The Japanese Lover

What's inside (12 sections)

1. Alma
2. Ichimei
3. Lark House
4. The history around the story
5. Irina and Seth
6. The reveal
7. What works
8. What does not
9. The prose
10. Who it is for
11. Key takeaways
12. FAQ

There is a scene early in The Japanese Lover where an old woman in a San Francisco retirement home receives a gardenia. She does not explain who sent it. She puts it in water and goes back to her chair, and the novel spends the next three hundred pages circling that flower. The gardenia is the whole book in miniature: a small, fragrant clue that turns out to be a lifetime.

Isabel Allende published the novel in 2015, first in Spanish as El amante japones and then in English translation by Nick Caistor and Amanda Hopkinson. The Atria Books edition cited here runs 321 pages. It moves between 1939 and the present, between Poland, San Francisco, and a Japanese internment camp in Utah, and it is held together by a secret that everybody in the family has agreed not to see.

Alma

Alma Belasco is eight years old in 1939 when her parents put her on a ship. Poland is about to fall. They are not foolish people; they have watched the news and they have relatives in California. They send their daughter to live with her aunt and uncle in a mansion in San Francisco, promising to follow. Most of them do not.

Alma grows up rich, safe, and guilty. Her uncle's household is comfortable and cold. Her cousin Nathaniel is kind. The gardener's son, Ichimei Fukuda, is kind in a different way, and the two children become friends in the garden before they have any language for what they are feeling. Ichimei teaches her about plants. She teaches him about Polish fairy tales. It is a childhood friendship that becomes the central relationship of her life.

Allende is good at this part. The mansion, the garden, the food, the servants, the sense of a household that is generous with money and stingy with affection. Alma is not a saint. She is a girl who survives by being agreeable, and the book is honest about how much that costs her.

Ichimei

Ichimei Fukuda is the son of the Belascos' gardener. His family is Japanese American, settled, and proud. After Pearl Harbor, they are declared enemies and sent to an internment camp in Utah. The novel does not dwell on the camp for long, but it does not soften it either. The Fukudas lose their home, their business, and their place in the city. Ichimei's father dies there. Ichimei comes back changed.

The love story is conducted in secret for decades. Alma marries Nathaniel, her cousin, in what is described as a marriage of affection and companionship rather than passion. Ichimei marries Delphine and builds a life as a nurseryman. The two of them meet when they can, write letters, and send each other flowers. The arrangement is never explained to anyone. It is not an open marriage and it is not an affair in the ordinary sense. It is a second life conducted in the gaps of the first.

Allende handles the secrecy with a light touch. There are no dramatic revelations, no discovered letters that blow up the family. The secret holds because everyone involved has decided to let it hold, and because the novel is more interested in the texture of the arrangement than in exposing it. That is a mature choice. It is also a choice that makes the middle of the book slow, because secrecy is static by nature.

Lark House

Lark House is the novel's other world. It is a retirement home for people who do not fit the template of quiet old age: a retired professor who keeps a parrot, a woman who paints her room orange, a man who writes letters to the editor every day. Allende uses it as a stage for the comedy of aging, and the comedy is gentle rather than cruel.

The staff are overworked and underpaid. Irina is one of them, and her job is the kind of labor that disappears from most novels: bathing, feeding, listening, cleaning up. Allende does not romanticize it. She shows the exhaustion and the small victories, and she shows how easily an old person can be forgotten by a family that loves them in the abstract.

The home also gives the novel a frame. Alma arrives at Lark House at the start, and she dies there, or near there, at the end. In between, the building becomes a place where the past can be told. The institutional setting is a clever choice because it makes Alma's memories plausible. She has time to talk. She has someone to talk to.

Lark House is also where the novel's theme of chosen family gets its clearest expression. The residents are not related to each other. They have been assembled by age and circumstance, and they have built a community out of proximity. That is a quieter version of what Alma and Ichimei did, and the parallel is deliberate.

The history around the story

Allende is not a writer who lets history sit in the background. The novel moves through the Second World War, the internment of Japanese Americans, the civil rights era, the gay liberation movement in San Francisco, the AIDS epidemic, and the tech boom. Each period touches the Belasco family in some way, and each one changes the emotional weather of the book.

The internment sections are the most pointed. Ichimei's family loses everything, and the novel does not treat the loss as a temporary inconvenience. The camp is a rupture. The Fukudas come back to a city that does not want them, and they rebuild slowly. Ichimei's marriage to Delphine is partly a way of rebuilding, and partly a way of hiding.

The San Francisco sections are warmer. Alma's adult life is full of parties, politics, and money. She becomes a patron of the arts. She has opinions about architecture. She is, in many ways, a conventional wealthy woman of her era, and the novel is honest about the fact that her privileges are what allow her secret to survive. She has the money to travel, the space to keep letters, the leisure to love someone in the margins.

Irina and Seth

The present-day plot belongs to Irina Bazili, a young Moldovan immigrant who works at Lark House, the eccentric retirement home where Alma lives. Irina is quiet, competent, and clearly running from something. She has a scar on her face and a history she does not discuss. Alma hires her as a secretary, and Irina becomes the person who sees the old woman most clearly.

Seth Belasco is Alma's grandson. He is in his thirties, he works in environmental law, and he has been in love with Irina since he met her. She keeps him at a distance. The novel uses their courtship as a counterpoint to Alma's story: a love that might be allowed to happen in public against a love that never was.

