The title of Anukrti Upadhyay’s new novel is a Japanese word that literally means “to join with gold”. It is the art of repairing things that are broken to create strong, beautiful fault lines. These lines remain as reminders of something that was vulnerable. The lines in Kintsugi are visible right at the beginning when Upadhyay “joins” the two worlds of India and Japan; it’s a move that is still relatively rare for Indian writers even with today’s increasingly blurred literary boundaries.