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    Plum Rains
    Plum Rains
    Plum Rains
    Audiobook13 hours

    Plum Rains

    Written by Andromeda Romano-Lax

    Narrated by Elizabeth Wiley

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    In Tokyo, Angelica Navarro, a Filipina nurse who has been working in Japan for the last five years, is the caretaker for Sayoko Itou, an intensely private woman about to turn 100 years old. Angelica is a dedicated nurse, working night and day to keep her paperwork in order, obey the strict labor laws for foreign nationals, study for her ongoing proficiency exams, and most of all keep her demanding client happy. But one day Sayoko receives a present from her son: a cutting-edge robot caretaker that will educate itself to anticipate Sayoko's every need. Angelica wonders if she is about to be forced out of her much-needed job by an inanimate object-one with a preternatural ability to uncover the most deeply buried secrets of the humans around it. While Angelica is fighting back against the AI with all of her resources, Sayoko is becoming more and more attached to the machine. The old woman is hiding many secrets of her own-and maybe now she's too old to want to keep them anymore.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHighbridge Company
    Release dateJun 5, 2018
    ISBN9781684412556
    Plum Rains

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    Reviews for Plum Rains

    4/5

    31 ratings4 reviews

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    • 2/5
      A really strange mishmash of artificial intelligence, the nature and future of humanity, a society with too many old people and too few babies, immigration and memories (including of lost families and forced prostitution). It was too odd a mix and too many issues for me and I didn't enjoy it.
    • 4/5
      Plum Rains (Andromeda Romano-Lax, 2018) is a peek into one possible future for modern Japan.Because of a casual interest in Japanese culture, I wanted to understand the symbolism of the title. Turns out, the titular season is a hazy, wet herald of possibility. The plum tree blossoms in the early Spring, and the plum rains mark the Japanese Spring, ushering in the warm summer months. Plum, we are old, is symbolic of the bittersweet, contrasting with the sweeter cherry that arrives later in the year. This symbolism pops up at various points in the story.Our adventure begins as a simple story about two women who come to know each other through the use of a technological device. Angelica and Soyoko are of different generations and cultures. Each locked inside herself, resentful and distracted but dependent upon each other. Their dutiful lives erupt in bloom after Hiro, an empathic robot prototype, joins them.But Plum Rains is more than a book about lonely people brought closer by technology. It is a book about secrets and new beginnings, the Japanese cultural themes of isolation and purity, and the ethics of technology. The events of this story are rooted in modern Japanese history and bloom a century later on the withering stem of a Japanese future.The world were the events of this story happen gives an engaging look at technology-assisted behavioral health therapies. We see several examples of therapies coming to fruition. There are medical assistance drones connected to government databases. There is an AI-enabled empathic android. There is a virtual reality device used to promote healing from psychological trauma. Readers can observe the potential of these devices for healing or oppression and make their own decisions about where the line exists between good and evil—a fascinating question when considering the future of technology-assisted counseling and psychological interventions. This book also asks questions about the illusory power of perception, identity, and perspective. It details how we only often see what we want to see, even--maybe especially--in our closest relationships. The power of attention and listening and compassion as change vehicles are on full display, but not where we expect them. In the end, this plum of a story is about relationships, oppression, self-awareness, and change, just as summer follows the rains.I grabbed a copy of this book on a recommendation from one of those websites listing the "best of" small press offerings and was not disappointed. The author's mastery of her craft shows in many enjoyable sentences; yet, parts of this book are a tad slow. Genre categorization is a bit tough. Some focus on the technology and the near-future setting to classify this book in science fiction or cyber-mainstream; it does fit there as the book features technology throughout the environment. Some focus on the historical backstory that is still relevant today. For me, this is less a book about then and more a book about now and the impacts of social decisions on real people.Finally. this book is for those readers confident in their perspective as much as it is for those who are not.
