Category: Japan

Author, Book review, Europa Editions, Fiction, Japan, literary fiction, Mieko Kawakami, Publisher, Setting, translated fiction, women in translation

‘All the Lovers in the Night’ by Mieko Kawakami (translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd)

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Fiction – hardcover; Europa Editions; 224 pages; 2022. Translated from the Japanese by Sam Bett and David Boyd. Review copy courtesy of the publisher via NetGalley.

Set in contemporary Tokyo, Mieko Kawakami’s All the Lovers in the Night tells the story of a 30-something woman who isolates herself from the real world because she has difficulty making friends and forming meaningful relationships — both at work and at play.

My name is Fuyuko Irie, a freelance proofreader, thirty-four years old. I’ll be turning thirty-five in the winter. I live alone. I’ve been living in the same apartment forever. I was born in Nagano. Out in the country. One of the valleys. I like to go out on a walk once a year on my birthday, Christmas Eve, in the middle of the night. But I was sure that no one else could comprehend what made this fun, and I had never mentioned it to anyone before. I had no friends to talk to on a regular basis.

Deeply introverted and carrying trauma from her high school years, Fuyuko begins to self-medicate with alcohol, and  “with the aid of just one can of beer, drunk slowly, or a single cup of sake” she develops “the ability to let go of my usual self”.

When she consumes too much sake one morning and accidentally vomits on a stranger she bumps into — an older man called Mitsutsuka — a tentative friendship develops between them.

The paperback edition was published by Picador in 2023

Freelance life

Like Kawakami’s previous novel, Heaven, which looked at social ostracization and bullying in a schoolyard setting, All the Lovers in the Night switches to the adult world of work and looks at what happens to those who struggle to fit in socially.

From a young age, I couldn’t bring myself to contribute to conversations like a normal person, much less socialize or go out with people, and I was never able to acclimate to the particular atmosphere of that little office. At first, my coworkers invited me out for dinner or drinks, but I always declined, offering a string of vague excuses, and at some point they stopped asking. Before I knew it, I’d been left entirely alone.

Fuyuko’s sense of social alienation and isolation worsens when she quits her job to go freelance. Initially, it’s fine because free from the pressure of an office environment, she can focus solely on the work that gives her so much pleasure. She has regular contact with the editor, Hijiri Ishikawa, who keeps her supplied with manuscripts to work on, and the pair sometimes go out for a drink.

But even when socialising with Hijiri, she rarely gives anything away and struggles to make small talk. Hijiri is too self-absorbed to pay this much heed, but later, towards the end of the novel, she becomes increasingly frustrated with Fuyuko’s passivity, accusing her of  “just going through life without asking anything of anyone, or letting anyone ask anything of you”.

Eventually, Fuyoko’s self-imposed isolation gets the better of her and she falls into something that looks like depression but is never stated as such. She lets her fledgling relationship with Mitsutsuka slide, even though she’s convinced herself she’s fallen in love with him.

Human connection

The story explores the meaning of friendship and the need for human companionship and connection. It also looks at what society expects of women, and how those who forgo children and marriage, perhaps in favour of a career, are judged more harshly and the bar for success is raised much higher for them.

I particularly liked the focus on proofreading and the way Fuyoko is so obsessed with “hunting for mistakes” that she stops watching TV because she can’t bear the errors she spots in the subtitles onscreen. (I feel similarly about restaurant menus!)

And she also acknowledges that the proofreader’s work is never done because errors always slip through:

“I mean, even if multiple people go over the same galley multiple times, for days on end, to the point where they can’t read it anymore, no matter how much work everyone puts into it, no book is ever free of errors, right?”

All the Lovers in the Night is the kind of book you can binge-read in one sitting. I loved the way it explored one woman’s attempt to expand her universe, to find her voice and to overcome loneliness. It’s a deeply melancholic but ultimately rewarding read.

