The Doctor's Wife (Japan's Women Writers)

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Summary: Very informative, about family and secret feelings
Review: An atypical threesome relationship: the husband, his wife and his mother. In a culture where, not dissimilarly to the British culture, it is despicable to show your inner feelings. The wife and the mother quickly become competitive, but never admit it, hence the tragic ending.
A warning to our modern society, where, partly in response to the high divorce rate, many young adults tend to stick closer to their parents: this may become the cause, rather than the solution, of divorce problems.

Although set in the Japan of one century ago, this book is still actual. Increasingly, Japanese women flee marriage because she who marries a first-born son (this is the case for most young men, given the size of modern families), is expected to go and live with his parents.

Rating:
Summary: bit too simple
Review: I think her writing style is interestingly spare and understated, but that the novel overall suffers from being too obvious and pat...vaguely interesting in some ways, but not necessarily a good book.

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Summary: Please ignore the review above
Review: The review above has been inadvertently transposed from another work and bears NO RELATIONSHIP to the book shown.

Rating:
Summary: Very readable novel raising interesting moral questions
Review: This review is for The Doctor's Wife by Brian Moore and has been inadvertently transferred to this novel in translation by Amazon. Dealing with themes of politics, sex and religion this novel immediately excites one's attention as none of these are matters for polite conversation. Are they? Apart from his craftsmanship as a writer, the novel seems much shorter than its 230 pages perhaps because of its unity of time and place and action. As an artifact I really liked it as I identified with young Tom Lowry (26) in his affair with Mrs Sheila Redden(37)and found the sexual congress between them quite well done - erotic it was. Where more romantic than Paris and Nice? Mrs Redden is returning to her honeymoon hotel of many years before where her husband is to join her when his duties as a medical officer in Belfast permit. She is unfulfilled, shy perhaps, sensitive of course, likes the arts including romantic literature. Her husband, whom she perceives as boring, is something of a workaholic no doubt due to the demands of a practice in Belfast, and is a practical, unromantic, no nonsense individual who doesn't understand his wife, or perhaps, appreciate her. Her son is an ungrateful 14 year old boy. Mrs Redden precedes her husband on the holiday back to the past, meets handsome American Tom Lowry, and before you can say "Have you got a diaphragm" they're going at it hammer and tongs, so to speak. The sex is good, very good, and Mrs Redden decides she wants less of her husband and more of Tom. In the event she decides to leave her husband and her son. The husband in his frustration and anger turns up at the lover's hotel and commits a pretty horrible act of violence on Mrs Redden. And that pretty much is it, in terms of artifact and enjoyable read. But it does throw up some interesting moral questions. Is it enough to abandon a marriage because you are bored with it and strike out on your own to get "fulfilled"? If the good Doctor had not committed the act of violence after she'd decided to leave him, there's no doubt I think that the reader would have felt much less sympathy for Mrs Redden. In short, there's enough titillation and enough intelligent consideration of a number of issues to make this a worthwhile read.