I'm still not quite sure what to make of Yoshimoto's writing. It's easy to read, and her female characters are well written, but they don't make me fall in love with the stories. This is similar to Kitchen, in that there are two novellas on a theme of moving on, getting past the past, as it were.
Hardboiled had a real creepy vibe to me, and I kept expecting something terrible to happen. It never really did, but I still felt there was much more to the main character than was revealed. Too many people dying, and her sense of time was weird; I could never tell when things had happened, and I'm not sure she could either.
Hard Luck was the one I liked much better. A girl's sister is in a coma after a freak incident, and as the sister gradually falls farther and farther away from life, she deals with the impending death, along with her family. Nice look at grief and how different people deal differently.
Physically, I like this book and it felt nice in my hands and was very pretty. I'm going to keep it, and maybe read again to see if the stories need to read again to be appreciated more by me.
