A Single Rose

A Single Rose / Muriel Barbery
trans. from the French by Alison Anderson
NY: Europa Editions, 2021.
148 p.

Muriel Barbery shot to fame with her novel The Elegance of the Hedgehog, which had hints in it of Barbery's fascination with Japan. But this book goes all out into that fascination.

It features Rose, a French woman, just turned 40, who is summoned to Kyoto when her father dies; she has never met her father, a Japanese art dealer. But he wanted her to be there for the reading of his will. 

She arrives in Kyoto, where she stays in her father's house and is waited on by a Japanese housekeeper and a chauffeur, and is toured around Kyoto to various temples and restaurants in the week leading up to the will reading. Her tour guide is Paul, a Belgian widower who has lived in Kyoto for 20 years and worked as her father's assistant. You can see where this is going from a mile away. 

Most of the book is about Rose's experiences of transcendence and self-discovery through her many trips to temples and their gardens. She's a botanist so should be enthused by flowers but she's hard to like; she's as prickly as her name, and never really becomes much more engaging. I found her obstinate behaviour quite child-like, more suited to a 20-something than a supposed 40 year old woman. And in response to many things -- her sudden attraction to Paul, her feelings of being abandoned/neglected by her father and her mother alike, etc -- she gets truculent, angry, or decides to get drunk. 

I found her really whiny and her sudden reversal at the end a bit too convenient. The ending itself is a bit of an anticlimax; the book is more interested in the twisty, poetic use of language (slightly purple at times) than plot. I liked parts of it (and certainly would love to go to Kyoto) but found it slightly too mystical for my tastes, and did feel that the Western person in esoteric Japan narrative was a bit cliche. I'm not actually sure what I really feel about this one yet! Maybe I'll have to think about it for a few more days to get a handle on my reading experience.