I read this book for the Japanese Literature Challenge 17 run by Meredith at Dolce Bellezza. This annual event has been held every January and February for 17 YEARS, which is an amazing achievement.

Author, Book review, Fiction, Giramondo Publishing, Japan, Jessica Au, literary fiction, Publisher, Setting

‘Cold Enough For Snow’ by Jessica Au

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Fiction – paperback; Giramondo; 108 pages; 2022.

Quiet books seem to be having a moment in my reading life. These books focus on introspective storytelling, nuanced character development and everyday life, rather than dramatic events or high-stakes plots.

Books I have read recently that are “quiet” include David Park’s Spies in Canaan, Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional (yet to be reviewed), Patrick Modiano’s Missing Person and Giorgio Bassani’s The Garden of the Finzi-Continis. All are highly recommended.

Into that same category comes Australian writer Jessica Au’s much-lauded novella Cold Enough for Snow. This quiet, contemplative story about a woman who takes her mother on holiday with her to Japan won the 2023 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for fiction last week.

It’s won a slew of other awards and nominations, too (check out the Australian publisher’s page for a full listing), and even its humble beginnings came about because the manuscript won the inaugural 2020 Novel Prize, a joint venture between three international independent publishers who selected it from more than 1,500 entries.

Hypnotic prose

I had put off reading it because I had heard so much about it, but from the first page, I was lulled by the understated, hypnotic prose and the way it jumped about from one quiet reflection to another, stream of consciousness style, without ever losing its flow or rhythm.

I was so effortlessly drawn into the lives of these two characters, all told from the perspective of the daughter, that I almost felt I was there on holiday with them, crisscrossing Japan by train, eating out in small cafes and restaurants, visiting art galleries, buying hand-selected gifts to take home, and doing my best to ignore the rainy autumn weather.

The narrative is largely told in chronological order but does include some minor flashbacks that reveal the daughter’s past (she studied literature at college and used to work in a Chinese restaurant) and her relationship with her boyfriend, Laurie, with whom she’s considering having children. There’s a brief mention of a sister.

Seeking to connect

The story explores connections — whether between people, such as mother and daughter, and the deeply felt emotional connections we might experience with art and nature. Travel, of course, is the perfect prism to explore this idea, because when we travel, we temporarily lose our familiar social connections and routines, but often develop new connections — cultural, historical, environmental and personal — which make the experience so rewarding and memorable.

In Cold Enough for Snow, the daughter is desperate to reconnect with her mother in a way she can’t quite articulate. They both live in different cities, in an unnamed country (which is presumably Australia because that is where the writer is based), and speak different languages, so the trip to Japan is a chance to spend rare time together, renew their bond and enjoy each other’s company.

I wanted more of those moments, to feel fluency running through me, to know someone and to have them know me. I thought too of how my mother’s first language was Cantonese, and how mine was English, and how we only ever spoke together in one, and not the other.

But the daughter, who narrates the story, is angst-ridden, frustrated and often talks down to her mother in a patronising tone of voice.

There’s a feeling that they are dancing around something. Something vague and nebulous that is the very crux, or essence, of the story. (When you figure out what it is, it turns the whole narrative on its head.)

Quiet presence

Meanwhile, her mother’s presence is so unobtrusive as to be ghostlike. A reluctant traveller — “I had pushed, and eventually she had agreed, not in so many words, but by protesting slightly less, or hesitating over the phone when I asked her” — she is introverted and passive, rarely, if ever, expresses an opinion, and doesn’t much care for anything they do or see.

She’s easygoing, which makes her the ideal travel partner in my books, but the daughter wants more — she doesn’t want to have to carry the mental load of every decision about where to eat, what to see and do each day.

Visits to art galleries, temples and churches form the heart of their itinerary, but the mother remains frustratingly unresponsive to what she sees. In one instance, she doesn’t even want to go inside, choosing to wait for her daughter outdoors instead. And then she forgets to bring her walking boots, which means she must forgo a planned hike into the mountains, which was probably an unsuitable exercise for her anyway. The daughter, in a fit of pique, goes off alone.

