Naturally I was curious what the trauma was, but the longer the book went on without any serious development in finding out what happened, the more I became anxious that we might in fact never learn (which would be extremely disappointing) or the answer would be rushed and, ultimately a let-down. Yet there is still a buildup of sorts throughout Yoshimoto’s narrative, for early on it’s made clear that one of the central characters, Nakajima, experienced some kind of serious trauma in his past and, like Chekov’s gun, it’s obvious that we’re doing to learn what that trauma was by the end. The Lake is not a story anywhere near on the same scale of Game of Thrones in terms of stakes, characters, or location – there is no threat of the world ending, dozens of complex characters all connected to each other in equally complex ways, and the world is basically a single Japanese town and a cabin by a lake which, now that I think about it, I can’t even remember where that part was. And the greater the build-up, the greater the disappointment. Regardless of how I feel about the ending, I completely understand the pain that comes from being let down by a story after so much build up.

In this review, I’m going to go through some of the many elements that make Banana Yoshimoto’s The Lake such an excellent novel.īut first, I want to make an seemingly odd comparison between this novel and the TV show version of Game of Thrones.īy now the entire world is aware that viewers were, by and large, deeply disappointed by the final season (and even earlier seasons, some would argue).

The lake yoshimoto