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the complete review - fiction

Dream Messenger

by
Shimada Masahiko

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

B : messy and uneven

See our review for fuller assessment.

  Review Consensus:

  From not too impressed to decidedly unimpressed

  From the Reviews:

• "Mr. Shimada and his translator, Philip Gabriel, strain to be trendy. (...) Mr. Shimada, who can be tart and amusing, this time out hangs too many clashing themes on the framework of his story. (...) The plot of Dream Messenger sounds bizarre in the retelling because it is." - Herbert Mitgang, The New York Times
  
  
• "(P)roof that the Japanese novel is taking some fantastic turns in the hands of a new generation of writers. (...) Characters pop blithely in and out of this episodic fantasy, and the haphazard effect is quite deliberate" - Julia Just, The New York Times Book Review
  
  
• "(T)his trying-too-hard-to-be-hip contemporary novel of fantasy, kinky sex, and emotional insecurity (.....) The improbabilities multiply in this choppy narrative melange of unsympathetic characters (too many of whom have similar-sounding M names), bad poetry, wooden dialogue, and imitation profundity (.....) The best advice for Shimada is to keep dreaming" - Publishers Weekly
  
  
• "Shimada (...) works hard to make this storyline, by turns threadbare and self-consciously quirky, more than a divertissement enlivened by New Age-ish excursions into the paranormal (...), forays down Tokyo's meaner streets (..), and glimpses into the disaffected lives of the young that seem cribbed from Brett Easton Ellis. (...) The problem is that nothing here quite comes off (...) the plot fizzles out; and the prose tries very hard to be hip but is flat and strained, like an undercover cop trying to mingle outside a rock concert." - Brooke Horvath, Review of Contemporary Fiction

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       Dream Messenger is an odd story (rendered, it appears, even more oddly into English; see below), in part because of how it is set up and set in motion -- as quest and P.I.-tale (where the private investigators are not professionals). The wealthy widow Mika Amino wants to find her long lost son, kidnapped by his father when he was three, a quarter of a century earlier. To do so she hires a twenty-five-year-old successful securities analyst she has only met a few times, Maiko Rokujo ("You'll have to quit your job, but you won't have to worry about money", Mrs. Amino promises) -- and throws in her houseboy as sidekick. The houseboy is thirty-seven-year-old Takehiko Kubi, a very successful "self-styled genius juvenile fiction writer" who has abandoned writing -- "It was a shabby business he wanted nothing to do with" -- and essentially sold himself -- in exchange for his extensive debts being taken care of -- into the service of Mrs. Amino, for her to do with as she wishes.
       The young man they are looking for is Masao Fudo, "otherwise known as Matthew". Mrs. Amino had grown up -- and lost her son -- in the United States, only coming to Japan when she was in her twenties. She is certain that her son is now in Japan, too -- but Maiko is sent to New York to first check up on the limited trails there are of the boy there.
       It turns out Matthew was raised in New York City by a couple who ran what amounted to a private orphanage. Except that they made a business out of it, renting out their wards. Generally only very short-term -- and at about: "A hundred dollars a day. On top of this there were extra fees, depending on the special requests of the client". The business sounds dubious, but the couple running it assure Maiko that they were very careful in selecting their clients, ensuring that the children were not in any danger, weeding out the sexual predators.
       The idea behind the business model was that there are a lot of lonely people out there, including many what they call 'orpharents' -- "orphaned parents", the inverse of orphans, as it were. The service provided human companionship of a sort the clients couldn't otherwise find. Indeed, even when he is grown and on his own, Matthew remains in the business, in a manner of speaking, hiring himself out as buddy -- a rock star's drinking companion, for example.
       Complicating matters -- or at least the story -- is the fact that Matthew is also a 'dream messenger', able to: "use dreams to communicate with others". Where others lack intimate bonds -- every man an island -- Matthew can connect on the most intimate, deepest level, literally getting inside others' heads. This happens throughout the novel, though generally not too intrusively -- though Shimada occasionally waxes excessively about it:

     Dream messengers live through dreams. In dreams they think, they worry, learn, have visions of the future. In dreams they take their shattered selves and piece them together again. They cure sickness in dreams, die in dreams, and wake to be reborn.

     Before him he saw the entire country, Japan, millions of people, drinking, spewing out their complaints, their misery and jealousy and fatigue enveloping them like mist.

Being a rental child means being everyone's child, and no one's. But never just one persons.

One novelist named Masahiko Shimada told me he's seriously thinking of making me the main character in his next novel. He'll come to interview me soon. I made it clear to him that I don't come cheap. I asked the budding girl novelist what she thinks of Shimada's work, and she said, "It's too sentimental. He needs to live a more demanding life, like yours."

     The story isn't supposed to develop this easily, Kubi thought. It's like a cheap detective novel. This is what they call 'misuse of happenstance.' Mrs. Amino's novel isn't supposed to be this simplistic.

- M.A.Orthofer, 11 April 2016

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Links:

• Kodansha publicity page

• Kirkus Reviews
• Lines from the Horizon
• The Modern Novel
• Publishers Weekly

• Shimada Masahiko at J'Lit

• See Index of Japanese literature

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About the Author:

       Japanese author Shimada Masahiko (島田雅彦) was born in 1961.

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