This story leaves so many questions unanswered that it lingers in the mind for a long time afterwards. Cold Enough for Snow is the kind of book where not much happens, but everything does — if you read between the lines.

There are plenty of other reviews online, both good and bad, if you search for them.

I read this for Novellas in November (#NovNov23) hosted by Cathy of 746 Books and Rebecca of Bookish Beck. This annual celebration of novella reading runs all month. Click the links above to find out more.

20 books of summer, 20 books of summer (2023), Author, Book review, Decolonise your bookshelves, Fiction, Japan, literary fiction, Penguin Modern Classics, Publisher, Reading Projects, Setting, translated fiction, women in translation, Yuko Tsushima

‘Territory of Light’ by Yuko Tsushima (translated by Geraldine Harcourt)

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Fiction – Kindle edition; Penguin Modern Classics; 128 pages; 2018. Translated from the Japanese by Geraldine Harcourt. 

Last month, you may remember that my niece Monet and I wrote a joint review of James Baldwin’s 1974 novel If Beale Street Could Talk, set in Harlem, New York, a book we chose to read because it is listed in This is the Canon: Decolonize Your Bookshelf in 50 Books.

This month, we’re headed to Tokyo, Japan, in a similar era, to see what we make of Yuko Tsushima’s highly regarded novella Territory of Light, published in 1979, which is also listed in This is the Canon.

This slim novella, written in the first person, charts the year in the life of a young (unnamed) mother in the immediate aftermath of her husband walking out on her. She moves into a rented apartment on the fourth floor of an office building, where she raises their two-year-old (unnamed) daughter alone.

Taking time to adjust to her new circumstances, she struggles to juggle childcare with her full-time job in a radio library and often feels as if she’s being subsumed by her daughter and judged by those around her.

Her husband, who claims he’s too poor to pay child support or to seek custody, doesn’t cut ties completely — he keeps hanging around and gets his friends, via phone calls and prearranged catch-ups, to remind his wife that he’s a good person. Yet he fails to show up for the mediation sessions his wife arranges.

This is the Canon describes Territory of Light as an “exquisitely affecting book” that will resonate with “any mother who has ever felt engulfed by child-rearing, estranged from their self-worth and confidence, exhausted and on the edge”. It adds:

Above all, this is a mesmeric and intimate evocation of the secrets that mothers hold close to their hearts and which are so rarely the subject of literature.

My thoughts

👍🏽 For a relatively simple story — what happens to a woman in the 12 months after being abandoned by the man she loves — there’s a lot going on in Territory of Light that, on first inclination, feels light and detached, but the more you read, the more you realise the woman is dealing with all kinds of issues. She’s struggling mentally, but wants to be self-reliant:

My husband would no doubt have helped out if I’d contacted him, but I didn’t want to rely on my husband, even if it meant putting my mother to extra trouble. In fact, I didn’t want him ever to set foot in my new life. I was afraid of any renewed contact, so afraid it left me surprised at myself.

And she’s stressed (by the move, by being a single parent, by having a new boss at work), upset (by the breakdown in her relationship) and feeling a mixture of shame, guilt and despair. She admits that she’s “afraid of my child” and yet she seems emotionally detached from her and offers next to no physical affection — although she’s self-aware enough to wonder why she “never dreams about joyfully hugging my child?”

The creeping sense of unease — and the increasing episodes of violence in the community (there are several references to local suicides and also the death of a young boy who falls from a height) — adds to the compelling nature of the woman’s story. As a reader, I began to worry that something truly tragic was going to happen to her (plot spoiler: it doesn’t).

