re:mote voices

N.P. - banana yoshimoto - was looking for something light weight to carry with me when i went out last night, as opposed to the brick that is quicksilver. banana came up, her stuff tends to be slight in length and generally a quick read. previous work i read, lizard and kitchen, left me with mixed feelings about her work - but i cam across n.p. for half price and decided to give it a go. i think i'm almost half way through it already, and i am actually enjoying it more than the previous work - probably because it feels like it has a plot and is going somewhere. the basic plot is about a book called "n.p." which was written by a japanese author in english while he was living in america. the book was a collection of 97 very short stories, and was the main work by the author who then killed himself. the main character was going out with a man who had been given an unpublished 98th story, he was working on translating it into japanese with the plan of publishing this revised collection. in the process he introduced his girlfriend to the author's children at a party - the twins being about the same age as she was. unfortunately her boyfriend kills himself before finishing the translation, becoming the third person to attempt to translate it and to commit suicide. four years have passed and the narrator suddenly bumps into the twins again for the first time since that party and quickly finds that they are all caught up in the mythos of this book and the deaths that surround it.