Fault Lines by Emily Itami
Review of Fault Lines by Emily Itami
“I wonder what will still matter when I’m as old as she is. I wonder who she loved, and what she hid, and when it stopped hurting her to remember, even while she was pretending to have forgotten.”
Fault Lines by Emily Itami (2021). Published by Custom House.
I first saw this book in a Barnes & Nobles, which was a surprise in why I was even in there to begin with. I never really go to actual bookstores; I tend to get almost all of my books through my county’s Libby and through my physical library.
I happened to be in close proximity to one after my sister wanted to go out one night, so we randomly decided to walk in and just take a look around. We didn’t buy anything because neither of us could really afford any of the books that were on the shelves, but we did take pictures of covers that captivated us and decided to find them later for free.
I was very attracted to the cover of Fault Lines. It was right at the front of the bookstore; it had its own entire table with copies stacked on top of it. It was right near the front, too, so we saw it almost immediately as we came in.
Look at it to the left of this paragraph. It’s beautiful, right? It’s a skyline picture of Tokyo in a deep blue with pink text. It’s so feminine, so delicate, and I’m absolutely in love with it.
And so when I saw the book was on Libby and didn’t have too long of a waitlist for the audiobook, so I hopped on it immediately. Let’s start this review!
Described as a Japanese setting and a story like Sally Rooney’s, we dive into a housewife’s world in Tokyo.
Our main character, Mizuki, seems to have it all. She has two children that seem perfect, wearing the backpacks that are trendy with the schoolchildren nowadays, and a husband that, when they met, seemed so devoted to her. But then it stops being so ideal and perfect when the marriage doesn’t meet expectations.
Mizuki’s husband sees her just as a way to meet an end. Because he is a man embodying a traditional sense of the world, Mizuki is nothing but a servant, what a woman is stereotypically supposed to be. She has no purpose to him and is thus treated as such. Because of her unhappiness stemming from this situation, she engages in an affair with a restauranteur named Kiyoshi.
I think that this is a tale that many women specifically can relate to, especially because we’re so deep into Mizuki’s perspective and world. We are quickly brought into her past; the part about her study abroad in the United States in New York (instantly noticed the dynamic though of her being put into a rich white family, that was pretty interesting to look at for me), how she learned to live outside of the more strict structure of Japanese society.
Mizuki critiques this in the narrative, since she thinks that the American students at the performing arts school she’s in aren’t as motivated and don’t actually do anything academically. She wanted to be a singer once upon a time, but gave that up for a quote-on-quote normal life. And then we go back to the present where she’s living with her husband.
Her life seems so perfect at first, but once we get into the nitty gritty of her everyday life, we see how sad and lonely she actually is. A lot of people feel misunderstood in the world, and so when we dive into their heads, we see how unhappy they are because of this. This is Mizuki.
And so we can’t help but to cheer for her when she meets Kiyoshi and begins to discover reasons to live again because of this new fling. But we also can’t help but to think about how immoral this is because she’s cheating, but there’s this cognitive dissonance because of how poor of a match her husband and she are.
The prose in this novel is absolutely beautiful. Sometimes when I’m listening to an audiobook I start to doze off because the prose, even when read aloud by a trained professional, just falls flat. While I wasn’t reading these words on the page, I was listening with quite a bit of attention to how the words flowed and were used. I will admit, however, is that the reader’s thick British accent is not what I would’ve envisioned for this novel.
I really appreciated the descriptions of Tokyo and the world that Mizuki occupied. We see her escapades with foreigners, how she has friends outside of the bubble that she’s kind of forced into. We also aren’t forcing the characters into boxes that they have to occupy. Mizuki isn’t perfect. Her husband isn’t completely a dick. Which makes this a sadder story and more of a character study, as we are forced to look at the situation with a more holistic eye.
Overall Thoughts
A stunning debut. The writing is solid, so solid that I’m surprised this a debut. Does this mean I’m into the content? Not as much. I think I’m not into the entire concept of romance and cheating, which is why I wasn’t catching on to this book as much as I wanted to. It was completely worth it for the beautiful writing, although I wasn’t as into the plot as much. I think if Kiyoshi and Mizuki’s relationship were more platonic then I would’ve enjoyed it a bit more.
I don’t care that she was technically cheating emotionally, but I think the story could’ve been told without her being super into him. She just needs to be seen and understood by someone in her life, and I think it could’ve been pulled off without the romantic elements to it. I do think this is worth a read; pick it up at your local library, stare at that beautiful cover, savor it, and then decide if you want a physical copy after that.
