Book Review: How Do You Live?
Genzaburo Yoshino’s 1937 Japanese coming-of-age classic.
I picked up How Do You Live? by Genzaburo Yoshino precisely for the reason you might think: It was touted as the inspiration behind Hayao Miyazaki’s latest Studio Ghibli movie, The Boy and the Heron. And I think I may have misunderstood what that meant at first. But after correcting my impressions, I still wanted to give it a read. It’s my first real foray into literary fiction and while there’s certainly things to enjoy about it, the experience as a whole fell very flat for me.
Blurb
'In How Do You Live?, Copper, our hero, and his uncle are our guides in science, in ethics, in thinking. And on the way they take us, through a school story set in Japan in 1937, to the heart of the questions we need to ask ourselves about the way we live our lives. We will experience betrayal and learn about how to make tofu. We will examine fear, and how we cannot always live up to who we think we are, and we learn about shame, and how to deal with it. We will learn about gravity and about cities, and most of all, we will learn to think about things - to, as the writer Theodore Sturgeon put it, ask the next question'.
Review
How Do You Live? is very much a young adult story with strong coming-of-age themes. For the most part, each chapter ends with a letter from Copper’s uncle expounding on some scientific, historical, or ethical point to help him to become a better person. Through the book we follow Copper’s life at school and learn how he came to have that nickname and how he makes friends along the way. His friends are vibrant and memorable characters, each with their distinctive parts. There’s the long-time childhood friend, Mizutani; tough and stubborn Kitami; and the quiet but stalwart tofu-maker, Uragawa. We follow them as they do ordinary kid things like playing make believe, talking baseball, and getting into disagreements with older students. The uncle talks about such famous figures as Copernicus, Sir Isaac Newton, and Napoleon; and about topics such as production lines and the history of Buddha statues.
The trouble is that I found the book incredibly boring, preachy, and verbose. It started off interesting, but the uncle’s lessons felt more like sermons and everything was done in such a long-winded way that it felt like it took me forever to read, despite being only 280 pages long. I found myself skipping over large sections from the second chapter onwards, and not missing anything of the conversation. It felt like the characters (particularly the uncle) were just vehicles for the author to expound upon very basic history and science facts that he had learned. There were interesting tidbits here and there related more to the fact the book was written in 1937, before the rise of fascism and the second world war, but overall it was just plain dull. The action picked up a bit when it came to the snowy day incident, but I felt like the book strayed into melodrama in the fallout. And then there was time for one more sermon from uncle before the end.
How Do You Live? may be a coming-of-age classic, and perhaps developing minds might get a lot more out of it—it’s definitely written for a younger audience—but it simply wasn’t for me.
