One Hour of Fervor

October 15, 2023
As he lays dying, Haru Uemo reflects on his life. He rejected his family business, instead moving to Kyoto where, through his charm and love of beauty, he became a successful dealer in contemporary Japanese art, developing a close circle of friends who became family. Through his business, he meets Maud, a French woman, with whom he has a brief but intense affair. When Maud returns to France, she informs Haru that she is pregnant, but she never wants Haru to have anything to do with their daughter, Rose. He accepts her choice but hires a private investigator to send him photos and reports on Rose. As he experiences the deaths of a number of friends, he wanders through Buddhist temples, where he explores how art, beauty, death, and friendship have informed his life. When he discovers he has lung cancer, he makes a fateful decision that will impact all around him. Barbery's beautiful descriptions of nature and her infusion of Japanese folklore and wisdom give her story an elegant and meditative quality. With its many poetic observations on life, this is a perfect novel for book groups.

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Starred review from January 8, 2024
Barbery (The Elegance of the Hedgehog) focuses her exquisite latest on Haru Ueno, a successful Kyoto art dealer whose life is disrupted when, after a brief affair in 1970, his French lover, Maud, informs him in a letter she is pregnant and that she will kill herself if he attempts to get in touch with her or their child. After their daughter, Rose, is born in France, Haru hires a detective to keep tabs on mother and child. He occasionally returns to his mountain homeland in Takayama to see his parents and brother but has deeper relationships with his closest friends in Kyoto, artist and poet Keisuke Shibata, and Tomoo Hasegawa, the woman who introduced him to Maud. Haru eventually works up the courage to visit Rose in Paris when she’s a young adult, a pivotal and poignant scene that Barbery handles with dexterity. Throughout, the author perfectly captures Haru’s ambivalence about family and the twin poles of his life, which he calls “opposing riverbanks”: “On one, there were women, sake, business dinners and parties. On the other, there were the works of art, Keisuke, and Tomoo. In the center, in a zone of mystery washed with flowing water, floated Rose, enigmatic and ethereal.” Readers will be rapt.