Bibliographic record
Abstract
Reviewed by: Niré par Aki Shimazaki Yan Zhao Shimazaki, Aki. Niré. Actes Sud, 2023. ISBN 978-2-330-17967-0. Pp. 133. Niré is the fourth volume of a pentalogy called Une clochette sans battant by Japanese-Canadian author Aki Shimazaki. The series presents the Niré family in Yonago, Japan, and each book is narrated from the viewpoint of a different family member, spanning various periods of their family history. Niré tells the story of Nobuki Niré, the Benjamin of the family following two elder sisters. Nobuki, a happily married, middle-aged civil engineer who is also an amateur guitarist, declines his parents' offer to move back in with them. Instead, he chooses to live with his wife and two daughters in their own suburban house. One day, while rummaging through his old school desk, Nobuki stumbles upon a diary that belongs to his mother, Fujiko Niré, who has been diagnosed with Alzheimer's and would not recognize her son ever since. Through the diary, Nobuki discovers a side of his mother that had been unknown to him—an impassioned young woman, a disappointed spouse, a devoted mother, and her struggle with her brain disorder. The diary helps Nobuki become more patient and skilled at communicating with his mother. However, it also unveils a shocking secret that turns his life upside down: his parents, who recently celebrated their fifty years of marriage, had both cheated on each another, and furthermore, he is not the biological son of his father but the result of a one-night affair between Fujiko and another man. Being the only male heir and having been cherished as "le chouchou de papa," this revelation is disorienting for Nobuki, and he now faces the dilemma of whether to share this secret with his father. Niré is an engaging and delightful read, with a straightforward, descriptive, and concise writing style that remains elegant and beautiful. Shimazaki focuses mainly on familial relationships without ambitious experimentation in different narrative forms. Nevertheless, the text subtly highlights various issues within Japanese society, including intergenerational conflicts, the aging population, and the lack of available places in residential care homes. Furthermore, the evolving relationship between Nobuki and his mother serves as an excellent example of coping with Alzheimer's as a family member and responding to their memory loss and confusion. Compared to the first three volumes of the pentalogy, Nobuki is a less captivating character and a less emotive narrator. The fifth volume is likely to be told from Fujiko Niré's perspective, and I am curious how Shimazaki will further develop her narrative since Fujiko's voice is already present in Niré through her diary. [End Page 148] Yan Zhao Harvard University (MA) Copyright © 2024 American Association of Teachers of French
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.079 | 0.048 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".