Irina's past is the novel's other secret. She grew up in Moldova with a mother who left and a stepfather who abused her. She was trafficked, or close to it, and she escaped. The details come out slowly, and Allende does not turn them into spectacle. The point is that Irina has learned to survive by making herself small, and Seth is the first person who asks her to be large.

The two strands meet when Irina and Seth begin investigating the gifts that arrive for Alma. Gardenias, letters, small objects. They assume there is an admirer. The reader assumes the same. The answer, when it comes, is the best thing in the book.

The reveal

I will spoil it, because these summaries are meant to be complete. Ichimei is not sending the gifts. He died in 2010. For three years, Alma has been sending herself the gardenias and the letters, paying a florist, arranging the deliveries, keeping the ritual alive because the ritual is the last part of him she has.

The reveal lands quietly. Seth visits the Fukuda nursery and learns the truth. Irina finds the final letter, dated 2010, hidden behind a portrait. Alma, by then, is dying in a hospital after a car accident, and the family has decided against the surgery that might save her. Irina sees Ichimei come into the room on the last night. In the morning he is gone and Alma is dead.

That ghost, or hallucination, or whatever it is, is the closest the novel comes to magic. Allende has written magical realism for decades, but here the supernatural is barely a shimmer. It could be Irina's exhaustion. It could be a dying woman's wish. The book does not decide, and that ambiguity is more moving than a confirmed miracle would be.

What works

The best sections are the ones about time. Alma lives long enough to become a different person several times: the Polish girl, the San Francisco debutante, the wife, the mother, the widow, the old woman in the retirement home. Allende is interested in how a person carries all those selves at once, and how a secret can be both a burden and a shelter.

The historical material is handled with a light hand. The Polish war, the internment, the gay rights movement in San Francisco, the AIDS crisis, the dot-com boom: all of it passes through the book without ever becoming a lecture. Allende knows how to fold research into a scene. A dinner party tells you more about the 1950s than a paragraph of exposition would.

The prose is warm and readable. Allende has a gift for the sensory detail that makes a room feel inhabited: the smell of the garden, the weight of a old coat, the specific color of a hospital wall. The translation is smooth. You do not feel the Spanish underneath, which is either a compliment or a loss depending on what you want from a translated novel.

What does not

The novel has been criticized for being thin, and the criticism is fair. The plot depends on coincidence and on characters who are kept from knowing things for convenience. The supporting cast is large and mostly sketched: Alma's sons, her daughter-in-law, the Lark House staff, Ichimei's wife. Delphine in particular is given almost no interiority. She is the obstacle, and the book never asks what the arrangement cost her.

The Irina sections are the weakest. Her trauma is serious, but it is resolved too neatly by Seth's patience and by a job she loves. The novel wants us to believe that love can heal a person, and it says so more than it shows it. The romance between Irina and Seth is sweet, but it lacks the friction that makes Alma and Ichimei's story compelling.

There is also a structural problem. The book moves back and forth in time so often that the present-day plot keeps losing momentum. Just as Irina and Seth are about to do something, the novel cuts to 1943. Some readers will find this lulling. Others will find it frustrating. I found it frustrating in the middle third and forgiving of it by the end, because the past sections are simply better.

The ending is another dividing line. The revelation that Alma has been sending herself the flowers is either devastating or precious, depending on your tolerance for late Allende. I found it devastating, because it turns a romantic gesture into an act of grief. Alma is not waiting for a lover. She is keeping a routine that lets her believe the lover is still there. That is a more honest picture of old age than any of the book's more lyrical passages.

But the novel does not sit with that revelation long enough. It moves quickly to the hospital, to the death, to the shiva, and then to Irina and Seth's future. The grief is acknowledged and then resolved. A book that had been willing to be sadder for longer might have been better.

The prose

Allende's sentences are long and flowing, full of lists and colors and smells. At her best, she writes like a person telling a story at a dinner table, with digressions and asides and a confidence that the listener will stay. At her worst, she writes like a person who has forgotten that a novel needs scenes as well as summaries.

The translation by Nick Caistor and Amanda Hopkinson is smooth. There are moments where the English feels slightly formal, as if the Spanish syntax is still visible underneath, but those moments are rare. The book reads quickly for its length.

The chapters are short. Some are only a page or two. That makes the novel easy to pick up and hard to put down, but it also makes it feel fragmentary. A scene will begin, do its work, and end before it has time to develop. The effect is a scrapbook rather than a portrait.

Who it is for

If you have read Allende before, you know the voice: generous, warm, slightly old-fashioned, more interested in people than in structure. The Japanese Lover is not her best book. It is not The House of the Spirits. It is a late-career novel by a writer who has earned the right to be sentimental, and it works best if you let it be what it is.

If you want a tightly plotted historical romance, this will disappoint you. If you want a book about late love, about the stories families keep from each other, and about the way a person can spend sixty years loving someone in the margins of a respectable life, it will stay with you. The gardenia does not need to be explained. That is the point.

FAQ

Is The Japanese Lover based on a true story?

No, it is a novel. Allende draws on the history of Japanese American internment and on San Francisco in the twentieth century, but the characters are fictional.

What happened to Ichimei in the novel?

His family is interned during the Second World War, and he later marries and runs a nursery. He dies in 2010, three years before Alma, who keeps his memory alive by sending herself gardenias and letters.

What is the original title of The Japanese Lover?

It was published in Spanish as El amante japones in 2015 and translated into English by Nick Caistor and Amanda Hopkinson.