The Argentine Hag

About

After the narrator’s mother dies, her father takes up with the strangest woman in town — an eccentric old woman who once taught tango and lives in a crumbling building everyone calls “the Argentine Building.” The neighbourhood calls her “the Argentine Hag.” The narrator is unsettled, then curious, then quietly transformed. Meanwhile, her father — a retired stonemason who once carved tombstones — becomes obsessed with mandalas, constructing an enormous one on the building’s roof with the Hag at its spiritual centre. Yoshimoto has always written about grief as a doorway rather than a wall, and here the doorway leads somewhere genuinely unexpected: a story about how the people we resist most fiercely are sometimes the ones who teach us how to keep living. Illustrated throughout by artist Nara Yoshitomo, whose drawings give the book the feel of a strange, beautiful object.