Rainbirds

Set in an imagined Tokyo suburb, Goenawan's moving debut, a well-crafted literary mystery, features a younger brother coming of age after the murder of his beloved older sister. Given his remote, borderline abusive parents, Ren Ishida had naturally always felt closest to his doting sister, Keiko. When Keiko is brutally murdered in the quiet town of Akakawa, where she worked as a high school teacher, a grief-stricken Ren travels there to settle her affairs. As he begins to look into her unsolved murder, Ren uncovers the shocking cause of their tense family dynamics and learns that his sister was, in many ways, a stranger to him. David Shih's tempered narration perfectly matches the deliberate, sparse prose, introspective feel, and slow unraveling of the events in this suspenseful, character-driven novel. He also expertly gives voice to Goenawan's quirky cast of characters ranging from a love-struck teenage girl to a stuffy local male politician to a ghostly Keiko as imagined by Ren.