The problems of growing up and the joys of growing old (Part 2)

At the beginning of this novel, Japanese-raised Franklin Hata is lucky to escape death by fire in his own house, much coveted by the local estate agents. It's no coincidence that it's the family room which catches fire in the house; family in Hata's life is so fragile that even the room in his house that carries its name is almost destroyed.

This house, in the best part of the small American town of Bedley Run, is literally the one constant structural element in his life. Everything else that matters to him has gone before the novel opens - he has sold on his Bedley Run pharmacy; his adopted Japanese daughter, Sunny, walked out a decade before, and has disappeared; and the local woman, Mary Burns, whom he might have married had he not been paralysed by his past, has died.

Hata has had another life and cultural identity before small-town America: in the second World War he served as a medic in the Japanese army. During the final months of war, five "comfort women" - young girls forced from their families - are brought to his camp to serve as prostitutes.

Hata's love for one of them, K, is as doomed as K herself. This early experience of love, brutality, and loss defines everything in his life afterwards in the US.

It's only after the symbolic destruction of the family room in his house and the near-death of Hata that he emerges like a quiet phoenix, and begins to rebuild his relationships: with his former country and its culture; with his lost daughter, who now has a child, whom he adores; and with the local people in Bedley Run, whom he had always previously seen only as customers in his pharmacy, and who are now transformed into neighbours.

A Gesture Life is an evocative portrait of a life that flowers late and unexpectedly, like the tree that you have walked past for years thinking it was dead which one day bursts into full and astonishing blossom.

Rosita Boland is an Irish Times journalist