👍🏽 I loved all the references to light in the story. The title of the book refers to the dazzling amount of light that filters into the woman’s fourth-floor apartment — “The red floor blazed in the setting sun. The long-closed, empty rooms pulsed with light” — but it’s also mentioned in other contexts, and I especially liked this quote:

No one else must know about this place that made me yearn to dissolve until I became a particle of light myself. The way that light cohered in one place was unearthly. I gazed at its stillness without ever going in through the gate.

👎🏽 I am not a fan of fiction that overly relies on dreams to move a narrative forward or to act as a kind of metaphor for issues going on in the wider story. It feels like a lazy device to me. Unfortunately, Territory of Light is filled with dreams (and nightmares) and while I will forgive the inclusion of one or two, there are so many in this short book I soon grew weary of them.

Monet’s thoughts

👍🏽 It’s not often that I pick up a book about a woman dealing with mental illness, and this depiction of her husband leaving her, and the guilt and shame she shows throughout was intriguing and definitely one of the only things I found interesting in the novel. I really felt some sympathy for her, and the author did a good job of capturing the narrator’s emotions as a single mother.

👎🏽I don’t tend to enjoy books that don’t have much happening in them, and this one is a great example of this (haha). It felt like an extra slow-paced version of a Sally Rooney novel, but with some quotation marks and without the romance. I was so disinterested in the plot. There was nothing keeping me reading it, besides this review that I knew I was going to write, so I decided to stop reading halfway through. Why was literally nothing happening?

👎🏽Although I said the book captured the single mother’s emotions and mental health well, I didn’t enjoy reading about it because I felt she was a bad mother. In one part, this woman leaves her young daughter in her apartment while she goes out to get drunk with a stranger in a random pub, which I didn’t understand and just made me hate her. At another point, she literally loses her daughter in a park, and I didn’t feel an inch of sorrow for her, I was just really annoyed. Obviously, this was probably intentional by the author but instead of making me more intrigued and playfully hateful towards the character, it just made me want to put the book down. Sorry Yuko Tsushima.

My rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Monet’s rating: ⭐️⭐️

We chose this book to read from ‘This is the Canon: Decolonize Your Bookshelf in 50 Books’, which focuses on fiction produced by writers of African descent, Asian descent and Indigenous Peoples. It’s written by Joan Anim-Addo, Deirdre Osborne and Kadija Sesay George.

This is also my 4th book for #20BooksOfSummer 2023 edition. I purchased it on Kindle last month when Monet and I decided this was the next book we were going to read together.

20 books of summer, 20 books of summer (2023), Author, Book review, crime/thriller, Fiction, Japan, Penguin Modern Classics, Publisher, Seichō Matsumoto, Setting, translated fiction

‘Tokyo Express’ by Seichō Matsumoto (translated by Jesse Kirkwood)

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Fiction – Kindle edition; Penguin Modern Classics; 150 pages; 2022. Translated from the Japanese by Jesse Kirkwood.

Seichō Matsumoto, a hugely prolific writer, popularised crime fiction in Japan in the 1960s. Tokyo Express, also known as Points and Lines, was his debut novel, first published in 1958 and only recently translated into English for the first time.

A classic of the detective genre, it charts a painstaking investigation into the apparent double “love suicide” of a man and woman found dead on a beach. The pair have succumbed to potassium cyanide poisoning, but how did they know each other? And why did they decide to die on Kashii Beach, far removed from their Tokyo homes? Where is the suicide note?

Veteran Fukuoka detective Jutaro Torigai is the first to have doubts. The dead man, Kenichi Sayama, 31, worked for Ministry X, which is embroiled in a bribery scandal, and the woman, Toki, 26, a waitress, was not known to have a lover. He begins to suspect that their deaths may be a smokescreen for another crime, but how does he prove it?

This is where Kiichi Mihara, a young inspector with the Second Investigative Division of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police, takes up the slack. Mihara begins a slow and meticulous step-by-step analysis of the couple’s last known movements, which includes a trio of witnesses seeing the pair on a train platform in the city a week before their deaths. Where have they been and what have they done since then?

