![]() ![]() After the man died, in 1925, the dog continued to show up at the station at the hour of the train’s arrival. The Akita would meet his master at the station each day upon the man’s return from work. The dog’s despair recalls, for the narrator, the remarkable story of the Japanese Akita, Hachiko, who is memorialized with a statue outside a Tokyo train station. Not loud, but strange, like a ghost or some other weird thing. But the worst part was, every once in a while, he’d make this noise, this howling, or wailing, or whatever it was. For a while he wouldn’t even eat, I was afraid he’d starve to death. “He didn’t understand that Daddy was never coming home again,” she tells the narrator. ![]() ![]() After his death, his widow, who had never wanted the dog, has put him in a kennel. The dog, a one-time stray, had belonged to the narrator’s friend. And there’s the unexpected companionship of a one-hundred-and-eighty-pound harlequin Great Dane. How is one to mourn the sudden death of a loved one? For the novel’s narrator, whose best friend and literary mentor has taken his own life, there’s writing. ![]()
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