This review contains spoilers. I dont think the work relies upon surprise but I dont want to mislead anyone who might read this. I cover the general shape of the protagonists relationship with her late mother and her aunt. This is the central narrative to the story. There is a large cast of characters who play significant roles outside of these three but most of them are not even mentioned in passing in this essay. Ikoku Nikki is a work primarily concerned with grief. The protagonist Takumi Asa begins the narrative with the death of both parents. She is suddenly found in the care of her estranged aunt Koudai Makio. Her abrupt guardianship was due to a sudden and sweeping pity for young Asa as she sat surrounded by a large calloused extended family unsure of how to handle the situation. Pity is a keyword because Makio would deny a sense of love explicitly and does not have a strong sense of obligation. Through Ikoku Nikki you will watch this pity warp and wane as they develop a stronger more stable connection as family. Asas grief swells and recedes creating the rhythm of the story as we watch her unlock dusty corners in the minds of everyone that she pulls into her life with a strong and unevenly bright personality. Makios grief loosens and reveals itself as she allows her niece to interrupt the privacy of her daily life in the way that children do. There is an emotional eclecticism to grief that is hard to explain even to those that understand. Specifically grief occupies a structure similar to chronic illnesses. It is recurring and its absence is best understood as a state of remission. For the sake of distinction I will define mourning as a reaction to grieving. This isnt necessarily a universally acknowledged difference but I think that I need clarity for the sake of discussion. Mourning is an action that is only achievable through an active state of grief. If I can continue the medical terminology mourning could be understood as a common symptom of griefs onset. However grief is caused by an ultimately unprocessable state of loss. This inability to fully process the loss means that grief will continually present itself in surprising and idiosyncratic ways. Grief is a very unpleasant way to trace previously unknown contours of your mind and emotional disposition. Grief also alters them reshaping the inner landscapes it maps. You can neatly divide my life into two parts.The fulcrum is in 2012 when my father died of cirrhosis of the liver a month later my grandfather died of pneumonia and then in a few weeks I graduated from highschool. So I would say its fairly clear how something like Ikoku Nikki would appeal to me. Of course I miss my father. I doubt I would write much of anything without his death. He stands at the center of my poetry which regardless of its quality there are maybe a hundred poems Ive written about him specifically. I was named after him as he was named for his father. I was raised with a very formal and concrete sense of legacy despite my entire inheritance being about 5500 dollars from disability that he was finally approved for after his passing. Even now he lounges in the back of my mind. Making my peace with his death made my southern accent thicker. Thanks to his death I dont have to grapple with the friction that comes with reciprocal familial love. He has been reduced down to several sentimental objects and an idea I can freely manipulate. I can imagine years of conversation wearing down his racism. I can talk about him like I would a cartoon character I have a particular fondness for saying things to people I want to find me interesting like Did I ever tell you about how my dad did ecstasy and rode a fourwheeler? I can magnify his tenderness when I need to but still utilize his mistakes to sulk. You can do this with a living parent but it dissolves the moment they speak. My mother is still alive and the knowledge that some things will become easier when she passes is deeply uncomfortable. Asas wound is complicated by her access to care. Makio the only one who stepped in and offered her stability openly resents her dead mother. Makios decision to make to tell Asa her true feelings coils anxiety in her nieces chest. Anxiety about her own status as someone who is loved. This does not only extend to her immediate relationship with Makio but reaches back in time and blurs the affections of her parents. With time the stories you hear of deceased parents can be as vivid as your own memories. When Makio describes her sister as cold and judgemental Asas mind wanders to small moments of reprimand. Her mothers reaction to Asas last haircut seemed sharp and exasperated. The only thing she remembered her father saying about her hair was: If Ikoku Nikki left its tone at this flat spoiling of memory I dont think I would like it very much. I think it would feel dishonest. However Yamashita Tomoko understands griefs capacity for surprise. Importantly she writes Ikoku Nikki with the understanding that these surprises are primarily hidden in the understanding of a situation rather than the production of new situations. Grief defamiliarizes people places and words. You can