Review: Plum Rains

Plum Rains by Andromeda Romano-Lax
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

4.5 Stars

Plum Rains is quiet genre-bending book. Historical fiction, sci-fi, and dystopian all at once, it takes place in the near future (merely a decade on from now) in Tokyo, in a world on the cusp of mainstreaming artificial intelligence into the workforce, and on the brink of disaster from toxic environmental conditions that take worker lives and sabotage white collar fertility. The story follows three characters. Angelica Navarro is a Filipina caregiver who has been working in Japan for five years and who is mired in debt to the Cebuan mob guy who funded her move to Japan. Sayoku Itou, the hundred-year-old woman she cares for, is stubborn, private and fragile. Hiro is a prototype carer robot who starts out naive as a toddler and learns exponentially as he lives with Anji-sensei and Sayoko-san. Angelica is at first very resistant to everything Hiro represents since he is clearly a harbinger of the end of the guest workers program in Japan. Over the course of the book, her resistance to Hiro wanes.

At the start of the book, Angelica and Sayoko are preparing for Sayoko's birthday party. Angelica's phone and all her accounts have been hacked and she correctly assumes that it is because she is late on making her payments to her debtholder. As Angelica struggles to regain control of her assets, accounts, and life, we see the struggle of guest workers in foreign countries. Parallel to Angelica's story is Sayoko's, for she is not what she seems. First of all, she isn't even Japanese, she's Taiwanese and from an aboriginal Taiwanese tribe. She has many dark secrets in her past, a past about which her son, a minister in the Japanese government, knows nothing. As the book opens, Sayoko receives a robot as a present and surprisingly, given her age, embraces the technology. She spends a good fraction of the first half of the book assembling the as-yet-unnamed Hiro in several stages and teaching him about Japanese culture. Romano-Lax's insights about the elderly and their need to be relevant and needed are poignant. Hiro, once he is Hiro, is an engaging and thoughtful AI with an interesting moral compass and seemingly few protocol checks. He becomes integral to the life of Angelica and Sayoko in surprising ways.

While I was a bit dissatisfied with the end of this book (I'd be happy to discuss with readers why), I loved its quiet contemplation of the role that artificial intelligence will play in the future care of the first world's aging population and how robots can potentially eliminate human jobs. (A valid question is whether there will even be enough humans to do these jobs, however.) The effects of heavy metals and other chemical contamination, social and cultural delays in childbearing, and the steadily decreasing fertility of women in first world countries are significant and real trends that are emerging in many first world countries. (Currently, in 2018, Japan has the lowest birth rate in the world.) The interface between low birth rates, aging populations, a country's economy, and the use of robots to do jobs that there are fewer humans to do is an interesting one to explore. However, what I loved most about the book is Romano-Lax's focus on the struggles of guest workers in a country like Japan, where people never discuss their private lives, struggles, and fears. Angelica's vulnerable situation is artfully rendered, enough so that you almost don't feel the edge as the book crosses into a dystopia where babies are prized above individual's rights.

An enjoyable read.

Readers interested in the Atayal tribe and Formosan headhunters can find more information here.

I received a Digital Review Copy and paper copy of this book from Soho Press and Edelweiss in exchange for an honest review.

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