Furukawa Makoto 古川真人. Seitaka awadachisō 背高泡立草. Shūeisha, 2020.
This won the 162nd A-Prize, for late 2019. Furukawa debuted in 2016 and had been a finalist for the Akutagawa Prize three times before winning it for this work. It’s the only one of his I’ve read, but evidently he’s been writing about the same family and the same setting for a while (Prize judge Shimada Masahiko called his work a “saga”); this book does the same.
The setting, almost a character in its own right, is a small island near Hirado, off Kyushu (evidently patterned after Azuchi Ōshima 的山大島, where the author’s own family comes from). The (human) characters are three generations of a family with roots there, although the two younger generations have relocated to Fukuoka, the closest metropolis. The plot is quite simple: one holiday weekend three middle-aged siblings and their two young-adult daughters converge on the old family home on the island, now unoccupied, to cut down a year’s growth of weeds (including the goldenrod that gives the book its title). We follow them on the car and boat trip from Fukuoka to the island, and then join them as they visit their mother, the abandoned ancestral home, and the overgrown barn. Nothing really happens: they visit, cut the weeds, and go home. No family drama. But in the process we get a really good sense of the texture of these people’s interactions, their personalities. 
The most vivid characters are Miho and Kayoko, sisters raised as cousins, and their daughters Nami and Chika. The daughters are grown and working, and Nami is living on her own. The narration mostly occupies Miho’s and Nami’s points of view, alternately, although that’s mostly a matter of perceptions rather than thought processes; the narrative mostly watches them. There’s a warm, comfortable sensibility governing this part of the novel, as Miho and Kayoko’s earthy energy and garrulousness elicit endless teasing and affectionate eye-rolling from their daughters. Why do we have to go cut the grass on a holiday? Because it’s long, of course. Why not sell the house? Because it’s ours, of course. (What’s the matter with you?)
We also meet the matriarch of the family, Toshiko, seemingly their only surviving relative on the island, and the older brother Tetsuo. Largely through them, we learn a little about the family’s complicated history, mostly concerning their properties on the island – Toshiko’s current house, the now-abandoned other house, and the overgrown disused barn. The latter two properties in particular plainly have a symbolic function as their family history made tangible, the visible representation of their legacy of generations of living on the island. Which means that essentially it’s a narrative about people trying to maintain their roots across three generations which are successively losing them: Toshiko who has stayed (but lost everybody); Miho, Kayoko, and Tetsuo, who left for the big city but who feel it’s important to care for their island legacy; and Nami and Chika, who don’t see the point, but who (over the course of the novel) gradually become curious about their family history.
In its tight focus on a Kyushu fishing community and the families that inhabit it, the story is sort of the happy version of Ono Takatsugu’s work (sharing his focus on recording the local dialect). The main difference (besides the tone) is that Furukawa intercuts the present-day narrative with four distinct episodes set in different periods of the island’s history. One episode is set in the 1930s and deals with a man trying to convince his young family to move to colonized Manchuria to seek their fortune. One is set days after the surrender and deals with what seem to be Korean laborers trying to get to Pusan when their boats capsize and they’re rescued by fishermen from the island. One is set in the Edo period and concerns a whaler who joins an expedition to survey islands near Hokkaidō, and who comes back to the island to find it in the midst of an epidemic. And one is set within a couple of decades of the present moment and follows a teenaged boy who lands on the island in an ocean kayak while fleeing his alcoholic father. What links them is the motif of escape: everybody seems to be trying and failing to escape a life of isolation and poverty on the island, or getting stranded there while fleeing something worse. They make for an ironic contrast with the present generation, who have made their escape but who are trying to keep from losing their roots.
Some of the characters seem to be ancestors or other relatives of Miho et al, and with others it’s not so clear. But whatever their connection to Miho and her family, these forebears and their stories serve to sketch in something of the heritage the present generation is trying (or not trying) to preserve. Seen in that light, the novel is a surprisingly unsentimental portrait of this marginal community – there are elements of home, but also of desperation and violence. The history sections thus balance out the relatively carefree events narrated in the present-day sections, although even there we get hints of alcoholism and other struggles; but only hints. For the most part the tragedies are in the past, it seems, and what the present generation needs to figure out is how to honor them, or why they should bother.