What do you do with an adult son who has no ambitions and no motivation? Well, if you’re Yuki Hirano’s parents, you volunteer your son for forestry work in a remote corner of Honshu. The Easy Life in Kamusari, by Shion Miura, contains Yuki’s story of his first year in Kamusari, learning to tend its forests, and finally figuring out how to pull his own weight instead of drifting through life. This might sound like an ordinary bildungsroman and it would be, except that Kamusari is so remote that it might be one of the few places in Japan where the gods still roam.
Yuki is not best pleased when he’s told that he’s being exiled from his cushy, undemanding life to take up hard labor in Kamusari. Not that he has a lot of choice, of course; his mother is very firm about Yuki getting out of the house. As soon as Yuki arrives at his train stop, he’s greeted by an employee of the forestry company…who promptly takes Yuki’s phone, pulls out the battery, and throws both into the woods. At least Yuki has the good grace to try and make the best of his situation by actually, well, trying to become a good forester.
What I really enjoyed about this book (apart from Yuki’s antics, which are hilarious) were the touches of Shinto and traditional beliefs. Yuki is from one of Japan’s most ultra-modern big cities. Religion, for Yuki, is something old people believe, and young people just smile and nod at. The supernatural is just a trick of the light or being overtired. But when Yuki sees two women (one in red and one in white) up in the trees and hears things in the fog, he has to start wondering if all of the rituals the people of Kamusari perform aren’t really just quaint customs. Maybe, he starts to wonder, there really is a god on Mt. Kamusari.
Readers who like stories about characters who find inner strength without having to go through psychological peril or who like fish-out-of-water stories will like this one.
