The Easy Life in Kamusari by Shion Miura, translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter

THE PREMISE: Award-winning Japanese author Shion Miura’s latest novel, is a moving coming-of-age story about Yuki Hirano, an aimless 18-year-old city boy. We meet Yuki as he’s embarking on a year-long forestry apprenticeship that his parents hope will help him mature.

THE SETTING: Yuki travels seven hours from his home city of Yokohama to the Mie Prefecture village of Kamusari, where he finds a lush mountain environment covered with oak, cedar, cypress, and katsura trees. What it doesn’t have is cell phones, internet access, or TV. And with only around 100 inhabitants, the area offers very few opportunities for socializing with other young adults. The locals are as skeptical of his urban ways as he is of country life, so he struggles to fit in and wants nothing more than to escape…until he falls for a young woman named Nao, who rides a motorcycle and teaches at the local elementary school. Yuki eventually adapts and learns as work and life change with each season of planting and harvesting–still, acceptance does not come easily. But when he decides to join the village men on an arduous trek to cut down a thousand year-old tree in order to make room for a sapling of the same species, he’s presented with an unexpected opportunity. The challenge may just allow him the room to prove to himself and to Nao that there’s more to his life than he’s previously understood.

IN THE END: I closed the pages in whole-hearted support of author Shion Miura’s call to slow down and appreciate and respect nature, especially as I think more about traveling responsibly in our age of climate change and a global pandemic. As Yuki learned about the culture and way of life around Mount Kamusari over the span of a year—celebrating each season and the festivals that surround them—I began to wonder if one can truly know a new place without spending a full year there.

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