Other downsides include a heavy hand with cliffhangers at the start and end of chapters: “A year after the first time I met Miwako, I attended her wake … It would only be her lifeless body, pale and cold to the touch.” There are also prose issues, with dialogue in particular. This is a factor elsewhere, as with the character of Fumi, whose transgender backstory seems to fit a more contemporary time. It’s a clever device – especially when girls start fictionalising entries to get ahead in the competition – but anachronistic for the supposed time frame of the novel. In Chie’s section, for example, the schoolgirl partakes in an e-zine competition where teenage girls across Japan write in with secret diary entries that are then ranked online. Goenawan is an inventive writer who uses novel devices to propel her story. As the other couples hit it off, she rejects Ryusei, only befriending him because of a shared love of books and after he has given his (false) assurances that he has no interest in being her boyfriend.

When her friends organise a group date – three boys, three girls – she behaves rudely to her intended, Ryusei. With its heavily ironic title, Goenawan's novel has echoes of Gail Honeyman's Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine. Here the titular character goes to Waseda University in Tokyo, lives alone and seems oddly distant from her family despite professing to have 'perfect' relationships with everyone. It is interesting to get this glimpse of a fairly recent past whose culture – not just in Japan – made it difficult for victims or those on the outside to be part of the mainstream. But Goenawan instead chooses to start her book in 1989, a time when people were less inclined to speak out about their stories or 'their truths'.

The Perfect World of Miwako Sumida initially gives the impression that it might be about Instagram culture, a heavily manicured world of online profiles and their suggestions of flawless, faultless living. The so-called perfect life of a Japanese teenager is the focus of Clarissa Goenawan’s second novel, an offbeat, tender exploration of the secrets we keep from others.

The perfect world of miwako sumida