Imagine Hamlet’s unbelievable experience. He’s suffering. He’s lost his father. He’s cringing at his mother’s too-soon marriage to his uncle.
Into this scene walks the ghost of Hamlet’s father telling him that horror upon horrors his brother, the uncle-now-stepfather, dealt him. His brother murdered him and married his wife thus revenge must be taken. There stand Horatio and Hamlet in the mists of a winter’s night after the ghost has faded away.
Horatio: O day and night, but this is wondrous strange!
Hamlet: And therefore as a stranger give it welcome.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
“Wondrous strange” like Hamlet is Naoko, Keigo Higashino’s novel of a father, mother and daughter. To bring Shakespearean language into more familiar terms, I’d say it’s weirdly troubling, supernaturally implausible and unusually odd, verging on repugnant.
Heisuke Sugita lived a simple life filled with love for his dear wife Naoko and sweet daughter Monomi until a tragic accident takes Naoko’s life and leaves Monomi in a coma. When the bus his wife and daughter rode in crashed, the mother threw herself upon her daughter thus saving her life. When Monomi comes out of her coma, she is confused. She speaks with her mother’s mind, thoughts and memories. A transference at the time of Naoko’s death occurred from one to the other wherein the mother’s soul lives in strange harmony with her eleven year old daughter. Monomi can function in her youthful world as well as her mother’s domestic life.
