#SHION OKAMOTO SPEAK ENGLISH HOW TO#

“What are you, nuts?” Letting his ax dangle, Yoki looked at me with disbelief. “That’s cruel, cutting it down when it’s trying so hard to live.” Yoki took his ax and chopped the elderberry tree down near its roots. Along the way, he learns a few hard lessons about what being a forester entails: Yuki moves from removing snow from young trees in winter and planting saplings in spring, to removing weeds and undergrowth in summer, and pruning branches in autumn. The backdrop of the tale is the changing of the seasons, and the four main chapters show that the forester’s work is never boring.

#SHION OKAMOTO SPEAK ENGLISH HOW TO#

Yet the main story of Yuki learning how to cope in the mountains is excellent. At times, this can make the story rather predictable, and the romance falls a little flat. There’s also the standard love interest, with the rather timid Yuki struggling to make an impression on Nao, an elementary school teacher who rarely gives him the time of day. It’s a fairly standard story of an outsider learning to adapt to life in a closed society, and in attempting to explain the job of the forester, Miura can be a little dry at times. If you go into The Easy Life in Kamusari with a critical view, then there are several aspects of the book you’ll find easy to dismiss. Accepted as part of a small group led by Seiichi Nakamura, who owns most of the land around, and living with Yoki ( a superman on the mountains, a playboy off them) and his family, Yuki learns all about life as a forester – and there’s even a hint of romance in the clean, mountain air… Poor Yuki is a fish out of water in the mountains, but even if he’s less than happy to be there (and attempts one feeble escape), eventually he decides to give it a shot and (what do you know?) begins to enjoy life in the mountains. It’s an excellent set-up for a novel, and it plays out superbly. In what will seem a rather cruel decision to most readers, they’ve signed the hapless Yuki up for a year’s traineeship as a forester, way out in the mountains of western Japan, and our average teenager soon finds himself stranded in the mountain village of Kamusari, without even a mobile phone or an internet connection.

As it turns out, this isn’t something he needs to worry about as his parents have made the decision for him. Shion Miura’s The Easy Life in Kamusari (translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter, review copy courtesy of Amazon Crossing) describes a year in the life of eighteen-year-old Yuki Hirano, a Yokohama native who’s just finished school, albeit with less than flying colours, and isn’t quite sure what to do next in life. Today’s choice is a book that has benefited form this trend, both a work by a popular woman writer and a fun novel many will enjoy, and it has a simple message for all you bookworms out there – take it easy, na? 😉 However, a more recent trend has seen that flow extended to a greater variety of works, some slightly lighter, more general stories, and with more books by female writers making it to our shores. Since the middle of the twentieth century, a steady stream of the classics of Japanese literature have made their way into English, for which I, for one, am extremely grateful.

Shion okamoto speak english