Gifted

Gifted by Suzumi Suziki is a moving and thought-provoking story of a complex mother and daughter relationship. Despite a childhood where she felt almost a burden to a mother more interested in dreams of becoming a successful poet than guiding her daughter through life ,the book begins with the unnamed narrator looking after her terminally ill mother. With the daughter leaving home young and drifting into life as a Hostess in Tokyo's red light district she feels remote from her ailing mother,even while caring for her,and reflects on a life of drifting from club to club with only those in the same field of work as friends.

This is a moving,and often beautiful, book as the narrator learns more about her mother's life and her true feelings towards the daughter who always felt like a liability even as the older woman is on her deathbed. The tawdry reality of the red light district and the often damaged people who work in it plays a big part in the story,not least the loyalty amongst the workers and sometimes the surprising tenderness shown towards each other,often by people who have not known much of that from other sources in their lives.

An intriguing portrait of a mother-daughter relationship which pans out across Tokyo nights and in hospital rooms. I appreciated the book’s nuanced portrayal of the experience of sex workers, a topic I believe to be is often underrepresented (or poorly represented) in popular novels. The writing was well-paced — while not plot-driven as such, there was a real momentum to the story and I found myself always eager to read on.

Gifted is a short novel about a woman working as a hostess in Tokyo who suddenly has to care for her terminally ill mother she left home to get away from. The unnamed narrator lives and works in Kabukicho, the famed entertainment district in Shinjuku, and her tattoos hide the burn scars from an incident with her mother when she was younger. Now, her mother is very ill, and stays with her between hospital visits, and the narrator must face her relationship with her mother as well as the other people in her life.

This book is a dreamlike experience to read, following the narrator's thoughts and her constant returning to her apartment, and offering glimpses into elements of her life rather than in-depth explorations given the short length. You never quite hear everything about her and her mother, but that feels right given that she doesn't know everything about her mother, and her mother's death isn't bringing some dramatic closure to their troubled relationship. Instead, you hear about how she unlocks her door—the main form of safety she seems to have—and snippets about her and others working in Kabukicho, not just the hostess and host clubs and the clients, but also the twenty-four hour drugstore, the difficulty getting a taxi. The way these parts are woven together was something I really enjoyed, though there were occasional points where the translation made for clunky sentences that were hard to get your head around.

Gifted offers a novella about a difficult mother-daughter relationship that also picks up on the tiny details of the narrator's life and offers glimpses into Kabukicho. Like the poetry the narrator's mother writes, this short book doesn't give you everything laid out as a chronological narrative, but leaves space for piecing things together or not knowing.