Kakigori Summer

Sisters Rei, Kiki, and Ai were born and raised in Japan and bonded through their tumultuous upbringing but have since gone their separate ways. Rei—who is the high-strung, caretaker type—relocated to London shortly after their mother’s death and works a consuming but unfulfilling corporate job. After her teenage rebellion, level-headed Kiki works in a Tokyo retirement home to support her son. The youngest, Ai, is a rising star in Japan who fronts a popular folk-pop band. But when a scandalous photograph puts Ai at the center of a media circus and sends her spiraling, Rei and Kiki converge to take her away to their small hometown. Going home, however, is as complicated as it is comforting. Family and neighbors alike never accepted the sisters’ mixed Japanese and British heritage, and memories of their mother’s mental illness and death haunt their childhood home and cause friction among them. Although the novel’s side characters can feel one-note, Itami (Fault Lines) writes the sisters as fully developed individuals with believable, strong bonds between them, and the seaside hometown is described vividly enough to almost be its own character.