see a confusing shame well up in your grandfather at his sons funeral like me. You can suddenly realize that your writer aunts definition of loneliness is fundamentally different from your own. You can try to communicate and suddenly feel the small but measurable distance between you and your closest friend. You can find yourself weeping publicly loudly because you cant remember how to write it: You find yourself wrapped up in the granular explanation of the radicals that spell washtub because your aunt said it with a healing urgency. You instinctively grasp why shes so fussy with what she means although you might find it pedantic. Makio radiates a nervous energy that works to protect herself from failure. It allows her to withdraw from social situations and gives her the strength to choose her friends. Her introversion may be something innate to her personality but the importance of her selfimage exaggerates her preference for solitude. This is a result of the constant belittling she received from her sister and to a greater extent than she admits her mother. She is hesitant to cook gyoza because shes worried she cant do it right. Her niece almost makes her cry asking her to help clean. She maintains an ambiguous relationship with her lover for the sake of obscuring its problems. Most importantly she is very very picky with her words. I love Makios preoccupation with language it felt very familiar to conversations Ive had with poets novelists and more generalized writers. The way she spoke of the kanji that make up kanji felt selfsatisfactory in a way I feel I recognize in myself and some people Ive spent a long time sharing work with. Although we dont talk much anymore I have a friend who began writing poetry as he started working as a programmer. He loves super formdriven poetry. He liked to nest words in his words in ways that were super hard when we were exchanging writings most frequently. I admired his writing and often tried to mimic him so I can show you a smidge of what I mean: Thick green thread wrapped aro und the buildings and the posts and the trees. Aro und the land and the people and the dead. Aro und and a let the whirring slow to a drawl round of muscadine wine to take the edge. I wrote this stanza as part of a poem in either 2017 or 2018 I think. I had been writing anything that would let me practice making my line break interesting. Im not particularly sold on this bit anymore but I can definitely see myself trying to work something out of the physicality of the text in a way that had to have been because he sent me a poem that did something similar. Makios interest in language especially in how she explains kanji is rooted in a similar spirit. I broke apart the word around just to get the und to allow me to stutter an and sort of. When I was breaking words apart in this very literal way it felt like unscrewing a cheap pen to access the small spring. Atomizing the pen allows you to see the inks physicality. Im autistic so I immediately stuck a paperclip in the back of the ink cartridge and smeared the thick ink on my notebook the first time I did it. With all the parts separated I couldnt see the pen as a single object for a while. Makio and Asas multiple discussions of kanji function to appreciate the modularity of the words. English is not as good at this but we do have compound words and the ability to use kennings as an archaic grammatical device when necessary. Anyway Makios preoccupation with language is central to how Asas grief develops. Her refusal to comfort Asa by lying may seed the girls initial anxiety but it also functions as a landmark. Asa depends on Makios curtness and pedantic specificity. Makios attempt at objectivity allows Asa to use their conversations more ruggedly than just as comforting words. This pull between grief and language forms the core of Ikoku Nikki. As you watch Asa grow you watch her bend under the weight of her loss. I dont mean to use bend to insinuate her growth is stunted or malformed but it is undeniably shaped. Not just the broad contours of her personality but Asas trajectory as a person gets shifted by her loss. Makios insistence on clarity is stifling. Makio consistently finagles with definitions with words as objects or even forces to bargain with. Asa sees these actions as binding in the way that a cast is binding. Makio and Asa eke out warmth from two words and their difference and this connection allows them to make irregular steps towards the only recourse towards grief which is adaptation. While you watch Asa grieve and change the series plants you in a corner similar to that of Makio. You watch from a fixed position with the presence of her mother in the corner of your eye. She recurs in the form of empty rooms in the phrases and expectations of her daughter in a diary you dont get to read very much of and you are forced to flit between the life she is living and how she might have grown with the firm and uncontested security of a mother that let very few people even imagine her in doubt. You might find her cold or cruel but Asas mother stands upright and lets her daughter look up at her in a way no one alive will.