In Plain View: A Novel

by Julie Shigekuni

Overview

Daidai and her husband Hiroshi have what many of their friends believe is a perfect life. Daidai has recently left her job as curator of the Japanese American Museum in Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo so that she and Hiroshi, a university professor, can try for a baby. Frustrated by their lack of success so far, and by their increasingly clinical love life, Daidai befriends Satsuki, one of Hiroshi’s graduate students. Newly arrived from Japan, Satsuki clings to her friendship to Daidai and quickly becomes a mainstay in their household.

Spurred by a revelation concerning Satsuki's estranged mother and a disturbing trip to Japan where Daidai discovered Satsuki's father was engaged in illegal, and illicit, activities, Daidai begins to seriously question Satsuki's seemingly innocent connection to three possible murders.

Daidai's concerns about Satsuki are dismissed as jealousy by her husband until Daidai's investigation will lead to a harrowing confrontation between the two women, and Satsuki's true intentions will be revealed. At once a taut psychological thriller and examination of cultural divides, Shigekuni's In Plain View is never as it appears.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781939419989
Publisher:	The Unnamed Press
Publication date:	11/22/2016
Pages:	246
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Julie Shigekuni is the author of four novels: A Bridge Between Us (Anchor/Doubleday 1995), Invisible Gardens (St. Martin's Press 2003) and Unending Nora (Red Hen Press 2008). Her fiction has been translated into German, Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian. Shigekuni was a finalist for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award and the recipient of the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature. She has received a Henfield Award and an American Japanese Literary Award for her writing.

Shigekuni received her B.A. from CUNY Hunter College and her M.F.A. from Sarah Lawrence College. She is currently at work on a novella and short story collection entitled Beep on Me, and a 60-minute video documentary, Manju Mammas & the An-Pan Brigade, for which she has received funding from the California Council for the Humanities and the Skirball Foundation and sponsorship from Visual Communications, an all Asian media network. She is director of the creative writing program and Development Director of an Asian American Studies program being launched at the Universityof New Mexico.

Editorial Reviews

09/26/2016
Mystery fans comfortable with deferring gratification will enjoy Shigekuni’s well-written if enigmatic tale. A short prologue, in which a four-year-old girl’s mother suddenly disappears in baffling circumstances, sets the cryptic tone. The book then shifts from the prologue’s undefined time and place to 2010 Los Angeles, where Daidai Suzuki has recently stepped down from her position as an art museum curator in the hope that a less stressful lifestyle will maximize her prospects of becoming pregnant. That choice creates tensions with her husband, Hiroshi, a professor of Asian-American studies, which are exacerbated by one of his students, Satsuki Suzuki (who isn’t related to them). Satsuki becomes a frequent visitor to the couple’s apartment, and Daidai fears that she has designs on Hiroshi. After the student’s mother dies in a convent, Daidai finds out that the death was a suicide and starts to play detective to learn the truth about Satsuki. Shigekuni (Unending Nora) does a superb job of portraying her lead’s insecurities. Agent: Laurie Liss, Sterling Lord Literistic. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

“Julie Shigekuni’s prose is shimmering and hallucinatory. The beauty of her writing turns the heat and hard times of California into a dreamscape.” —Ann Patchett, author of Commonwealth

“Julie Shigekuni's thriller delves deep into marriage and friendship, exploring the thin line between love and betrayal. In Plain View explores its Japanese American protagonist's experiences and unique point of view with a refreshing candor that is still too rare in contemporary American fiction." —May-lee Chai, author of Hapa Girl

“Mystery fans will enjoy Shigekuni’s well-written if enigmatic tale… Shigekuni does a superb job of portraying her lead’s insecurities.” —Publishers Weekly

“Artfully evocative... The lesson one takes from [this book] is time-honored in every culture.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Julie Shigekuni seems to know well—painfully well—the complex loyalties that a ‘settled’ modern woman owes to the world that would define her: to her spouse, to her children and parents, to work and to the home, and (most perilously) to her heritage and heart. What can happen when all these loyalties suddenly collide is the subject of this elegant, suspenseful, and ultimately haunting tale.” —Julia Glass, National Book Award-winning author of Three Junes

“This is an intense and introspective book...Shigekuni’s well-crafted first novel succeeds in engaging the reader in its exploration of a universal theme.” —The San Francisco Chronicle

“With the skill of an accomplished novelist, Shigekuni tells a powerful story of the strength of family and the creation of identity...A first novel that betokens a promising career indeed.” —Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“A family saga on an intimate scale... Shigekuni evokes with skill and sensitivity the many colorations of unhappiness that tinge these interwoven lives.” —Boston Globe

From the Publisher

2016-10-19
A thriller that takes the reader from academia in Los Angeles to the nuclear disaster at Fukushima.Daidai is taking a leave of absence as a museum curator while she's trying to conceive. Her husband, Hiroshi, continues to work as a professor. At a party for graduate students, Daidai meets Satsuki, who has just arrived in Los Angeles. Even though she's convinced that Satsuki is interested in her husband, Daidai is, herself, seduced by this beguiling woman. Satsuki is both a fascinating distraction and a chance to connect with Japanese culture—which is something Daidai, a Japanese-American woman raised in the United States, craves. But a death at a local Catholic monastery makes her wonder what she really knows about her new friend. Psychological thrillers often rely on a disconnect between a protagonist's ordinary life and the extraordinary circumstances in which she finds herself. Bored and frustrated, Daidai is perfectly situated both to fall for a charismatic stranger and to become obsessed with her secrets. But Shigekuni's (Unending Nora, 2008, etc.) writing flattens the contrast between Daidai's reality before and after Satsuki. Descriptions of setting and action tend to be vague to the point of opacity. For example, very early in the novel, Daidai has an encounter with a strange man while shopping for groceries in Little Tokyo. She's so startled when he speaks to her that she makes him stumble, and their interaction, apparently, causes a tear in the heavy bag of rice she's carrying. But there's no obvious moment of impact; physical contact is mostly implied. It's difficult to visualize what actually happens during this encounter. Emotional states and relationships are equally hard to divine. The stranger she meets in Little Tokyo is still carrying the torn bag of rice when Daidai runs into the little brother of the friend she's planning to meet for lunch. There are suggestions that she finds him attractive, but there's no way to understand how important this information is. These are not isolated incidents but, rather, indicative of the novel's style throughout. This leaves the reader feeling off-kilter from the start, which diminishes the impact of real mystery entering Daidai's life. Satsuki would be more compellingly enigmatic if there weren't so many gaps and elisions in Shigekuni's worldbuilding and character development. Like many "literary" authors before her, Shigekuni borrows genre-fiction tropes without knowing how to make them work.

Kirkus Reviews