I suppose because I've been reading so much non-fiction lately, focusing mainly on human relations in the direst of circumstances due to religious, sectarian, ideological, territorial and tribal conflicts, I felt I was due a change. It does affect your mood, after awhile; even while it informs and enlightens, at the same time it is extremely depressing.

So I turned back to fiction, as kind of needfully morale-boosting antidote to all the gloom about unchecked, unbridled and malevolent human emotions. Not that any of these characteristics are necessarily absent in fiction; quite the contrary.

When I finished reading Bharati Mukherjee's Desirable Daughters, a novel that is compelling in some ways, entertaining and certainly informative, it was still disappointing. The quality of the writing is excellent, but there's also a missing quality; one did not tend to view the protagonists with much compassion; perhaps it was the flaunting of intellectual exceptionalism, the garishly casual wealth.

I turned then to a Japanese novel by Keigo Hiashino, Naoko. At first blush it appeared to be clumsily realized and written, the author in dire need of a good editor. Oriana Fallaci's Inshallah, while a fascinating read and masterfully written, was badly overwritten and also in need of a discriminating editor. Her book flaunted her genius for arcane and elaborate details. A penchant she seemed to share with the later books of Umberto Eco, lavishing upon the pages of their novels their splendid but often too verbosely descriptive details adding little to the novel.

There must be something about modern Japan to explain its fascination with the supernatural. That would edify the curious thinker about why it is that so many Japanese films are puerile and fixated on a mysterious other world that impinges on our own. They're a far cry indeed from The Pillow Book of Sei Shonogon and Murasaki Shikibu's The Tale of Genji.

But I'm reading Naoko, at night, in bed, before falling off to sleep and as improbable as the story line is, it's managing to retain my interest thus far.