Blog tour: Fish Swimming in Dappled Sunlight

Welcome to the blog tour for Fish Swimming in Dappled Sunlight by Riku Onda!

More about the book…

Set in Tokyo over the course of one night, Aki and Hiro have decided to be together one last time in their shared flat before parting. Their relationship has broken down after a mountain trek during which their guide died inexplicably. Now each believes the other to be a murderer and is determined to extract a confession before the night is over. Who is the murderer and what really happened on the mountain? In the battle of wills between them, the chain of events leading up to this night are gradually revealed in a gripping psychological thriller that keeps the reader in suspense to the very end.

More about the author…

Riku Onda, born in 1964, has been writing fiction since 1991 and has published prolifically since. She has won the Yoshikawa Eiji Prize for New Writers, the Japan Booksellers' Award, the Yamamoto Shūgorō Prize and the Naoki Prize. Her work has been adapted for film and television.

My impressions…

Beautifully translated from the Japanese by Alison Watts, this is unlike any psychological thrillers you’ll have read. Cleverly narrated in turns by Aki and Hiro, the questions it tries to answer go way beyond ‘Who killed that man?’. The themes of love, identity and memory play a huge role in this novel, which reads like a clever and well-thought-out chess game between the two main characters. And the details… oh, I loved the details that made the stifling hot, Tokyo night itself become a third main character. Here’s to wishing for more of Onda’s novels to be translated into English!

Three words to describe it. Intense. Claustrophobic. Elegant.

Do I like the cover? I love it!

Have I read any other books by the same author? Yes. Fish Swimming in Dappled Sunlight is the author’s second work to be translated into English. Her first, The Aosawa Murders, was also amazing!