Page 45 Review by Stephen
Do you go walking?
Every time I cross the River Trent on my way to work, something magical happens. I can’t explain it, but it makes all the difference: a sensation of space and light and beauty heightened several-fold when I cross it on foot. Eye-candy. We all need eye-candy.
And that’s the simple premise behind this book: one man, sometimes with the dog his wife found under their house, takes eighteen different walks round the Japanese suburbs and occasionally out into the countryside.
It’s clean and it’s beautiful and the word that keeps springing to mind is indeed ‘magical’. The amount of work that has gone into some of these landscapes is staggering: line after delicate line tracing the structure of trees, roofs and fencing.
A quiet book of exploration which will cure any brief bout of the blues.
Now presented in the original Japanese sense of reading out of respect for Taniguchi's wishes. Three additional independent short stories have been added and also 28 pages in colour have been included where they existed in the original material.
