The concept and presentation of the book's story are quite new to me, but I liked it. I liked the parts of the book set in the Edo and Heian period. The description of the era was intricate and transported in the time and period. I struggled a bit with the subject of cheating, but I understand that it was a vital part of the book.

This book follows Riko, a loner from childhood who finds it hard to form relationships. She meets and marries her husband, a philanderer that leaves her broken hearted. To escape her lonely life, she begins to have vivid dreams. I found this book meandering and could not figure out why although desperately sad Riko was unable to leave her husband. Overall, an interesting look into relationship dynamics in different eras in Japan and would recommend to readers who would like to learn more about that topic. The translation by Ted Goossen was good.

Disclaimer: I received this ARC from NetGalley and Granta Publications in exchange for a free and honest review.

I was truly hoping to enjoy this book, but it felt like I encountered two completely different stories. The first half was beautifully written, delving into fantasies and love. However, the writing quality seemed to decline in the second half, leaving me feeling like the book didn't offer any significant takeaway.

I wasn’t a huge fan of this. I didn’t connect with the characters and the writing didn’t grab me at all so I found it difficult to follow the plot along. I liked that it focused a lot on Buddhism and the points it made about love but I found the book a bit of a slog to get through and I didn’t finish it feeling like I would read it again

This translation does A LOT. Riko is stagnant in her relationship and offered escape from the everyday through her dreams. She travels all across history exploring the past, whilst also herself and new friends and lovers along the way. While this is a gorgeous concept, it is slightly confusing at times; the flip between dream and reality is often paragraph to paragraph, with little to no explanation and the reader is left to figure out which version of Kiko they are reading about. However, it is also a tender story of love which perseveres through ages, places and remains despite the toughest of odds.

The Third Love is my favourite Hiromi Kawakami yet. The concept of being able to live through historical lives, transported in your dreams is so interesting and I thought the execution was excellent. I enjoyed learning the historical context of the Edo period, even if the setting was more of a backdrop for the emotions of the characters.

I loved this author's perspective on how infidelity can be so tough on a woman's mind.
The protagonist, Riko, finds out her husband has been unfaithful to her. By chance she runs into an old friend that shows her how to love inside her dreams. This becomes her escape and she lives different lives.
There's a lot about Japanese culture and tradition from the Heian period and the Edo period which was quite fascinating.
The writing was a bit slow so this one might not be for everyone.

An interesting exploration of the experiences of women throughout different historical periods of Japan and on the Buddhist ideas of rebirth and connection. I enjoyed the use of dreams in this book, which combined with the matter of fact writing style did help to create that unquestioned logic of dreams, which cease to make sense once you step back. However, I am not sure if it is the translation or if the same is true of the original, but the writing for the most part felt fairly bland, and while the sex workers in Edo Japan felt well realised, the older time period felt like it was coming from a text book written for children, and did not have much emotional impact. This coupled with info dumps from our dreamer's research made the whole book hang awkwardly, and so it was not the most pleasent read.

I loved this story of Riko and the use of her dreams to escape an unfulfilling marriage to her first love who is constantly unfaithful. It is a mix of magical realism and historical fiction taking us through the different Japanese eras. Perfect read to escape reality and I look forward to reading more from Kawakami.

I greatly admired 'Strange Weather in Tokyo' by Hiromi Kawakami but found 'The Third Love' somehow less satisfying. The exploration of historical periods through prior incarnations / dream-like sequences, a little reminiscent of Mishima's 'The Sea of Fertility', lacks the same depth. Nonetheless, Kawakami's ambition in chronicling the evolution of love and the place of women in society in Japan across time make this well worth reading. Her writing frequently shines, even if the novel overall does not fully coalesce. Special thank you to Granta Publications and NetGalley for a no obligation advance review digital copy.

I wanted to like this. But it starts slow, and never quite caught my interest. The falling and being in love is well written, but i struggled to finished the novel.

Surreal, dreamy, flighty... It's hard to hold this story in your hands. It feels ethereal somehow. I struggled to connect very strongly to the protagonist but it didn't dampen my enjoyment, not take away the spell of Kawakami's striking cast of characters. A great escapist read.

Riko is a strange child or, perhaps, it is Japanese culture which is strange. She meets her husband to be, Naa-Chan, when she is a toddler, her best friend in school is a caretaker, Mr Takaoka, and she has an odd relationship with her koto tutor, Michiko Sensei. Otherwise, she grows up as an isolated, rather solitary person.

That is until she starts to dream, and her dreams become more and more absorbing as they occupy a greater importance than waking life. This first dream is set in the Edo period of Japanese history and Riko is sold into the sex trade to be trained as a courtesan. Her dream explores this life and the separation of sexual desire and marital relationships. At the same time she is becoming aware that Naa-Chan is pursuing other women in her wakeful life and the book explores how that feels.

Then, there’s an interlude in real life where she has a child and then her dreams take her into the Heian period where she’s the lady in waiting to a princess. The dreams follow the princess’s courtship and marriage and Riko’s relationships in a world where both men and women transact sexual relationships on the simple basis of mutual desire.

All of her dreams are vaguely connected by the Tales of Ise, a classic of Japanese literature and, somehow, her dream worlds and her relationship with the caretaker echo elements of the stories in that work of literature in the context of her own life.

It sounds more complicated than it is, and it reads quite naturally but you can soon identify recurring characters and ideas. However, in many ways this is simply a vehicle for the discussion, within Riko’s character, of modern Japanese attitudes to sex, desire and fidelity and from where these have originated. It is fair to say that the Western courtly love tradition does not always come out on top, as it were!

It’s an excellent read, translated with a light touch, and employing a relaxed style which makes Riko emerge as a genuine and likeable character. It might make you think about your own relationships as well!

