As this novel dragged on, I moved from mere boredom to discomfort at the author’s choices. Why did she decide to co-opt the real-life stories of many Japanese women and use them as narrative elements in a book about a US woman trying to excuse her white US father from any wrong-doing? It seemed an at best very odd and at worst offensively short-sighted way to address a story which feels like it isn’t really hers to tell, even if she clumsily tries to convince me it is by having her Japanese cipher character quite literally and somewhat unsubtlety declare in reference to the US author substitute character “My story belongs to Tori.”  Overall I found that the combined elements of romance/historical fiction/journalistic expose/memoir/travel journal did not fit well together.

Ultimately, the problem with this book is that it has no central reality to hold it together; the US half is just a really boring woman slowly researching the content of the Japanese half, while the Japanese half is just a western-gaze narrative of the mysterious East, designed to excuse the father from the US half of his past actions. Each half negates the other. The US segment is a falsified justification for the Japanese segment, and the Japanese segment is a falsified defence of the US segment. It’s like a mobius strip of pointlessness. 

On top of which it is also unforgivably dull and replete with clichés: Japan is all bamboo and calligraphy and paper lanterns and tea ceremonies and superstitions and wise old women spouting proverbs. The Japanese heroine is a bland cipher, wandering about being long-suffering and patient, described in the exact same way as Sayuri from Memoirs of a Geisha; persistent, like water, and thus able to make her own way by gentleness rather than unfeminine anger and unattractive pushiness. She also doesn’t care about anything except weddings and marriage and babies. So that’s great. Her character detail doesn’t go much further than the standard “My corset is too tight, which symbolises society” period-woman thing, except in her case it’s an obi because she’s Japanese, remember?

The whole “White Kimono” thing from the title is very poorly handled; the US woman finds a photo, taken in Japan, of a woman in the 50s wearing a white kimono. Somehow this is a massive clue that the woman in the picture is the woman her father knew. But why is the kimono relevant? That’s just traditional Japanese clothing; it proves nothing. Surely the clue is that the father kept the picture in the first place? Although ‘The Woman in Some Photo My Dad Kept” doesn’t sound as exotic and mysterious, I suppose.

This book is also about twice as long as necessary, mainly because I have to listen at interminable length to every step of the US protagonist’s phenomenally dull ‘investigation’ of her father’s secrets. I really can’t express how boring and unnecessary this is, and how replete with irrelevant details. There are multiple sections which read like this:

I googled a Japanese thing. Then I looked at it. I will now describe my google image results. Then I thought again about the scene with my dad, which you read earlier; nothing new to say about that. Then I googled again. Then I made a note. Then I made another note. Then I drew a line on a map with marker pen. Then I googled something else about Japan. Then I made another note. Then I called my friend who lives in Japan for advice...

or

I sat down by some boxes, then I drew one box toward me, then I opened the box with my fingers, then I looked at what was inside it. One of the things inside was a piece of paper. There was some writing on the paper. The words were laid out on the paper in this order. I looked at them. I wondered what they meant. I realised what they meant. Then I thought about what they meant… 

It’s as though the author was trying to meet a word count, which is odd as the story in no way requires the number of words used. 

And then we get to the handling of the real-life suffering on which the book is built. I did not care for how this was handled. For example, personally I am uncomfortable with the implication that the biggest impact of stranger rape and subsequent impregnation is that it cruelly denies the woman and child involved the sentimental wedding/romance backstory by which they could otherwise have defined themselves. Frankly the whole thing felt clumsily handled and exploitative to me. 

The main thing I will remember about this book is being repeatedly astounded that there was still so much of it left. If I had to summarise it, I would say it is a culturally insensitive romance narrative which attempts to excuse the crimes of a white man whilst relying for its depth on the suffering of non-white women whose voices have been co-opted by a white American for purposes of bulking out her family drama.