Mihara’s investigation relies on good old-fashioned police grunt work. It’s 1957 so there is no internet, no mobile phones, no easy way to find people without knowing their address beforehand and then knocking on their door. People contact each other by telegram or letter — in fact, Mihara and Torigai strike up a correspondence to keep each other abreast of their enquiries and these letters are included in the narrative.

Most of Mihara’s work involves poring over train timetables and passenger lists, which makes for an incredibly detailed — sometimes laboriously so — plot that is heavily focused on the logistics of travel. The constant reference to (unfamiliar-to-me) Japanese train stations and towns only adds to the complexity.

But the story is well-paced and there’s a nice contrast between Mihara’s urban life —  he does his best thinking while drinking coffee in Tokyo cafes or riding the city’s trams — and the quiet beauty of Hakata Bay, where Torigai resides.

Of course, everything is neatly wrapped up in the end and the solution is a satisfying one. It just felt a little too procedural to get there.

The book was adapted for the screen in 1958 under the name Point and Line. You can watch a trailer for it here.

This is my 1st book for #20BooksOfSummer 2023. I bought it on Kindle on 30 March this year after I discovered it had been published in English for the first time. Admittedly, it was the smart-looking cover that attracted me.

Author, Book review, crime/thriller, Fiction, Japan, Keigo Higashino, Publisher, Setting, translated fiction, Vertical

‘The Name of the Game is Kidnapping’ by Keigo Higashino

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Fiction – hardcover; Vertical; 238 pages; 2017. Translated from the Japanese by Jan Mitsuko Cash.

Japanese crime writer Keigo Higashino has once again broken the conventions of the genre with his standalone novel The Name of the Game is Kidnapping, which was first published in 2002 but only translated into English by American publisher Vertical in 2017.

In this story, a disgruntled employee takes an opportunity to scam a client who has complained about him — but with unforeseen consequences.

The book is not a typical whodunnit or even a whydunnit — it’s really a howdunnit and showcases Higashino as a true master at plotting, something that is apparent in all of his novels (or at least the ones I have read, which you can view here).

Playing a game of revenge

The Name of the Game is Kidnapping is narrated by Sakuma, a project leader for a PR and advertising firm who is booted off a campaign for a car manufacturer, Nissei Automobile, when a newly appointed executive vice president (EVP) decides he wants someone else in charge.

Sakuma decides to play it cool, although he’s raging inside — “It was as though rage and humiliation were filling my entire body; I felt as though if I said anything, I’d yell, and if I moved, I’d throw my glass” — so when an opportunity comes along to wreak a form of revenge he grabs it.

Except he doesn’t see it as revenge; he sees it as playing a game, a business game that “requires scrupulous planning and bold action”.

That game — as the title of the book suggests — involves kidnapping the EVP’s daughter, Juri, who is in on the game because she has a troubled relationship with her father and wants to get her inheritance early.

The narrative charts how the kidnapping unfolds and shows how cool-headed Sakuma plans the whole thing while holding down his job and sheltering his “victim” from any unwanted public attention or police investigation.

Everything goes perfectly to plan — perhaps too perfectly — and just when Sakuma thinks he’s got away with the entire scheme something happens that turns the game on its head. It’s a heart-hammering twist that makes the novel’s last 40 or 50 pages especially exciting.

Meticulous plotting but slow-paced

That said, the pacing is a little slow. It’s not until around page 200 that things take off, so to speak, which is a lot of pages to wade through beforehand if you are expecting a crime thriller.

The prose is pedestrian and full of exposition — which is fine because I have read enough Higashino novels to know you don’t read them for their literary merit — but I found the narrator’s voice, which is arrogant and misogynistic, a little grating.

Despite these faults, the novel’s meticulous plotting and its brilliant twist of a conclusion make it worth reading, especially if you are already familiar with Higashino’s style.

