Frankin Hata, the aging Japanese-American narrator in Chang-rae Lee's mournful and elegantly wrought A Gesture Life, has reached what's euphemistically called his twilight years, a bittersweet period in which he's left with nothing to endure but his own memories. A quiet fixture in Bedley Run, a colorless suburban town in Upstate New York, Hata retired from his decades as owner of Sunny Medical Supply, a successful local business where his sensible advice earned him the affectionate nickname "Doc." As the book opens, he's keeping up his too-spacious home, which he describes as "the type of creaky, murmuring structure they make up at amusement parks to amuse and frighten guests." His only reliable friend is a vulture-like real-estate agent who's anxious to snatch up the property after he dies. Writing with an eerie air of detachment that reflects Hata's state of mind—a style which, consequently, can seem off-putting and impenetrable at times—Lee intersects two painful sections from his past. One focuses on his harrowing experience as a medic for Japan's Imperial Army in WWII, in which Korean girls ages 16 to 21 were forcibly recruited for the soldiers' sexual gratification. His response, a mix of impotent horror and discomforting voyeurism, is the same 30 years later, when he's faced with his rebellious adopted daughter's heedless carnality. A Gesture Life is, as its title suggests, full of the sad ruminations of a kind man who deferred too much to everyone around him, observing the people and events in his life from a marked distance. Though a young author (this is only his second novel), Lee doesn't stray from Hara's wizened perspective, etching a haunting portrait of growing old without the benefit of pleasant memories.