Maybe a 2.5 stars would've been closer, since I did like it enough to finish reading it. 
 Read this after watching and liking the movie. Deals with a very intersting topic and contains an interracial romance-- one of the types I love most, i.e., Asian + Caucasian, with the added bonus of it being during wartime. 
 Writing and stylistics is pretty in the usual poetic-yet-massively-descriptive manner of modern literature. It was on the slow side, but the stifled romance between the main girl and guy was affecting. Somewhere along the way, though, the story tried to be a detective story, and sort of piffled the job by building tension up very poorly (no doubt due to the sloooow I-am-a-deep-story feel that dominates from page 1). It also delves long and hard and very unnecessarily into the love lives of various side characters in the town who are only tangetially related to the immediate story of the Japanese girl, the Japanese guy she marries, and the white guy Ethan Hawke plays (HA. Yeah, can't remember their names). In other words, it was TMI on people I didn't care about.