    • 4/5
      This book is set in the not too distant future of 2029 in Japan. The fertility rates have dropped extremely low and the elderly are living even longer. Japan is bringing in more and more immigrant workers to take care of their old. They are also working on artificial intelligence to handle where humans are falling short.After a slow start, I really became engrossed in this story of the Filipina nurse, Angelica Navarro who is caring for Sayoko Itou, a very private woman about to turn 100 years old. Sayoko’s son sends his mother a prototype robot caretaker that educates itself to bond with her and anticipate her needs. Needless to say, Angelica fights against this AI as she sees and hears how attached Sayoko is becoming to her robot. While I know that science fiction lovers (and you have to question how much of this is really science fiction) will really like this book, the story is engrossing enough for most readers. Once I got into this book, I did read it straight through.
    • 3/5
      This novel centers on two characters: Sayoko, a Japanese woman nearing her centenary (and the attendant media coverage of that birthday), and Angelica, the Filipina immigrant nurse caring for her.It’s the year 2029. Robot development has taken a “Pause” after the Musk-Hawking 2015 letter warning about the dangers of artificial intelligence. There was the South Korean Sexbot Ban of 2025 and the E.U.-U.S. AI Accord of 2026 (rather short-lived since the E.U. goes into the ashbin of history in 2027). Other regional agreements put similar bans in place.But it’s just a pause, and that’s made clear when a new model of Taiwanese robot shows up to take care of the rather technophobic Sayoko. It’s was ordered by Itou, Sayoko’s son and employed by METI, according to some the government agency that really runs Japan.The best part of the book is that robot, Hiro, and his conversations with Sayoko and Angelica. Hiro is not a programmed robot. He’s designed to learn and, particularly, learn about his charge Sayoko.Romano-Lax does a credible job describing the Japan of 10 years from now. As now, immigrant nurses have to keep up on their medical Japanese and are tested regularly. To that, the Japanese have developed a sophisticated monitoring network to meet the needs of the natives and keep an eye on the foreigners.This being a literary novel, there’s lots of trips back to the main characters’ past and a gradual reveal of their secrets. One of those, revealed early on, is that Sayoko is at least half Taiwanese, and we hear about her childhood during the Japanese occupation of that island.There are, of course, subsidiary characters: Junichi, Angelica’s lover and a co-worker of Itou; Rene, an African working as a physical therapist in Japan; and Datu, Angelica’s ne’er-do-well older brother. He works in the BZ, a heavy metals mining area in Alaska – that’s BZ as in “Burned Zone”, a cordon sanitaire that killed most of the animals in Alaska to prevent the spread of bird flu.A question I had is why go to the work of hiring people to be poisoned slowly in the BZ when robot technology is increasing in sophistication. However, Romano-Lax handles the technological extrapolation fairly well.However, as a science fiction reader, I thought this book could have been tightened up considerably with shorter passages about Sayoko’s and Angelica’s early lives. Some descriptions could have used just one, not three, similes to present a picture.The central conflict of the story, robots or humans to care for older Japanese, is well shown in Angelica’s mixed feelings about Hiro. After all, Hiro is potentially her replacement, and she needs the job to pay Datu’s and hers debts to a Filipino loan shark.But Romano-Lax dilutes and cheapens that conflict by bringing in an element that makes the future of Japanese elder care as robots or humans an unlikely either-or dilemma because pollution has rendered most Japanese infertile. Thus, the normal solution, up that birth rate, is taken off the table.There is also the question of the book’s concluding tone. Sinister implications of robot technology rub shoulders with some cyberpunk hero story. It’s almost as if sequels are planned. Though, that said, I might read such a sequel since I didn’t dislike this novel – just thought it unnecessarily rigged its central dilemma and was too long in parts. Part of that change is encoded in the metaphor of the title. The “plum rains” of Taiwan are the dreary season of rains followed by spring.Finally, it must be said that, while it’s fairly obvious that Romano-Lax comes down on the notion that Japan needs more immigrants, she’s not heavy-handed about it. And she has presented a story with some nice ruminations on sacrifice, need, and love.