I can appreciate what this book tried to do, but it just didn't work for me. I looooove the cover and was very intrigued about this, but it never grabbed or kept my attention. I didn't care at all about this character and I can't say I liked her. I didn't dislike her either, I just wasn't at all interested in her. I hated the dynamic of her marriage so much. When the lucid dreams started, I thought I would be more into it, but I just wasn't engaged. I did enjoy that she started to think more about her life as a result of the dreams, but, again, this didn't work for me at all. I was bored every time I picked it up and reading a couple of pages felt like reading 20. Not for me!

Hiromi Kawakami's The Third Love is an exploration of Japanese gender relations. Kawakami uses a dream-like time travel structure to send her contemporary main characters into different eras of Japanese history. Riko is stuck in a long term, unhappy relationship. With the help of another man she experiences life in the Edo period as a courtesan and the.another life earlier in Japanese history. Through these experiences she learns to re-examine her own life. The conceit is interesting but results in a disjointed narrative that fails to engage.

"To be born into this world is a wondrous thing."

Riko has married her childhood sweetheart but her husband's infidelity plagues their relationship. At times, it doesn't seem to bother her, at others, she feels desperate and lonely.

As a child, she befriends her school janitor, a man who later becomes a monk. Years later, she runs into Mr Takaoka again, and rekindles their friendship. Mr Takaoka teaches her something magical: how to live inside her dreams and visit different times in history. In the 17th century, she is a courtesan who falls in love with a client and runs away with him. In the Middle Ages, she is the handmaid to a princess. In each of these times, she learns about both love and loss.

Riko's dreams start leaking into her daily life. It makes her wonder about her roles as a wife and mother, questioning her independence or lack thereof.

This book is beautifully surreal and the writing is as dreamy as Riko's nighttime adventures. I learned a lot about different times in Japan through her dreams. Still, I struggled to connect with her. She frequently accepts her husband's continued cheating, which is something I don't really understand.

What I liked is how she eventually began to question all the aspects of her life, and whether her reality is as important as her dreams, and where she can find love outside of her love for her husband and son.

I will read just about anything Kawakami writes! I was drawn in by the premise of this one, and while this wasn't my favorite of her titles, I appreciated the writing -- always dreamy, wistful, and full of heart -- and will continue to follow her career. Very appreciative for the chance to read The Third Love!

A beautiful journey throughout modern day Japan and back to the times of Edo. I really loved the themes in this book and the concept of the third love. Riko is an exceptional character and very easy to relate to.

It's the first thing I've read by Hiroi Kawakami and I'm really looking forward to Strange Weather in Tokyo.

The truth is that I started reading this book with great enthusiasm because I felt that it touched on very interesting and current topics. It was originally published in 2020 and I think it was already quite a topic to talk about feminism and the role of women in society.

Although I found several interesting things in that aspect, I felt for the other that I could not understand the life of the protagonist, which led me to become exasperated on many occasions. Taking into account what Japanese culture is like, one comes to understand certain actions and thoughts a little more, but at times I really wanted to grab the protagonist, Riko, and slap her a couple of times (with no intention of attacking her, just to wake her up). .

It is interesting how we move between the present and their dreams, dreams where we move to the past and that some of the people we can see there also exist in the present and who remember those dreams perfectly. This was strange, I admit. At first I didn't understand what all this dream stuff was for.

Riko constantly talks about the types of love and how they change over time, about how she sees love and what she does in pursuit of those bonds. I think the healthiest thing to do in these times is to focus on self-love. It will sound cliché, but only there... when we know HOW MUCH we are worth, we can come to understand that perhaps, it is better to be alone than accompanied by people who do not value us.

Thank you Granta Publications for the ARC I read on NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

This is a beguiling bit of timeslip romance, which starts a little too early and ends far too late. It contains three interlinked stories, framed around the life of Riko, a shy modern Japanese woman (though not that modern), who identified the love of her life at a very young age, pursued and married him. However, he turns out to be less fulfilling than she expected, and her love is mirrored by others, as she stretches into a long, lonely marriage she reconnects with her school caretaker Mr Takaoka, one of her few friends at school who had something mysterious and an air of a magician about him. On reconnecting she asks him to teach her magic, which eventually starts to happen as she starts, in dreams, to slip into the life of a 17th-century courtesan, and then again as a serving lady to a Princess even further back. Riffing on Buddhist ideas of past lives, but also just simple dream logic, she sees how the past lives reflect on her current one, perhaps giving her more agency until quite a climatic much more recent timeslip in the present.

Riko is a very passive protagonist, and Kawakami uses this as a commentary on the current position of Japanese women. It does not seem to occur to Riko to work at all since she married young, and yet in her dream lives both work extensively (sex work and/or manual cleaning). On the flip side, the book lingers for a long time on what Japanese men are looking for in wives, and certainly Riko's husbands many affairs suggest that they still occupy the prime position in the relationship. There is an aspect of the book that suggests its set about twenty years ago, though near then end when Riko is talking about phone photos it isn't that old. But that is part of her sheltered life between housewife, and esoteric dream traveller (which the book attempts to solve near the end).

The Third Love is an intriguing and swift read, which walks a somewhat unsteady tightrope between a confessional pity diary and a historical textbook. There are often big chunks of text where Kawakami just explains the rules of 17th-century courtesan behaviour, or how houses were set up in the Middle Ages. Digressions into how words have changed meaning somehow feel natural because Riko has always been quite a dispassionate narrator, Nevertheless I was more interested in the narrative than engaged, again potentially due to her dispassionate nature, and her eventual conclusion to make her happier is one she possible should have reached without any time slipping at all.