Building Novels

The Summer House: A Quiet—and Quite Beautiful—Ode to Process

Madeline Beach Carey | 25. June 2025

Photo: John Hill/World-Architects

Although “summer reads” have been a thing for a long time, books about architecture don’t tend to populate lists of books to be taken on holiday. Most architecture books are big and heavy, academic rather than narrative. Novels with strong architectural elements strike a good balance, and in the latest installment of her “Building Novels” series, Madeline Beach Carey finds Masashi Matsuie’s debut novel, The Summer House, to be a perfect companion for lounging at the beach—or in the mountains—this summer.

For years Japanese author Masashi Matsuie was a fiction editor at Shinchosha Publishing Company, where he worked with writers such as Yoko Ogawa, Banana Yoshimoto, and Haruki Murakami. He also helped launch Shincho Crest Books, an imprint dedicated to publishing work in translation. Now, Matsuie’s debut novel, The Summer House, has won the prestigious Yomiuri Prize for Literature, an honor rarely given to first-time authors. His years of dedicated reading and editing have certainly paid off. The Summer House is a delicate, highly nuanced accomplishment and an extraordinarily fitting book for this series of reviews on novels and architecture.

Tōru Sakanishi, a young architect, narrates this debut novel. Sakanishi has the great fortune of working at Murai Office—a small architecture firm founded by Shunsuke Murai, who was once a student of Frank Lloyd Wright. Sakanishi is captivated by his new employer and by the careful dedication his co-workers show to each of their tasks. As sultry summer begins, the Murai Office leaves Tokyo for Kita-Asama, a mountain village and former artists’ colony. In this idyllic spot, a small team of architects set out to design the National Library of Modern Literature, competing against a rival—less poetic—firm run by an enemy of sorts:

[Kei’ichi] Funayama had been three years behind Murai Sensei at the same college of art. From the early 1960s, when preparations for the first Tokyo Olympics had begun and new roads and buildings were being produced at fever pitch, wrapping the city in a cloud of dust, Funayama was always in the spotlight. Winning competition after competition, he designed monumental buildings that had everyone craning their necks to look up at them, in locations where they were most likely to attract attention. Murai never built anything that pushed outward or rose straight up into the sky. He consciously avoided exteriors that looked conspicuous, preferring designs that would fit into a neighborhood rather than stand out.

So the group of architects take on their task—at once simple and enormous, traditional but also utopian:

[The] Library of Modern Literature would allow people into the stacks, and it would have large reading rooms in addition to a restaurant, a day care facility, and an auditorium that would also serve as a film center. The library itself was to be a learning center where anyone would feel welcome, rather than primarily an archive for storing research materials like the [National] Diet Library.

Masashi Matsuie’s book is not just about beauty or design or even an architectural project; it is rather very much character driven, with some love stories folded into the plot. Our narrator has an innocence and gentle voice that brings to mind an almost Victorian sensibility. Certain descriptions could be oil paintings on display in a summer house:

She smiled and headed back into the kitchen through the back door. Mariko was always, somehow, brimming with energy. You could hear it in her voice, and see it in her smile and the whirl of her skirt as she turned around. She shone like the skin of the only orange in a bowl of fruit. Above her white deck shoes—she wasn’t wearing socks—her long legs moved gracefully as she walked away.

Cover of The Summer House

We see a group of dedicated architects designing a library from scratch, intensely working together, grappling with questions about what makes a library useful to the public and how to protect books from dust and mold during the rainy season. The book is set in the 1980s, a time that feels almost like a pre-tech utopia:

By nine in the morning everyone would be sitting at their desks, sharpening their pencils. Most of us used Staedtler Lumograph 2H, though some preferred H or 3H. This was long before the introduction of CAD software, which allowed designers to draw on a computer, but as most architects had already switched to mechanical drafting pencils, it was unusual to still be using ordinary lead ones.

The focus on the analogue feels almost like a mantra or manifesto.

As Murai's plan for the library nears completion, Sakanishi and his younger colleagues—including two women he has a bit of a crush on—grow certain that they will win the competition. A natural threat looms large however: a volcano just above their summer workplace warns them against overconfidence. A single eruption could destroy their aspirations. Having survived the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 as a teenager, Murai knows how precarious unforgiving nature can be and how fragile humans are.

Collective life is given great importance throughout the novel: shared meals, collaborative work, knowledge passed down from one generation to another. Throughout the narrative questions are posed about the relationship between tradition and modernity, the collective and the individual, and how those relationships affect the built environment:

As he talked, I recognized the connection he saw between early customs and things like the front door of a house—whether it should be pulled or pushed open— or the boundary between an open kitchen and a living room, or how a master bedroom and the children’s rooms should be arranged. Variations in human emotion were what his architecture was based on. That was part of what he meant when he said that architecture wasn’t art but function.

This novel steadily grows on the reader. Exploring themes about the duty of architects and constantly reminding us of the possibility of climate change and collapse, Matsuie still manages to transmit calm, perhaps because he zooms in so intently on the daily acts of the architects: the gestures, the conversations, the tools, the daily rituals and ceremonies of life. There is a tenderness to this story as well as gentleness and hope. It’s clear that the author is a lover of both literature and architecture. For anyone interested in those two things this a gorgeous and relaxing summer read. The lucid prose pays homage to anyone performing creative acts with solidarity and determination: an ode to process and to the many people it takes to build something.

The Summer House
Masashi Matsuie
Translated by Margaret Mitsutani

5-1/4 x 8 inches
400 Pages
Paperback
ISBN 9781635425178
Other Press
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