Yume No Hon

This story runs the emotional gamut. If it is Your Sort of Thing, it will hollow you out, as surely as it will lift you up. Yume No Hon is a lyrical, visceral, and powerful tale, highly evocative and deeply moving.

It paints the story of Ayako - and indeed it often felt to me more like painting than prose - an old woman-hermit who has lived alone on a mountain with only her thoughts and dream-forms and the natural world as companions since her youth. Her memories, imaginings, physical reality, and dreams come together to lay bare all that she is, might have been, could be, and will be. The reader is left to puzzle out what is real and what is other-than-real, as is Ayako...and to question whether such distinctions truly matter. With words both delicate and raw, to melodies joyful, keening, noble, broken, naked and seeking, we dream with Ayako as she dances the patterns of her life. This is a story of Potential and a story of Convergence, existing at the crossroads of many seemingly-unrelated myths.

If you gravitate to archetypes, myths, and explorations of the facets of the psyche, give Yume No Hon a go. Valente is known as a mistress of evocation and intoxicating language, and she is in fine form here. As much poetry as prose, there are stories within stories to be discovered within this modest volume.