In Water Lily, Susanna Jones creates two central characters whose lives have been corroded by loneliness. Ralph is a businessman (and sex tourist) who has arrived in Japan to search for a bride. Runa is a Japanese high school teacher who fears that her relationship with a male pupil is about to be uncovered. Both desperate for friendship and love, they set sail on the same ship from Japan to Shanghai. Their meeting on board has appalling consequences.
Jones's first novel, The Earthquake Bird, winner of several notable literary prizes, was distinguished by its clever modulations of narrative voice and subtle digressions on Japanese culture. The descriptions of Japan in Water Lily, by contrast, are rather tired and unenthusiastic, as if Jones has absorbed Ralph's alienation from the countries he is visiting. Rendering the voice of ordinary characters in vivid language is always a difficult task (although Graham Swift managed it magnificently in Last Orders), and Jones does not quite pull it off here. Japan, as seen through the eyes of Ralph and Runa, is far more drab and empty than in The Earthquake Bird.
But the lack of colour aside, Water Lily is an impressive psychological thriller. Ralph engages our sympathy in a most unsettling way. As he stumbles around, sweatily searching for love, he displays only occasional self-awareness: "He was C-list. He wondered if there was a D or an E list. He suspected that he had already reached the bottom." Only after we have started to feel sorry for him does it emerge that he has been married before, to a Thai woman whom he now feels is "manoeuvring her way back into his head". Like Runa, he is both a victim and a predator, and Jones manages this balancing act very finely.
For the first half of the novel, Runa is rather faintly sketched. She may have had exciting experiences - an illicit affair with one of her pupils, furtive trips to love hotels - but she is described in a manner reminiscent of Jackie magazine. The descriptions of her pubescent lover, for example, are cliched: "A tall figure, muscular and deeply tanned, he twisted a basketball round in his hands." At times, the sentimentality cloys: "She loved his eyes at moments like this. They were big and limpid, so uncertain. She wanted to take his hand and lead him through each piece of his life."
Only on embarking on the voyage does she comes to life. She had to steal her sister's passport and identity to do so, and it is as if this gives her definition and character. When she sees Ralph's magazines, full of "Oriental Brides for English Gentlemen", she realises "from the shine in his [eyes] that she was his target". She fears him but feels impelled to make him her target, too, because he offers her an escape route.
From there the endgame plays itself out to its tragic conclusion as the narrative cuts between the central characters and the sub-plot of a violent relationship between two young men on the boat. Only in the last few pages do we realise how central that relationship is to the narrative and how deftly interwoven are the plots. The final pages are written with bleak beauty.
