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A tattooed hostess leaves her job to visit her dying mother. As often, death lasts longer than expected, and Gifted tells those few weeks, with an abundance of trivial details (and cigarette smoke. Do not read this if you''re trying to stop smoking).

The ethnological description (Suzuki is herself a former hostess and a sociologist) of Tokyo nightlife wasn't enough and I was thoroughly bored until I understood that most of those details were a receptacle of an attitude to the character's body, the one her mother gave her, the same one her mother burnt, the one she covered in tattoos and uses in her job, a reflection of the body her mother didn't want to give to customers when she worked herself as a hostess.

So, no sudden revelations, but a quiet layering of everyday events and memories, and sometimes, something builds towards some meaning. The writing reflects the mind of the hostess, as she quietly comes to an understanding of her mother that resembles a sort of peace.

The Internet tells me, "Toxic parent literature" is in fashion in Japan these days (the book was published in 2022 in Japanese, 2024 in English). The genre name evokes dramatic tear-jerking memoirs on this side of the planet; Gifted felt truer to life: a tale of the ordinary pain of an imperfect child raised by an imperfect parent.

Gifted

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"My mother died today" with more cigarettes

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