The writer of the notes to "Auto Fiction" is at pains to tell us how Hitomi Kanehara stopped attending school at age 11, then, as a teenager, left home. As with other young women writers who have made waves for novels set in the low-life purlieus of the capital, these works give the impression that their authors are gifted, world-weary delinquents hailing from the tough public housing estates of east Tokyo.
So it's a mild disappointment to discover that writers like Kanehara, and Banana Yoshimoto before her, are the privileged offspring of literary and academic parents, the type likely to have provided an 11-year-old dropout with an ample supply of private tutors. Literature, of course, should not be divided along class lines, nor characters confused with their creators.
"Auto Fiction" begins with the thoughts of an adoring bride as she and her husband fly back to Japan from their honeymoon in Tahiti. In the time-honored fashion of novelists, the work follows a construct-deconstruct pattern: a well-grounded edifice is built, only to be systematically, brutally demolished.
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