WHEN Patrick Ness was five years old, his kindergarten teacher Mrs Nishimoto told him and the rest of his class an old Japanese folk tale about a crane that turned into a woman to help the man who saved her life. Ness never forgot Mrs Nishimoto or the story about the crane. In fact, he has used elements from the ancient folktale to write his latest novel, one that tells the story of two deeply flawed individuals who live in the modern-day world and are in desperate need of being rescued by affection, acceptance and unconditional love.

The original Japanese folktale involves a poor, young rice farmer who rescues an injured crane by mending its wing. The crane eventually flies away, but some days later a beautiful young woman appears at his door. They are soon married and she asks him for a loom upon which she will weave beautiful silken cloth for him to sell at the market for a lot of money. Her only stipulation is that he must not look inside the room while she weaves. One day the farmer gives in to curiosity and takes a peek inside the locked room. What he sees is a crane weaving cloth from feathers plucked from its own wings. The crane wife admits that she had wanted to repay him for his act of kindness but now that he knows her true identity she must leave forever.

In Ness’s version, the rice farmer is the owner of a small print shop in London. Lonely, unassuming and kind-hearted George Duncan is the divorced father of 20-something Amanda. One night he is awakened by a loud keening sound coming from outside his front window. He finds a large white bird collapsed on the ground with an arrow piercing one of its wings. After George pulls out the arrow, the crane bows its long neck as if to say thank you and flies away. The next day a beautiful young Japanese woman walks into his shop. “My name,” she says, “is Kumiko.”

In no time at all they are spending long hours together and going for lunches and dinners. Although she is happy for George, Amanda reminds him of his past experiences: “You break. You love and it’s too big and they can never love you back enough.” Amanda’s reaction is partly due to her own sadness at having driven away Henri, the love of her life and father of her young son, JP (Jean-Pierre). Madly in love, she slapped him in a moment of uncontrollable rage which caused him to walk away. “It is not the slap,” he calmly explained. “A Frenchman can take a slap, Lord knows. It is how your face looked when you did it.” Amanda loves like the Volcano, whose ancient tale runs side-by-side the modern-day story in the novel. Both love so violently that they end up destroying that love with the force of its own intensity.

Meanwhile, George is delighted to have made an instant connection with Kumiko and, as his daughter had predicted, he becomes besotted with her. Kumiko, too, shares his strong feelings, but there are some aspects of herself that she keeps hidden. Or so George is starting to think. He realises that she never mentions any relatives or friends and has said very little about her past. In fact, he isn’t even quite sure where she lives. He wants to know everything about her and close even the small distance that she maintains between them. What he wants is to take a peek inside the forbidden room.

There are some moments of hilarity provided by George’s smart aleck assistant Mehmet, who torments customers and his boss alike. When George relates the wondrous episode of finding a wounded crane in his front lawn the night before, Mehmet pointedly asks if by “crane” he actually means “prostitute.”

But for the most part the novel deals with some heavy subjects, albeit within a lightly woven storyline. The writing is sublime, becoming increasingly introspective as the deep-rooted fears and insecurities of father and daughter are revealed. Their anxieties will be familiar to many of us; anxieties about our person, our choices and our fate which we are often unable to reveal to another. But when the burden becomes too great, it spills out, with a hope that it will be met with understanding. Like in that moment of despair when Amanda rages that she simply does not have whatever it takes to make friends, George quietly admits that he too suffers from a similar deficiency.

“For me, it’s been two and a half decades of false starts, of sitting outside the glass, wondering how you get in. How you stay in.”

“Could be worse. Could be nearly five decades.”

“You’ve never had a problem getting inside the glass, George.”

“I’ve had a problem getting other people to stay in there with me, though. Same thing, different angle.”

How will their wounds be healed? Is Kumiko the crane? Will she stay in the end? The reader races through the novel to find the answers to these questions, all the while admiring Ness’ lyrical writing and his thoughtful portrayal of the destructive and restorative powers of love.

The Crane Wife

(NOVEL)

By Patrick Ness

Penguin Books, US

ISBN 978-1594205477

320pp.