Book Review: The Summer House by Masashi Matsuie

Metropolis Japan

2 days ago

It's not just a novel about architecture—it's a novel constructed like architecture: every beam of narrative serves a purpose, every window of emotion is carefully placed.
In The Summer House , Masashi Matsuie's prize-winning debut novel (originally published in Japan in 2012 and now translated into English by National Book Award–winner Margaret Mitsutani), that question unfolds slowly, with the same measured elegance as the Murai Office's architectural plans. Set in a sweltering summer of the late 20th century, the story follows recent university graduate Toru Sakanishi. He works at an architecture firm known for its blend of traditional Japanese aesthetics and Western modernist influences.
When the team temporarily relocates to a mountain retreat beneath an active volcano, it's ostensibly to escape the heat. However, the real furnace lies in the creative and romantic tensions that begin to simmer. There's a high-stakes competition to design a national library, and Sakanishi clumsily falls into something like love with two women at the retreat. In lesser hands, this might veer toward melodrama. But Matsuie, a longtime editor of literary greats like Haruki Murakami and Banana Yoshimoto, knows restraint like a well-crafted floor plan. The emotional architecture is subtle, precise, and deeply human.
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The book has an obsession with structure—physical and metaphorical. The novel is filled with thoughtful ruminations on libraries, natural light, the tension between form and function. This is a book that breathes. Mitsutani's translation captures the quiet rhythms of Matsuie's prose—never showy, never missing, always deliberate.
It's a style that mirrors the landscape it describes: a Japan perched between nostalgia and modernity, lush forests giving way to concrete, traditions quietly rearranged by economic ambition.
For readers who love contemplative fiction, The Summer House is a welcome escape. It doesn't roar. It hums, like cicadas in summer, or the soft creak of wood in an old house at night. It's a story about how we shape the spaces we live in, and how they quietly shape us back.
Read The Summer House by Masashi Matsuie, Translated by Margaret Mitsutani, here. On sale from June 17, 2025.