Flo is sick of Tokyo. Suffering from a crisis in confidence, she is stuck in a rut, her translation work has dried up and she's in a relationship that's run its course. That's until she stumbles upon a mysterious book left by a fellow passenger on the Tokyo Subway. From the very first page, Flo is transformed and immediately feels compelled to translate this forgotten novel, a decision which sets her on a path that will change her life...

It is a story about Ayako, a fierce and strict old woman who runs a coffee shop in the small town of Onomichi, where she has just taken guardianship of her grandson, Kyo. Haunted by long-buried family tragedy, both have suffered extreme loss and feel unable to open up to each other. As Flo follows the characters across a year in rural Japan, through the ups and downs of the pair's burgeoning relationship, she quickly realises that she needs to venture outside the pages of the book to track down its elusive author. And, as her two protagonists reveal themselves to have more in common with her life than first meets the eye, the lines between text and translator converge. The journey is just beginning.

This is a really beautifully written, cleverly structured book. A novel within a novel, one strand follows Flo (a character from "The Cat in the City") as she struggles with feeling lost and adrift in her life in Tokyo, until she finds a book called "Sound of Water," which she soon begins to translate. The other strand consists of this novel, which follows Ayako and Kyo, a grandmother and grandson living in Onomichi, a town in rural Japan. In a structural move reminiscent of to Ali Smith, the book is divided via seasons (Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter). We not only get to see how the town changes over the course of the year, but also the slow transformation of Ayako and Kyo's relationship, which is initially quite cold and combative due to painful family secrets. I can't think of many novels that explore this relationship (grandmother and grandson) and I thought it was really beautifully done, with lots of sensitivity and empathy. We also follow Flo in her quest to track down the book's author, as well as her own journey of learning how to open up and communicate (which is cleverly ironic, considering her job as a translator). This is a great book for fans of David Mitchell, lovers of Japanese literature, and for people who want to read an encouraging, hopeful story about how to deal with failure and disappointment in life.