Author(s): Gail Jones

General

"A vision of Japan as you have never imagined it. A brilliant and moving novel about displacement and belonging by the award-winning author of Sixty Lightsand Five Bells.She wished to study the unremarked beauty of modern things, of telephones, aeroplanes, computer screens and electric lights, of television, cars and underground transportation. There had to be in the world of mechanical efficiency some mystery of transaction, the summoning of remote meanings, an extra dimension - supernatural, sure. There had to be a lost sublimity, of something once strange, now familiar, tame. We must talk, Alice Black, about this world of modern things. This buzzing world."Alice is entranced by the aesthetics of technology and, in every aeroplane flight, every Xerox machine, every neon sign, sees the poetry of modernity. Mr Sakamoto, a survivor of the atomic bomb, is an expert on Alexander Graham Bell. Like Alice, he is culturally and geographically displaced. The pair forge an unlikely friendship as Mr Sakamoto regales Alice with stories of twentieth-century invention. His own knowledge begins to inform her writing, and these two solitary beings be