age of dreaming

Jun Nayakama is a long-ago retired silent movie actor, and when he is approached decades after his last film by an interested reporter, this quiet, private man needs to decide if wants to step out of the shadows and be recognized again for the work he did, and was quite famous for, in his youth. And, if that's even possible.

Nina Revoyr weaves a subtle, personal story of this reserved Japanese-American man, who lives his life in almost direct opposition to his stardom in the early days of Hollywood. Revoyr paints a picture of a man who's life seems to have paused 40 or 50 years in the past, and who is now comfortable with his day-to-day busy work and his anonymity.

The decision whether to grant an interview sparks Nayakama's memories back to his time as a star in early Hollywood, the life he lived, his loves and his losses, and ultimately why he left the business and retired to quiet life in California, rather than returning to Japan. Some of the circumstances of his personal history are pretty mysterious, and Nayakama thinks long and hard about the things in his past that he hoped would never come to light, and had got to the point where he believed they never would.

Revoyr reveals her character slowly and carefully, keeping the interest up until the end. The stories of the heyday of Hollywood are fun to read about and to see them through the eyes of a man that should have been an outsider, but was too talented to stay on the outside, make for an interesting story.

The Age of Dreaming is set in the mid-sixties, when you couldn't just search for everything you wanted to know about a movie star on the internet, and mainstream publications where just beginning to move away from treating movie stars as royalty. The recollections of the characters take us even further back, to the 20s when Hollywood was young.