A Distant Neighbourhood vol 2 back

Second and concluding chapter.

Hiroshi Nakahara, a middle-aged businessman with a family of his own, has found himself back in both the village and the body he grew up in. Physically at least he's now fourteen-years-old again but with the weight of hindsight on his back. For any day now, he knows, his father will leave them. He will walk out the door, never come back, and no one will ever know why. Can Hiroshi persuade him otherwise, or at least learn the truth? And can he do so without revealing too much and so alarming his family and friends about his current mental health? And what of his own family several decades in the future? Has he inadvertently just walked out on them?

If it sounds overly dramatic then that couldn't be further from the truth. Taniguchi's best works (WALKING MAN etc.) are more about contemplation and a search for truth or at least peace of mind than anything else, and usually in the middle of the most beautifully lit countryside you will ever encounter. There's also an emphasis on respect and gratitude - the touching Japanese courtesy of not wanting to put anyone else out - and it's evoked as well here as it was in the first volume as Hiroshi's grandmother continues to explain his father's particular circumstances following his experience in World War II, and his mother struggles with her understanding of the debt she owes her second husband, her knowledge of what he has sacrificed for her, yet her need for his presence. Meanwhile Hiroshi takes the girl he'd never have had to courage to talk to the first time round to the seaside where he relishes the freedom and sensations of being fourteen again, but without the insecurities.