In a park in Tokyo, a young man in a cheap black suit props one side of a plastic crate on to a stick to which a string is tied. Leading to the crate is a trail of hamburger bun crumbs. He sits back. He waits. The bird trap is a failure. The pigeons ignore the bread. A group of women laugh behind their hands.
The slow-paced, staccato opening to Bird Life, the new novel from Wellington writer Anna Smaill, has a palpable tension that permeates this tale of grief, friendship and madness. The crate clatters to the ground, the pigeons take to the sky, the fountain suddenly erupts, an immaculately dressed middle-aged woman walks, one shoe held in her hand, towards a young foreign woman lying eyes-closed on the grass.
If were a film, the theatre would already be gripped. Dinah, the young woman in the park, has recently arrived from Oamaru to teach English at Saitama Denki University. She is mourning the death of her twin brother, Michael, a brilliant pianist whose future was cut short through mental illness. As
