When charismatic and spoiled Tsugumi invites her cousin Maria to spend a last summer by the sea, a restful idyll becomes a time of dramatic growth as Tsugumi finds love and Maria learns the true meaning of home and family. A 2002 Kiriyama Prize Book.
Reviews
"A rollicking good read about the paradoxical nature of love and blood." "A vital portrait of a complicated friendship." "Bittersweet...buoyant...[Yoshimoto] shines like few contemporaries when writing about the sea. "There is no such thing as a stock character in Yoshimoto's fiction....[She] writes utterly without pretense." "Yoshimoto's words are considered, and each of them has the weigh of a small, perfectly round stone dropped into a still pool....In Tsugumi the author has created one of her most palpable and intriguing characters."
