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When Yuki, a sweet but directionless teenager, finishes high school in Tokyo, his parents enroll him in a forestry program without asking him first. Next thing he knows, he’s living in Kamusari, a village so rural that it has no phone service or internet, and learning how to nurture saplings, fell trees, and speak the Kamusari dialect known for the phrase “naa-naa,” meaning “take it easy.”
This book is in the intersection of two of my very favorite genres, which I think of as “process books” and “secret garden books.” By process, I mean books focusing on how a thing is done rather than on plot, as in process rather than product. Dick Francis’s books have a lot of process in them. Secret garden books are about exploring and nurturing/fixing up a small and often hidden or remote place; as it blossoms under your care, so do you.
The Easy Life in Kamusari is about village life, learning the forestry trade, and how both of those change Yuki. It’s a coming of age story, but the emphasis is more on what shapes him than on how he’s shaped. The main character is really Kamusari itself, a quirky little village straight out of a Miyazaki movie. It’s ambiguously magical; all the magical events have alternate realistic explanations, but the magical explanations make more sense and seem more plausible than the realistic ones. The villagers take all this as a matter of course.
The forestry details are apparently all meticulously accurate (the book has a list of sources at the back) and they’re fascinating even if you don’t care about forestry, in much the same way that Dick Francis made me care about the liquor and gemstone trades for the space of a book. Nothing hugely dramatic happens – a child is lost and found, a once-every-forty-eight-years festival is celebrated, Yuki falls in love – but it’s all charming and atmospheric and engrossing. The best way I can think to describe it is My Neighbor Totoro meets All Creatures Great and Small, only with forestry rather than veterinary medicine.
This book is in the intersection of two of my very favorite genres, which I think of as “process books” and “secret garden books.” By process, I mean books focusing on how a thing is done rather than on plot, as in process rather than product. Dick Francis’s books have a lot of process in them. Secret garden books are about exploring and nurturing/fixing up a small and often hidden or remote place; as it blossoms under your care, so do you.
The Easy Life in Kamusari is about village life, learning the forestry trade, and how both of those change Yuki. It’s a coming of age story, but the emphasis is more on what shapes him than on how he’s shaped. The main character is really Kamusari itself, a quirky little village straight out of a Miyazaki movie. It’s ambiguously magical; all the magical events have alternate realistic explanations, but the magical explanations make more sense and seem more plausible than the realistic ones. The villagers take all this as a matter of course.
The forestry details are apparently all meticulously accurate (the book has a list of sources at the back) and they’re fascinating even if you don’t care about forestry, in much the same way that Dick Francis made me care about the liquor and gemstone trades for the space of a book. Nothing hugely dramatic happens – a child is lost and found, a once-every-forty-eight-years festival is celebrated, Yuki falls in love – but it’s all charming and atmospheric and engrossing. The best way I can think to describe it is My Neighbor Totoro meets All Creatures Great and Small, only with forestry rather than veterinary medicine.
