This was... tougher to read than usual; with Yoshimoto the reader gets used to characters mourning or experiencing difficult moments in their lives, but honestly this children-murdering-cult was a bit too much for me, this is definitely one book I'm not keen to read again.
It's a sort of weird love story, they have been together since they were children, they felt somehow different but comfortable when they were together, he spent a lot of time at her house and often slept in her bed, and when she got sick he kept on leaving flowers outside her window for her. But, he's always been troubled because of his parents who left him to follow a strange-dangerous cult, so he lived all his life with this death-weight hanging over his heart.
As often in her books, there is nothing exactly romantic, the characters are very matter-of-factly about their relationship and sex, they are simply a constant presence in each other's life and can't think of it without the other.
In details:
Manaka is 23, lives in a house with a garden and spends a lot of time there, in silence. Hiroshi lives near, since they were children. She has a dog, Olive, and they both love it. He lives alone with his grandfather and is always with Manaka and accepted in her house so when they turn 18 they get married. When his grandfather dies it's very difficult for him, he always lived in fear that he'd die. He works to put his things away by himself, but then Manaka goes to stay with him, she doesn't want to leave him there alone. There's a room with an altar, eerie and stinky... his father is in a strange cult, and he gets news that he died in a group suicide, or at least that's what everyone thinks since the cult members died together in a fire.
When Hiroshi started high-school, a friend of his father came to see him. The night before Manaka had a terrible nightmare, so Hiroshi and Manaka 'ran' away together, so he wouldn't meet the guy, and he came out with the idea 'come on, let's get married' .
Manaka's biological mom lives in Australia, and her everyday mom lives with her and her father and they love each other very much. The second mom is a bit afraid, she thinks that it's not good for her to be everyday with someone so depressed, that they should do something, change air a bit, so they could travel together, for example they could go to visit her mother in Brisbane.
When they get there, they see that mom is pregnant, Manaka didn't know that. But they are not strangers to each other, they have a rather good relationship and love each other.
For Manaka and Hiroshi it's like a honeymoon, everything is different, even the colour of the blankets is different from what they have in Japan. They go to see the koalas and Hiroshi says that sometimes he thinks he can understand what animals say or think, they have breakfast in a bar, they go to an island to watch the dolphins, everything done slowly and rather quietly.
Her mom tells them a story that Manaka didn't know, of how her marriage ended. She realised that one day her husband and that woman would have loved each other and she would have lost, so she didn't say a thing, she started a wild life and eventually tried to drown herself in the sea (but never wants her ex and his wife to know about this because they would feel terrible about it and she doesn't want that) but she didn't drown because the pills she took didn't have any effect on her so she kept being awake and afloat, and grabbed a ball that went towards her and it took her ashore; she gave the ball back to a couple and slept in a boat, then in the morning she went to catch a train to go away.
For Hiroshi and Manaka this is a chance to know more about each other, to talk, and Hiroshi tells her something that has always weighted on him. His father was in a murderous cult, he heard people talk when he was in high-school, saying that in that cult they used to make babies and then they would let them starve to death and then they would eat the bodies because they believed that they would gain some kind of powers through that... so young Hiroshi always felt this weight, even before knowing if there was any truth is it, like 'I'm alive while all my siblings are dead' (at this Manaka thinks that all the blood in her nightmare represented the blood of his dead brothers); he always lived thinking he had in him the same blood of someone who does these things.
Before going back, they talk of getting a dog, because Olive always helped him.
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