What's Left of Me Is Yours
Stephanie Scott, 2020
Knopf Doubleday
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780385544702
Summary
A gripping debut set in modern-day Tokyo and inspired by a true crime. What's Left of Me Is Yours charts a young woman's search for the truth about her mother's life—and her murder.
In Japan, a covert industry has grown up around the "wakaresaseya" (literally "breaker-upper"), a person hired by one spouse to seduce the other in order to gain the advantage in divorce proceedings.
When Sato hires Kaitaro, a wakaresaseya agent, to have an affair with his wife, Rina, he assumes it will be an easy case.
But Sato has never truly understood Rina or her desires and Kaitaro's job is to do exactly that—until he does it too well. While Rina remains ignorant of the circumstances that brought them together, she and Kaitaro fall in a desperate, singular love, setting in motion a series of violent acts that will forever haunt her daughter's life.
Told from alternating points of view and across the breathtaking landscapes of Japan, Stephanie Scott exquisitely renders the affair and its intricate repercussions.
As Rina's daughter, Sumiko, fills in the gaps of her mother's story and her own memory, Scott probes the thorny psychological and moral grounds of the actions we take in the name of love, asking where we draw the line between passion and possession. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
Stephanie Scott is a Singaporean and British writer who was born and raised in South East Asia. She read English Literature at the Universities of York and Cambridge and holds an M.S in Creative Writing from Oxford University.
Scott was awarded a British Association of Japanese Studies Toshiba Studentship for her anthropological work on What's Left of Me Is Yours and has been made a member of the British Japanese Law Association as a result of her research.
She also won the A.M. Heath Prize, the Jerwood Arvon Prize for Prose Fiction, and was a runner up for the Bridport Prize Peggy Chapman-Andrews Award. What's Left of Me Is Yours is her first novel. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
[A]n extraordinary window onto [Japanese] culture.… Each chapter of this enrapturing novel is elegantly brief and charged with barely contained emotion. Yet Scott’s subject remains vast: the idea that the law itself does not protect the innocent, and "that what matters most is knowledge—of ourselves and others,"
New York Times Book Review
Mesmerizing
Los Angeles Times
Fascinating.… [scott] braids her different characters' timelines together with sophistication, her storytelling harmoniously well-constructed. The big questions over whether it's better to lie or to tell a difficult truth, and what might constitute a betrayal, are layered across generations and decades and there is strength in the subtlety with which Scott slowly unpacks them.
Guardian (UK)
Scott deftly spins a web through modern day Tokyo in this captivating dual-perspective rendering of a young woman determined to find out the truth behind her mother's murder.
Newsweek
Sumiko works to resolve the mystery of her mother’s murder… bringing her closer to understanding the blurred line that exists between love and hate. Byzantine subplots, distinctive characters, and atmospheric settings will leave readers spellbound.
Publishers Weekly
Scott poignantly evokes both a mother trapped by the choices made for her and a daughter learning to deal with her own precarious freedom.… [W]ith carefully accumulated details [she] describes a Japan… teetering on the edge of change.
Booklist
The book proceeds slowly… perhaps not adding enough new information to maintain the level of interest set by the sensational details in the first pages. An unusual and stylish story of love and murder—less a mystery than a study of emotions and cultural mores.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Before reading the novel, had you heard of the wakaresaseya or "marriage breakup" industry? What do you think are the risks of this industry being allowed to operate? How does this relate to honey trapping in your own culture?
2. From the beginning, photography plays a large role in the novel. How does photography influence Sumiko’s telling of her mother’s story?
3. Sumiko notes early in the novel that the best lies are close to the truth. How does Kai prove this theory as he tells Rina about himself?
4. Sumiko observes that she struggles to imagine her mother as a young person, an individual separate from her motherhood: "When I think of her, it is as my mother, and I cannot picture her any other way." Have you ever heard a story about a family member and struggled to reconcile this with your own image and experience of him or her?
5. This novel revolves around a murder, but we learn the identity of the alleged murderer relatively early in the story. How does that affect your reading of the events leading up to the crime?
6. Almost every character in the novel struggles to balance multiple roles: parent, lover, child, professional, etc. Who do you think struggles the most?
7. How do physical objects trigger memories and emotions for Sumiko and Yoshi after Rina’s death? Do you have any talismans that remind you of people you’ve lost?
8. How is the Japanese justice system similar to or different from your own? What do you think of Yurie Kagashima’s defense of Kai? Is it a fair defense?
9. What do you think Sumiko means when she says that every member of her family, including her, is guilty of her mother’s death?
10. How do you think knowing the full truth about her mother’s death will affect Sumiko’s life after the action of the novel concludes? What do you think will be the significance of her "choice" at the very end? And is it the right one?
11. Is the law a character in its own right?
12. Are the locations in the novel characters in their own right? How do they affect and shape the narrative?
13. What do you think of the novel’s title? How does it apply to all the characters?
14. What economic and societal constraints are faced by the men and women in the novel? Have any of these issues featured in your own life?
15. How does the novel depict the tension between personal desire and the pressure to conform to social norms?
16. The novel is a mediation of all the different forms of love. What does love mean to you? Who from the book best exemplifies this definition of love?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)