We follow the life of recently widowed Kyoko, a Japanese immigrant in America. Kyoko leaves for America as a teenager for college, leaving behind her parents and a sibling. Growing up in Japan and witnessing the war she had it in her mind to find freedom, and heading to America for studies and a future there is how she takes steps towards it.
Kyoko has a regular, run-of-the-mill upbringing with a working father, ahousewife mother and a younger sibling. She grew up content with the basics never wanting anything. Once in America, she lives the college life and this story starts when she gets pregnant and decides to keep the baby and marry his father. Her marriage is born more out of friendship and the unplanned baby than love, though there's some of that too. Life settles for Kyoko and Levi and baby Alex, on her first trip back to Japan after Alex is born, Levi who had stayed back in America, dies in an accident.
Kyoko and her inner mind is what we witness in this story. After her husband's death with a 2-year-old to look after, Kyoko is almost relieved to give up on dating andlove, she solely focuses on being a mother. She works for a local preschool and not as a writer, she qualified in at her graduation. She is not very ambitious in life though.
She takes the help she is offered by her mother and brother-in-law in the immediate aftermath of losing her husband. She is also very angry and convinced she doesn't and never loved Levi, once he's dead. She focuses on raising her child mainly. While she is doing that she has a lot of free time while the kid is young. And it is this free time, at least mentally, thatis what the reader witnesses.
Kyoko is a peculiar woman and some of the things and experiences she narrates put me right off her. I persevered thoughas I got curious seeing how a young woman, who does have opportunities in front of her, is not ambitious enough to make a go of them. She is happy getting the money from the government,andher work at the preschool. She is frugal. She lives in a house she'll share till her child grows up and leaves for college.
Her inner thoughts are so varied and the interesting ones are accompanied by good times, to say the least for her not-so-good thoughts. There are some equally quirky, a bit disgusting and even too much information type events that we read about.
Through all the inner workings of Kyoko's life, I can say she is honest, unapologetic and speaks her mind most of the time. Her relationship with her mother-in-law and her family is honest, loyal and loving at times. Though not sure about anything, she is a good mother and ensures her child's safety, health and happiness at all times.
The lead character is a flawed human and I could feel the raw honesty in the way she is presented, which is always underappreciated but refreshing to read about nonetheless.
After reading all about how Kyoko feels about life in general and what makes her, herself, one can say that SEE: LOSS. SEE ALSO: LOVE. is about a woman making sense of her life through grief, being a mother and everything in between. It isn't always pretty and at times downright cringe-worthy. So if you want to get out of your mind for a while and see how a young Japanese woman goes through life in America without much ambition, but has dreams nonetheless and love for her child as she brings him up alone, then this might be a good read for you.
A tender, slyly comical, and shamelessly honest debut novel following a Japanese widow raising her son between worlds with the help of her Jewish mother-in-law as she wrestles with grief, loss, and—strangest of all—joy.
Shortly after her husband Levi’s untimely death, Kyoko decides to raise their young son, Alex, in San Francisco, rather than return to Japan. Her nosy yet loving Jewish mother-in-law, Bubbe, encourages her to find new love and abandon frugality but her own mother wants Kyoko to celebrate her now husbandless life. Always beside her is Alex, who lives confidently, no matter the circumstance.
Four sections of vignettes reflect Kyoko’s fluctuating emotional states—sometimes ugly, other times funny, but always uniquely hers. While freshly mourning Levi, Kyoko and Alex confront another death—that of Alex’s pet betta fish. Kyoko and Bubbe take a road trip to a psychic and discover that Kyoko carries bad karma. On visits back to Japan, Kyoko and her mother clash over how best to connect Alex with his Japanese heritage, and as Alex enters his teenage years and brings his first girlfriend home, Kyoko lets her imagination run wild as she worries about teen pregnancy.
In this openhearted and surprising novel about the choices and relationships that sustain us, there are times where Kyoko is lonely but never alone and others in which she is alone but never lonely. Through these moments, she learns how much more there is to herself in the wake of total and unexpected upheaval. See: Loss. See Also: Love. is a testament to how grief isn’t a linear process but is a spiraling awareness of the vast range of human emotion we experience every day.
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