Cassie McCullough

So I thought I really have to hook the reader.

She is a woman who was brought up in very poor circumstances in a sea town near or is it in Osaka or just outside Osaka.

And her father, it doesn't really do anything.

He lies lying on a mattress and is drunk and he's just terrible.

And it's really her mother and the sister that tries to survive and cope.

And it's a very kind of bleak, unsentimental version of Japanese society.

And it's a lot about the mother struggling, as I said, trying to keep it together, but also...

how what the length she goes to to keep the family together and it just it feels very much like she experienced that and and i understand that some of it is actually built on her own experiences because there's this wonderful

kind of quick glimpses that you just feel that is just too true.

I can't really see how you can come up with something like that.

It just felt so real.

For instance, the only time the family's together is this very banal thing when they're walking down the stairs.

She just had this memory, I can't remember if she's five or seven, but suddenly she feels we're a family and they're just walking down the stairs of this very bleak apartment building.

And it was kind of, it was so sad when I read that.

It kind of really hits me.

And then it's, the men are basically non-existent.

It's the drunk dad, it's a boyfriend that's very much in the periphery, but there's basically no men.

There is this very tight family of women, the mother, the sister, and the younger sister who is the writer.

And it's a beautiful way to depict friendship and female friendships, really.

And I really love this book because I just never met a Japan in such a way before.