The North Light by Hideo Yokoyama — what happened to the Yoshinos?

Houses in fiction are versatile actors. They can be aspirational sites or dens of horrors. Sometimes, as with Daphne du Maurier’s Manderley in Rebecca, they are both. But in Hideo Yokoyama’s enigmatic new novel The North Light, a Japanese architect designs something far more interesting: a house that turns into a ghost, of sorts.

Minoru Aose is a middle-aged architect in Tokyo, a figure much reduced from his heyday during Japan’s boom years of the late 1980s. Now divorced, struggling to connect with his daughter, Hinako, and working at a friend’s small design practice, Minoru finds a new sense of purpose in an unusual commission from the inscrutable businessman Touta Yoshino. “Please build a home you would want to live in,” Yoshino says.

Minoru builds an elegant wooden house in Shinano-Oiwake, 100 miles from Tokyo, with arresting views of Mount Asama. It is designed around the incoming north light, a soft light that “would almost apologetically enfold” its interior in its “gentle arms.”

It is the idea of the unoccupied house — an insult to his honour as an architect — that concerns him most

However, four months after he hands over the keys, Minoru learns that the building remains empty and the Yoshino family have disappeared. The one clue is a chair left in the building: a modernist piece by a mid-century German designer called Bruno Taut.

For Minoru, the disappearance of the Yoshinos is just the first of several puzzles: Hinako is plagued by anonymous phone calls; a private detective has been asking questions about him; and his boss is implicated in a case of political corruption. But it is the idea of the unoccupied house — an insult to his honour as an architect — that concerns him most. It is as much a philosophical question as a literal mystery. 

Themes of disgrace, loneliness and artistic and parental exile are explored leisurely. But it is the tortuous nature of absence that remains Yokoyama’s fixation. The limitations of language when trying to communicate the effects of an unresolved loss are particularly well observed.

A similar thread ran though his 2016 bestseller Six Four, a 600-page cold case crime novel about the kidnap and murder of a young girl. Here, however, what is missing is biographical as well as physical. Minoru lacks vital details about his own family history, just as the “Y Residence” lacks its occupants. 

Relayed in a smooth translation by Louise Heal Kawai, Yokoyama’s narrative flits between periods, from Minoru’s youth to his marriage to his search for the Yoshinos, often cleverly handled within the space of a page. But, while its architectural milieu is appealingly idiosyncratic, Yokoyama’s story is undermined by its pace. The book’s central section, in which Minoru researches the career of Taut, the maker of the incongruously placed chair, becomes a lethargic seminar on design aesthetics. It’s like reading a dense furniture catalogue.

Yokoyama succeeds, however, in presenting a house as something more than a simple construction — something closer to an ideal. “People’s obsession with their homes was never a matter of simple preference or taste,” Minoru observes. “It was rather a manifestation of their personal values and their hidden desires.”

The North Light by Hideo Yokoyama, translated by Louise Heal Kawai Riverrun £22, 416 pages

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