This is a strange little book. The protagonist, Harada, is a middle aged screenwriter, orphaned aged twelve when his parents are killed in a traffic accident. Recently divorced, he throws himself into his work. He is tired and lonely.

A) story that pens in spare strokes a portrait of urban alienation. (...) Less subtle, unfortunately, are the vagaries of the translation into American English. (...) What survives, however, is a memorably uncanny tapestry, and a powerful atmosphere, of heat and rain and sorrow." - Steven Poole, The Guardian David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas) said "highly recommended, a cerebral haunting ghost story" & Bret Easton Ellis describes this as "an eerie ghost story written with hypnotic clarity, intelligent & haunting with passages of acute psychological insight into the relationship between children & parents".Pe de alta parte, daca acceptam supranaturalul, atunci putem afirma ca prin suferinta, prin divort, Hideo a devenit un fel de "felinar", un "magnet" pentru spiritele care mai aveau ceva de spus in lumea noastra. Acesta este un concept des intalnit si in filme, indeosebi cele japoneze, cand eroul devine un portal pentru spiritele de dincolo. Eu as tinde spre aceasta explicatie, mi se pare mai pe gustul meu. :) It’s that yearning that compels him to make return visits. Every time he does so, he feels bathed in the warmth of their welcome and their easy acceptance of him. Over the course of a few visits he relaxes enough to begin calling them Mom and Dad, finding a deep pleasure in their company and the opportunity to re-live happy childhood experiences as well as make up for lost time. It sounds like the starting point for a dark, terrifying descent into mania and doubt, or else a paranoiac thriller. However, Taichi Yamada takes a more subdued approach. The protagonist, Harada, has a quiet life: recently divorced, he rarely socialises and lives in a near-empty building. A secondary plot strand involves his burgeoning relationship with a neighbour, Kei, who shies away from the world because of the scars caused by a severe burn across her chest. Harada's encounters with his parents are disconcertingly ordinary. A note of horror creeps in when others notice Harada physically declining, though he is unable to see the change.

The Japanese original won the 1987 Yamamoto Shūgorō Prize for best human-interest novel. The English translation was one of sixteen works long-listed for the 2006 Foreign Fiction prize awarded by The Independent. This terse novel by Taichi Yamada, a successful scriptwriter for Japanese television, is a ghost story that pens in spare strokes a portrait of urban alienation. The narrator is 47-year-old Hideo Harada, also a TV scriptwriter: he is working, he tells us wryly, on "a comedy of manners about men and women who spent a hell of a lot of time playing billiards and tennis". Harada is divorced from his wife and hasn't spoken to his 19-year-old son in a long time. He lives in his office and hardly sees anyone, and doesn't want to. Until one night when, looking up at his building from outside, he notices another lit window. As the story fairies would have it, there lives an attractive younger woman, with whom he starts a desperate affair. The cleverness of Yamada's novel is in its final twist, when it turns out that Hideo's choice leaves him still ensnared in a dangerous position. This book is a thinking man’s ghost story in the vein of The Turn of the Screw, and its rich pathos should delight fans of King’s warmer fare. Strangers by Taichi Yamada – eBook DetailsTaichi Yamada's Strangers is a very efficient and chilling up-dating, to the 1980s (when it was written in Japanese), of a Noh-play-type story: of ghostly spirits filtering through into the living world, and of how the spirit must be put to rest by the living." - Anthony Thwaite, Sunday Telegraph Strangers is an odd little book and isn’t my usual fare because it involves ghosts. Fortunately there was more to it than the spectral element. The 2023 English-language film All of Us Strangers, directed by Andrew Haigh, is also based on the novel. Meanwhile he also become more involved with the woman in his building, Kei, with a real relationship developing between them.

The impact of All of Us Strangers will likely vary wildly depending on the beholder. With such a despairing thesis, the film may seem awfully foreign to some younger queer people who, while no doubt still suffering the batterings of an often hostile world, can’t quite identify with Adam’s internal wrestling: his fear, his coded shame, his hermetic longing. Older viewers may run headlong toward the film’s despondency, finding solace, even catharsis, in its haunting ache. Kei isn’t convinced his trips to Asakusa are good for his health. She sees Heido changing day-by-day, becoming hollow-eyed, aged and emaciated. She’s even more worried because Heido himself cannot see these changes – when he looks at himself in the mirror he looks as healthy as ever. Can Kei save him from the ghosts of his past? Or is his desire to make up for the lost years of his relationship with his parents too strong to resist?Hideo's visits to the people who resemble his parents so closely turns out to come at a high but confusing cost, appearing -- to others -- to sap the life out of him, though he himself remains largely oblivious to this. Strangely enough, this book began tepidly. This is the story of lonely TV writer, Hideo who is approaching middle age. Set in Japan during the 1980s outside of Kyoto, Hideo lives a mundane life of where everything seems to be all laid out for him. Estranged from his son, Shigeki, at odds with his ex-wife Ayako for dating who’s now engaged to his occasional friend and co-worker, Mamiya, Hideo spends his time in solitude, concealing his feelings—whether it be anger, or confusion. The old neighbourhood has, of course, changed dramatically since then, but he's still somehow drawn to it.

Strangers is narrated by middle-aged Hideo, a recently divorced TV scriptwriter living in a Tokyo apartment building where most of the apartments are used as offices, leaving the building practically deserted at night.

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La trama è molto coinvolgente ma bisogna accettare i lati surreali (un altro giapponese letto faceva vedere il mondo dal punto di vista del gatto di casa, quindi basta abituarsi). Devo riconoscere che ci sono alcune "sbavature" nel racconto che non collegano bene i due filoni principali, 'genitori e amica", questo mi ha lasciato un po' perplesso (ma non posso svelare il contenuto). We learn his life’s been marked by constant tragedy: he loses his parents when he was 12 to an accident; he lives with his grandfather out in the country, eventually losing him too. Finally, it is an uncle of his who helps him with his college tuition as he comes of age without much of a family unit to complete him. In reading these early scenes, it reminded me too much of films or books where it is usually about a lonely male protagonist who finds himself in a noirish situation where he falls for a mysterious woman who awakens what’s dead inside. I was partially correct: Hideo is entranced by his waiflike neighbor Kei and the two begin an affair. Hideo loves touching Kei’s bottom parts complete with moles that show his desire to love physically. I shuddered thinking this would become a book about the exposure of male glaze that I was fearing. So, this is the moment where Hideo falls for Kei, at least physically. Strangers is written with a clarity I have come to recognise as Japanese." - Kate Kellaway, The Observer Strangers" was one of those books that has been left behind by another traveler on the shelf of an Airbnb apartment. Me, always being curious about what kind of reads others bring along on their vacations, decided to take it along for a couple of days at the beach. Yamada has gained accolades from substantial writers such as David Mitchell and Bret Easton Ellis, but this novel is more a gentle entertainment than a serious psychic disturbance." - James Urquhart, Daily Telegraph