She drifts through the days with lugubrious philosophical thoughts (“The branches reconstituted a tableau of perfection, and the visual choreography of it touched her heart but also irritated her”), and just as Rose recognizes her attraction to Paul, he leaves suddenly for Tokyo on business, and the day of the will reading rapidly approaches.
She discovers, despite remaining distant, that he kept up with her life by hiring photographers to follow her and send back photos. Uncertain how she should feel and initially disoriented by the gardens and flowers around her, Rose yearns to know more about her father. Before the reading, Haru’s assistant, Paul, a Belgian widower, drags Rose along to visit a series of temples as part of an itinerary left by Haru. Forty-year-old Parisian botanist Rose travels to Kyoto for the reading of the will of her father, the influential art dealer Haru Ueno.
Barbery ( The Elegance of the Hedgehog) returns with a lyrical and opaque story of a French woman grieving her Japanese father, a man she’d never met.
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