One Hundred Flowers
Translated by Cathy Hirano
About
A hundred flowers, a hundred ways of looking. Each brief chapter in Genki Kawamura's novel centres on a single flower and the human moment it illuminates — a stem in a vase catching afternoon light, a petal falling at the exact instant someone decides to leave, a bouquet that says what the person holding it cannot. Kawamura writes about flowers the way his earlier novel wrote about cats: as quiet witnesses to the emotional lives of people who have forgotten how to pay attention. The fragrance of wisteria, the architecture of a sunflower, the stubbornness of a weed — each becomes a lens for love, grief, or the small miracle of noticing something beautiful in the middle of an ordinary day. A novel in fragments, arranged like a bouquet — delicate, deliberate, and more moving than its gentle surface suggests.
