Mario Menti
This is a quiet but beautiful book. A little like Miura's The Great Passage, it's about work, craft and craftmanship, and the pride in work well done, as well as a quite touching coming of age story. It manages to weave in a lot of other very Japanese themes too, the hyperaging society, depopulation of the Japanese countryside (there is literally just one age-appropriate girl in the village for teenager and main protagonist Yuki... it's lucky he fancies her, even if she doesn't feel the same way about him).
There are Shinto shrines, customs and festivals everywhere, and I loved how Miura combines and contrasts the traditional Japan (the very off-the-beaten-track Kamusari village) with contemporary Japan (Yuki, who comes from Yokohama).
This is a really compelling read.
Set in a dystopian (but all too plausible) near future where the “fight” (if only) against climate change has been lost, it follows Sol from Arizona to Okinawa in search of her long lost US marine father.
Featuring lots of drugs, booze, robots, Okinawan folklore and cats, and trying to highlight the terrible history (and present) of Okinawa, this was right up my alley (maybe helped by having visited Okinawa and Ishigaki twice before, but I think anyone who finds this description interesting would like it).
Natsuko Imamura's The Woman In The Purple Skirt is gripping enough that I read it in a single sitting today. Starting off quirky but always unsettling (it's a book about obsession after all), it gets progressively darker as it continues, but not without a certain dry sense of humour throughout. Really enjoyed this!
I first came across Tash Aw when in Malaysia a couple of years ago, just as the excellent “We, The Survivors” was published (I have this thing that I like to read books local to where I'm travelling).
“Five Star Billionaire” was written a few years earlier. I finally got around to reading it, and I loved this just as much - the intersecting stories of five Malaysian expats from very different backgrounds trying to make it in Shanghai.
Really enjoyed this touching and often laugh-out-loud funny novel.
It's about love, about language and translation, and then differences of thinking in Chinese and English. And some of her observations, especially about English food, from the perspective of a newly arrived visitor from China are hilarious.
I'm honestly not exaggerating when I say this is my favourite book not just this year, but for quite a few years. If you know Okinawa, it might have slightly more impact - I remember driving down from Nago to Naha, and we were literally driving along a US army base perimeter for nearly an hour, just to give an idea of its size - , but its real power is in its excruciating personal honesty about her relationship with her parents, and most importantly her mother.
Just finished books 1 & 2, and wow, I think I will have to start book 3 right away.
Particularly loved the “town of cats” story; and the scene towards the end, where Aomame is watching Tengo sitting on the slide in a park in Koenji from her balcony, is so well written, it felt like actually seeing it or being there.
Horses, Horses, in the End the Light Remains Pure: A Tale That Begins with Fukushima
Hideo Furukawa's “Horses, Horses, in the End the Light Remains Pure” is the second book I read this month to remember 3/11. It's a difficult but very compelling mix of journal entry and novel, with interesting insights into the history of horses, which of course somewhat parallels that of humans - in the sense of horses being slaughtered at the whim of governmental powers, and the Fukushima nuclear power plant serving almost exclusively Tokyo (which was relatively unaffected by the disaster).
Not an easy read (it's too weird and infuriating for that), but very powerful.
I read this to remember the 10th anniversary of 東日本大震災, the Tohoku earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown in Fukushima, tomorrow (March 11).
Published a year after the event, it's a really interesting collection of short stories from Japanese writers, addressing the disaster in different ways.
Yoko Tawada's “The Island of Eternal Life” is a kind of sketch of what was to become her novel “The Last Children of Tokyo”, while the bleakest, angriest and most harrowing piece is a short manga by Brother & Sister Nishioka (“The Crows and The Girl”).
But I think my favourite was Shinji Ishii's “Lulu”, a magical, almost child-like story of translucent women and an imaginary dog (Lulu of the title) that helps orphaned children in an emergency evacuation centre come to terms with their trauma and grief. It's simple in some ways, but so emotionally charged and beautifully written it will stay with you for a long time.
Ryu Murakami, when not called “the other Murakami”, is usually called the enfant terrible of Japanese literature.
This was the third of his books I've read, after Coin Locker Babies and In The Miso Soup. I loved Coin Locker Babies, but didn't like In The Miso Soup quite as much - I think I generally have quite a strong stomach for violence in novels, but even for me it was a difficult book to read that made me feel quite queasy.
69, on the other hand, couldn't be more different from either of those books, being a lighthearted, semi-autobiographical story set in the author's small hometown at the end of college in 1969 (when the author is 17). It touches on how Western culture (rock music, jazz, films, etc) was a breath of fresh air to Japanese youth at the end of the sixties, but mostly it's just a very funny, quite often laugh-out-loud funny story of coming of age, of being at that precious and difficult age where you're influenced by everything, but haven't figured out yet, or had the experience to be able to figure out, who you are.
Really enjoyed this one.
I started reading this book at least partly because I absolutely love Dorayaki (pancakes filled with sweet red bean paste). To be fair I love most sweets, so this is a low bar. And while it starts quite whimsically, the story soon changes and highlights something I never knew anything about - the treatment of Hansens's Disease (leprosy) sufferers in Japan.
Up until 1996 people that had suffered from the illness, even if they had been cured for decades with no risk of any transmission, were locked away in sanatoriums. This is a large part of what's behind this story, and it also serves as a way to more generally question the value of a life, and the notion that a life should or could be measured by its usefulness to society as a whole.
When I come across a new book I really want to read, by an author I haven't read before, I often try and read one of their earlier books first (I'm not sure why).
Xiaolu Guo's I Am China is wonderful - covering language, politics and culture across multiple countries and continents, and yet deeply personal and very touching.
This is a short but very powerful novella.
One of the top selling books in S Korea this century, it brutally lays bare gender inequality and prevailing attitudes. Told from a dispassionate 3rd person perspective, I found the statistics and footnotes initially odd in a novel, but as it goes on they become strangely compelling.
I absolutely loved this book. And I think I read it at the right time (not to mention the right age), shortly after seeing Yasujirō Ozu's Tokyo Story.
He explicitly mentions this scene at the end of the film, which is one that I genuinely will never forget:
“Life is disappointing, isn't it?” says a young girl who's just lost her mother, near the movie's end. Her sister-in-law, only slightly older but a widow already, breaks into a radiant smile. “Yes,” she says, in the voice of classical Japan. “It is.”
If you're interested in Japan, and (ideally, like me) getting on a bit, I highly recommend this quite beautiful rumination on Japan, aging and death.
I haven't (yet) read the Haruki Murakami short story that this novella is a “remix” of, but I really loved it. Perhaps strangely, for a book that is all about (unsuccessfully) leaving Tokyo, I actually think it helps to be just a little familiar with Tokyo, as it lives and breathes Tokyo geography and public transport.