Book lists, crime/thriller, Fiction, Japan, Setting

6 gripping crime fiction reads from Japan

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The crime genre is often accused of being formulaic and cliched, but the handful of Japanese crime novels that I have read tend to shun the usual conventions. In these well crafted stories we often know who has committed the crime. Sometimes we even know how they did it. And occasionally we know why.

Japanese crime writers, it seems, are more interested in looking at the circumstances surrounding a crime, the impact of the crime on victims, friends, family, investigators and even the accused, and  what these crimes say about society at large. I find them wholly fascinating and know that whenever I pick up a Japanese crime novel I’m going to read something entertaining as well as intelligent.

As with most Japanese fiction, these novels are generally written in a stripped back, flat, detached prose style, which only adds to the chilling nature of the stories.

Here’s a handful of Japanese crime novels that I can recommend, arranged in alphabetical order by author’s name — click the title to see my full review:

 

Devotion of Suspect X

‘The Devotion of Suspect X’ by Keigo Higashino

Keigo Higashino is a master crime writer whose tales turn the genre on its head. I have read several (all reviewed here) but The Devotion of Suspect X is my favourite. In this extraordinary crime thriller, we know from the outset who has committed the crime, how they did it and who has helped cover it up. But what we don’t know is the detailed steps that have been taken to protect the real murderer. The story is effectively one giant riddle; the reader must find the clues and then join them together to create a likely scenario, mindful that the real clues have been mixed in with red herrings! It’s a brilliantly gripping read — and turned me into a Higashino fan.

‘Out’ by Natsuo Kirino

I read Out many years ago (sadly it’s not reviewed on this blog), but the story — of a group of women who help a colleague get rid of the body of the philandering husband she has murdered — is another Japanese crime novel that turns the genre on the head. Yes, we know who committed the crime and we know all the women who become accessories after the fact, we even understand why and how the murder was carried out. But what we don’t know is whether the perpetrators will get away with it and whether one of them will say or do the wrong thing to give the game away. It’s a real nailbiting novel, but it’s also an insightful one about misogyny, domestic violence and the Japanese working class.

‘Confessions’ by Kanae Minato

This dark novel is a revenge story about a woman who takes the law into her own hands with devastating and gruesome consequences. It focuses on a grief-stricken school teacher, who accuses two of her students of having murdered her daughter. She doesn’t name the students but drops enough clues that everyone knows who she is pointing the finger at. She then avenges the crime, but this does not bring peace: it simply begats more crime so that a dizzying dark spiral of events unfolds, sucking people into its deadly centre. It’s a terrifying novel but it deals with big themes, including how we teach children right from wrong, how society deals with child criminals and what barriers there should be between teachers and their students. It’s a thought-provoking read.

‘The Aosawa Murders’ by Riku Onda

The central focus of The Aosawa Murders is a devastating mass murder in which 17 people (including six children) are poisoned and die agonising deaths at a family celebration. The prime suspect is the family’s blind daughter, the only family member spared death, but why would she want to kill her loved ones? The book, which has a complex structure featuring multiple view points and time frames, is about the long-lasting impact of the crime on those directly affected by it, including the police who carried out the investigation, those who knew the family well and the local community. There’s no neat ending, but it’s the kind of story that leaves a marked impression as the reader tries to process what happened and why.

‘The Thief’ by Fuminori Nakamura

This prize-winning novella is told from the point of view of a man who makes his living by petty theft. His sole occupation is to pick the pockets of the wealthiest people he can find, either on the streets of Tokyo or the public transport system. But he isn’t a particularly bad person; there’s a good heart inside of him. In one scene he is so outraged to see a man on the train groping a schoolgirl he comes to her rescue. And later, when he sees a woman and her young son shoplifting, he warns them that they have been spotted by the store detective. This isn’t a story about solving a crime; it’s merely a glimpse inside a criminal’s mind which allows you to empathise with someone you would most likely condemn. It’s an intriguing conceit.

