Rate this book

The Maid (2010)

by Yasutaka Tsutsui(Favorite Author)

3.52 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

1846880998 (ISBN13: 9781846880995)

languge

English

genre

Science Fiction

publisher

Alma Publishing Company

review 1: This book confused me; I didn't like it as I read it. Nanase, the maid, has the ability to read people's minds. She's chosen to work as a maid and to conceal her gift of telepathy because she fears the consequences of anyone finding out. In each family she works for, everyone is reduced to thoughts and feelings of hate, sex, rape, envy, arrogance and condescension towards both family members and the maid.I wondered why the author had deliberately chosen to reduce all people to vessels of hatred, with no love or 'goodness' to be found anywhere. Then I concluded that maybe the maid is just crazy. After all, nobody can actually read minds. Nanase's selective ability to apparently work only for families hiding bad thoughts and ill will inside their hearts seems unlikely to me ... more- surely Japanese society isn't composed exclusively of morally corrupt people? As Nanase doesn't tend to judge people beyond not liking them or feeling wary of them, there doesn't seem to be social commentary going on here. Instead, Nanase's thoughts often centre around herself - in her mind, she had chosen to work as a maid to hide her secret; she makes an excellent maid because of her ability to know what people are thinking, yet nobody ever appreciates this; whenever she's around men, they all have lusting thoughts for her, appreciating her figure and beauty; she could do something different with her life, but chooses not to. Perhaps Nanase is just so bored with her life and cannot face the drudgery that lies before her, she's created an alternative reality for herself inside her head, placing herself at the centre of a universe where people are intrinsically tainted and she is purer and has powers that the rest of them don't possess. She's pretty narcissistic and is not to be trusted; her reality is so incongruent with mine, that the only way I can make sense of her is to conclude she's a little bit insane. Who knows?
review 2: This is the second collection of short stories I've read by this weird dude. The first was Salmonella Men On Planet Porno (SMOPP) about which I had mixed feelings. On the one hand I thought SMOPP was deeply misogynistic and the characterizations pretty helter-skelter, but it had enough cool imagery that I still think about the book and several of the stories on a fairy regular basis(particularly the titular story and the one about an enormous floating resort city that is sinking). I went to the library to try and get that book to re-read it but they had this there instead and I was like, yeah o.k. So, I read it in about four hours during my commute to and from school (I am a student at the local community college's wine production program, except by local I mean nearest because I live on an island and have to ride a boat to go basically anywhere) and I really liked it a lot actually. Its still very focused on sex, I guess dude was a psych major w/ adds up, but I didn't have alarm belles sounding off in my head the whole time like I did with SMOPP. The stories are written from the perspective of this 18 yo Japanese maid who is a telepath and works as a maid as, like, a cover. This is a pretty great idea because it gives you a narrator who is somewhat divorced from the action and also who is somewhat omniscient which adds up to some really closely observed portraits of the kind of deeply fucked up families that are (in my personal experience) extremely common. Really great psychological investigations into the way a family can slowly rot out inside until its a hollow shell of civility filled with black nacreous bile, which, like, if you know me you could see how I would be totally down for this. In terms of the style the stories remind me a lot of classic detective stories and a lot of them unfold like short mysteries as the maid probes the minds of her families and gets to the bottom of their black hearts. There is one story in particular, the second, where the author has the option to get really scatologically explicit but instead takes the opposite tack and is just vaguely suggestive; I mention this because, after SMOPP I would have expected the former and while I think it works probably at least as well I did find I was actually disappointed by the lack of graphic descriptions. I just read Assisted Living by Tetralogen and I wouldn't have minded a taste of that kind of thing. All in all I say, yeah go ahead and read this if your interested in Japanese Contemp. Lit. especially I guess as this dude is really popular there. less

Download links for: The Maid

Advertising