Machiko, an English teacher in a small Japanese village close to Kyoto, is a lonely woman who dreams of travelling to other countries. What stops her is trichotillomania: a disorder involving repeated urges to pull out hair and pick skin. She hides her patchy bald spots under headscarves and and camouflages her scabs with makeup. Machiko finds what’s missing in her tranquil existence when a guarded American woman wearing a mitten on her right hand arrives in the sleepy village.
Though Machiko finds it impossible to crack Krista’s mystery, the readers are allowed to enter the mind of this enigmatic woman through the chapters written in first person. Krista has grown up motherless, and her alcoholic father has been too mournful to notice the personal tragedy that has overshadowed her adolescence. Upon his unexpected death, she leaves this “house of grief” and starts travelling around the world restlessly, careful not to put down roots anywhere. Yet grief seems to be inescapable; everywhere she goes, she sees only cruelty, pain and sadness. In Nepal, Rwanda, Cambodia and Vietnam, Krista patiently listens to horror tales of exile and death, but her eyes are always dry. Just when she thinks there’s nothing left to learn or feel, she meets Machiko, a woman whose only pain is the one she inflicts upon herself.
An undercurrent of religion, Buddhism in particular, flows throughout the book, raising the heat between these two women and coming to expression at the explosive end where the first of the Four Noble Truths of Buddha—“life is suffering”—is discussed at length. The author writes about Buddhism, Japanese culture and even trichotillomania with authority. The tone of the Machiko chapters is also suitably “Japanese”: clean, spare (almost bleak) and subtle. The timbre of Krista’s first person chapters is distinctly darker; the sentences longer, more abstract and lyrical. “Sorrow was baked,” Krista says, “and fried, stewed and sautéed as [my father] studied cooking books, learning to prepare dishes of sad hearts and silent eyes, casseroles of memory and remorse.”
The gripping story and the wonderful pacing of the book make the reader ignore the little typos and accept the lack of humor. Though the two main characters are portrayed with careful precision, the minor characters could use a few more brushstrokes. The members of Machiko’s family, for instance, are hard to distinguish from each other; they all seem to be very welcoming, kind and understanding, which results in practical but impersonal dialogue.
THE FIRST NOBLE TRUTH, a work of delicate brilliance, reflects on pain, depression, dignity, survival instincts and friendship in a unique and touching way.
Reviewed by M. Rivera for IndieReader.