The Subject Matters

One sunny afternoon, in Lynne Kutsukake’s The Art of Vanishing, two art students take their sketchbooks to a park in Tokyo. Akemi is a fastidious realist, best at illustrating anatomical diagrams for medical textbooks, and so she focuses on the tiny insects and plant life on the ground. Sayako — impetuous, romantic, with a fondness for Caravaggio — is unimpressed with her friend’s pedestrian efforts. “Why are you always looking down at your feet?” she wants to know. When Sayako reveals her drawing, Akemi is discomfited to see her own likeness staring back at her: somewhat slapdash, lacking in discipline, but undeniably truthful. “I had to admit she had captured in those rapid strokes not so much my physical likeness but something of my state of mind,” Akemi recalls. “My concentration, my earnestness, my sticky determination.”

The Art of Vanishing, Kutsukake’s second novel, is about the relationship between dutiful, studious Akemi and the hotheaded...