THE JAPANESE LOVER by Isabel Allende (fic)

I approached this novel by Isabel Allende with great pleasure as the first book I would read in the new year. Having read a couple of her books in the past, I was primed for this book with its intriguing title.  Allende writes books that one might classify as romantic, but she is a cut well above the popular romance novel.  Her characters are interesting and the settings are colorful.

Alas, I was disappointed in this latest endeavor.  The plot has great promise and the characters potential, but unlike her best known novels, the characters are never fully developed.  It may be that Allende attempts to provide a back-story for too many characters, rather than concentrating on developing two or three main characters.  Because of this, they fall flat as the story progresses and they never really live up to the backgrounds they were given.

The primary story centers around Alma Belasco,an elderly member of an assisted living facility named Lark House in San Francisco.  Alma was a Polish war orphan in World War II and came to live with her wealthy aunt and uncle who raised her with the same love they gave their only son.  The elderly Alma is given to musing on her past life as the chapters move back and forth in time.  Alma and the young son of her uncle's Japanese gardener play together as children and are inseparable until Ichimei Fukuda, the young boy, is sent to a concentration camp with his family for the duration of the war.  This mirrors the fate of Alma's Jewish family back in Poland.  The relationship between Alma and Ichimei is slowly revealed through letters they send to each other throughout their lives.  Even though their paths in life are separate, they fall completely in love, hence the title of the novel.

The elderly Alma hires a young assistant named Irina Bazili, a Moldovian girl of fragile beauty who has her own secret which is revealed to the reader but not to Alma.  Along with these three, there are numerous other characters who could stand on their own, also with mysterious backgrounds. It would be interesting to know more about Alma's brother and how he escaped the death camps and became an agent of Mossad; also, Ichimei's sister who is a strong female character who is never fully developed.

I would have enjoyed the story more if the two main characters were given more space and their star-crossed romance was further developed.   Instead, they seem mere caricatures.