The latest addition to my website is Mario Bellatin‘s El jardín de la señora Murakami (Mrs. Murakami’s Garden). This is nominally a story about a Japanese woman who wants to make an academic career which, for various reasons, goes wrong and she ends up marrying a much older man, whose art collection she had earlier criticised in a a magazine article. The marriage is not a happy one. The books starts with his death and her anger at him. However, this a novel where all is not as it seems. It seems to be in Japan and apparently is not. The motives for the marriage of both our heroine and Mr. Murakami are decidedly unclear. In fact, at the end, the author states the true motivations of the story’s protagonists will never be known . In other words this is a novel that, on the face of it, seems straightforward but definitely is not. Bellatin toys with his readers and the novel is much more interesting for it.