words or the talent to do that. All I’m going to say it that this book is totally deserving of having a place of my forever shelf.
