All of Us Strangers [Movie Tie-in]

A Novel

By: Taichi Yamada

Narrated by: Geoff Sugiyama

Now a Major Motion Picture starring Andrew Scott, Paul Mescal, Claire Foy, and Jamie Bell.

A man is drawn back to his childhood home and discovers his parents living just as they were on the day they died thirty years before…

Screenwriter Harada is disconnected from the world. Lonely and jaded, he’s drifted apart from his son and is dismissive when approached with gestures of friendship, including from a lonely and mysterious tenant who lives in his mostly empty apartment building.

One night, when Harada returns to the dilapidated downtown district of Tokyo where he grew up, he meets a man who looks exactly like his long-dead father. And so begins Harada’s ordeal, thrust into a reality where his parents appear to be alive at the exact age they had been when they died many years earlier.

Deeply felt, searching, and profound, All of Us Strangers is a beautiful meditation on loss and the connection between familial love and romantic love.

Very different from anything else I’ve read lately

Story was Quick and unpredictable. Overall a very Nice read. I could see this easily turned into a movie.

Abbreviated

I enjoyed the plot, but there wasn’t much of an emotional connection that I could make with any of the characters. I had heard so much about the heartfelt movie that I expected it from the book. I didn’t get it except in small size bites

Terrible; Possibly Lost in Translation

The narrative is devoid of human emotion. That is partly a device to develop a character who is emotionally unavailable. But it goes too far. My inclination is that the translator is using too many phrases to capture ideas that are simpler said in Japanese. It leads to awkward passages where the narrator says things like: “I was lonely” followed by two sentences that define what the word lonely means. Completely lacking in poetry, it creates a distance between story and reader. I found it annoying.