[Book Review] Catfish Rolling by Clara Kumagai

Summary

Magic-realism blends with Japanese myth and legend in an original story about grief, memory, time and an earthquake that shook a nation.

There’s a catfish under the islands of Japan and when it rolls the land rises and falls.

Sora hates the catfish whose rolling caused an earthquake so powerful it cracked time itself. It destroyed her home and took her mother. Now Sora and her scientist father live close to the zones – the wild and abandoned places where time runs faster or slower than normal. Sora is sensitive to the shifts, and her father recruits her help in exploring these liminal spaces.

But it’s dangerous there – and as she strays further inside in search of her mother, she finds that time distorts, memories fracture and shadows, a glimmer of things not entirely human, linger. After Sora’s father goes missing, she has no choice but to venture into uncharted spaces within the time zones to find him, her mother and perhaps even the catfish itself…

Facts

Published: March 2023
Length: 384
Genre: Magic Realism
Format: Hardback

Review

I don’t have a whole lot to say about this book, I really wanted to love it but it just felt a little flat for me,

Sora was really hard to like, and it wasn’t until I got ¾ of the way through did the story pick up. It was a real struggle to not DNF.

I did like all the metaphors and the Japanese mythology was interesting. I liked the concept of the different time zones.

The overarching theme of this book is grief which isn’t really that clear from blurb. Also I didn’t really understand the end of the book, but that might be my fault for trying to rush read this.

My Rating: 2/5 🌟🌟

About the Author

Clara Kumagai is from Canada, Japan, and Ireland. Her fiction and nonfiction for children and adults has been published in The Stinging Fly, the Irish Times, and the Kyoto Journal among others; this is her debut novel. She is a recipient of a We Need Diverse Books Mentorship and was a finalist for the 2020 Jim Wong-Chu Emerging Writers Award. She currently lives and works in Tokyo.