Matt

I wanted to love this, but right from the outset it didn't land with me the way other works from Yoshimoto have. The sparsely elegant prose is still there, but somehow more clunky than in her later works (although this may have been a translation issue). I suspect it's the plot that really turned me off this one, the combination of the not-quite-but-let's-face-it-actually-yes incest-adjacent romance and the incredibly problematic relationship between the aunt and her underage student might be a product of the time in which the book was written, but land with such a catastrophic thud in this day and age that it makes it hard to invest in any of the characters.

A great corrective to the traditional focus on the identity of Jack the Ripper himself, rather than the women who suffered at his hands. Well researched if a bit speculative in parts on the motives of its protagonists, it presents a compelling glimpse into the lives of five disparate women and the societal forces that led them to be in the wrong place at the wrong time in the dark laneways of Whitechapel.