‘Villain’ by Shuichi Yoshida

This book looks at the outfall of the murder of a young woman on a series of characters, including the woman’s hardworking parents, her friends and the accused, and shows how they adjust to their changed circumstances. So while there is a crime at the heart of this novel, it’s not a police procedural and it’s fairly obvious from the start who committed the crime, though we are never completely sure why he did it. Again, it’s another fascinating examination of the sociological and psychological impact of a crime on a community.

Have any of these books piqued your interest, or have you read any of them? Can you recommend any other crime books from Japan that are worth reading?

20 books of summer, 20 books of summer (2021), BIPOC 2021, Book review, Fiction, Japan, Mieko Kawakami, Picador, translated fiction, women in translation

‘Heaven’ by Mieko Kawakami

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Fiction – paperback; Picador; 167 pages; 2021. Translated from the Japanese by Sam Brett and David Boyd. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

Mieko Kawakami’s Heaven is a novella about the impact of bullying on a teenage boy and how his friendship with a girl suffering similar schoolyard abuse gives him the courage to keep on going.

It’s set in the early 1990s, before the advent of the internet, social media and smartphones (which would arguably make things worse or, at least, different), and presents a world that is both violent and nihilistic.

A secret alliance

Narrated by “Eyes”, a 14-year-old boy, who is ruthlessly bullied at school because he has a lazy eye, it charts his last tormented year at middle school before graduating to high school. His only friend is Kojima, a female classmate, who is dubbed “Hazmat” by the same bullies because she supposedly smells and has dirty hair.

Their friendship is a secret one because to admit their solidarity would only encourage the students who persecute them so shamelessly already. The pair communicate via notes and letters and meet in the stairwell when no one is looking. They even go on a train trip together, a journey that solidifies their alliance and helps them get to know each other outside of the classroom.

There’s not much of a plot. The storyline simply highlights how Eyes is treated by his fellow students and shows how he tries to rise above his situation by not fighting back, accepting their terrible treatment of him in silence and nursing his pain alone.

When he does build up the courage to confront one of his attackers, following a distressing scene in a school gymnasium (be warned, there are some violent scenes in this book – they’re not gratuitous, but they are confronting), he’s essentially gaslit into thinking he’s got it all wrong.

“You said we do it for no reason, right? I agree with that, but so what? What’s wrong with that? I mean, if you want us to leave you alone, you’re totally free to want that. But I’m totally free to ignore what you want. That’s where things don’t add up. You’re mad that the world doesn’t treat you like you want to be treated, right? Like, right now is a good example. You can walk up to me and say you want to talk, but that doesn’t mean I have to listen. Know what I mean?”
I replayed in my head what Momose had just said and looked at his hands.
“More than that, though,” he said. “I got to tell you. This whole thing about you looking the way you look. You make it sound like that’s why we act the way we do, but that’s got nothing to do with it.”

Eventually, even his friendship with Kojima begins to flounder when he realises that she’s not there to support him to escape the bullies but to merely comfort herself by the idea she’s not suffering alone.

Bullying behaviour

This Japanese novella, expertly translated by Sam Brett and David Boyd, is a good examination of bullying behaviour — why people do it, how they get away with it and the long-term serious repercussions on those who suffer it.

There’s an alarming absence of adult intervention, whether by parent or teacher, which is probably indicative of a problem that can go undetected for a long time if the perpetrators are careful and the victim is too scared to speak up.

Heaven is profound and disturbing, but it’s also melancholy, intimate and tender, and there’s something about the hypnotic prose style that gets under the skin and leaves a lasting impression.

And thankfully, despite all the violence and the terror, the story ends on a bittersweet, hopeful note…

This is my 8h book for #20booksofsummer 2021 edition. I accepted this one for review because regular readers of this blog will know I am quite partial to Japanese fiction. I’d been quite keen to read Kawakami’s previous novel, ‘Breasts and Eggs’, now. This is also my 7th book for #BIPOC2021, which is my plan to read more books by black, Indigenous and people of colour this year.

20 books of summer, 20 books of summer (2021), Author, Book review, crime/thriller, Fiction, Japan, Keigo Higashino, Little, Brown, Publisher, Setting, translated fiction

‘Newcomer’ by Keigo Higashino

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Fiction – Kindle edition; Little Brown Book Group; 353 pages; 2018. Translated from the Japanese by Giles Murray.

Keigo Higashino is a Japanese crime writer who likes to spin his tales in a completely different way to most crime writers. He basically takes the rules of the genre, rips them up and throws them away — and then does things completely on his own terms.

Whodunnit with an unusual structure

Newcomer, which is set in Tokyo, is a whodunnit but the narrative is structured in an unusual way: each phase of the police investigation into the homicide of a 40-something woman is told as if it’s a standalone short story. With each new story, or chapter, we learn something new about the case as the list of suspects grows longer and longer.

The investigation is led by Detective Kyochiro Kaga, a sharp-minded, highly experienced policeman who has just been transferred to the Tokyo Police Department and who was first introduced to readers in Higashino’s previous novel Malice. (Newcomer is billed as book 2 in the Kyochiro Kaga series but you don’t need to have read the first to enjoy this one.)

As his investigation into the murder of divorcee Mineko Mitsui proceeds, more and more potential suspects enter the fray to the point where you wonder whether he is ever going to be able to weed out the real culprit.

The evocative setting — the Nihonbashi area of Tokyo, which is dominated by family-run shops and all-night bars, and is, I believe, one of the original areas of the city — lends an olde-worlde charm to the tale as Kaga slowly but surely traces a series of items found in the dead woman’s home back to the shops in which they were purchased.

His logical and methodical inquiry eventually allows him to rule out several suspects, and the denouement comes in the form of a final chapter that reveals who did it, how they did it and why.

A bit of a plod

Regretfully, I didn’t find this book as exciting as previous Higashino novels I have read, and for the most part, I found it a little dull and plodding. I kept wondering how he was going to tie up all the loose ends, and by the time he did so, I’d become bored by the storyline. It definitely lacks tension.

But it’s an intriguing read in terms of characterisation, scene-setting and plotting. Higashino wields his pen carefully, giving us a rather charming, calm and sensible hero, who uses his brain and his wits to put all the clues together without fuss or agenda. In many ways, Kaga might be a little too nice to be a police detective!

Newcomer — the title refers to Kaga being the new man in the police department — is an unconventional mix of cosy crime and modern-day police procedural. It’s an unconventional mystery full of red herrings, subtle reveals and a suspect list so long the book comes with a dramatis personae right upfront. It might be for you if you’re a crime reader looking for something a little on the unusual side.

This is my 2nd book for #20booksofsummer 2021 edition. I bought it on Kindle on 7 February 2021.

Author, BIPOC 2021, Book review, dystopian, Fiction, Japan, literary fiction, Publisher, Reading Projects, Setting, TBR 21, Vintage, Yoko Ogawa

‘The Memory Police’ by Yoko Ogawa

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Fiction – paperback; Vintage; 274 pages; 2020. Translated from the Japanese by Stephen Snyder.

The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa is a brilliant mix of The Diary of Anne Frank meets George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. There are echoes of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and it also shares similar themes with Richard Flanagan’s latest novel, The Living Sea of Waking Dreams, too.

And yet for all that, this is a wholly original dystopian novel like no other.

As Madeleine Thein writes in her review, published in the Guardian in 2019, it is a “rare work of patient and courageous vision” and one that “can be experienced as fable or allegory, warning and illumination”.

Written in deceptively simple yet hypnotic prose, there’s a dream-like quality to the text, yet the subject matter is quite nightmarish.

Isolated island life

Set on an island in a vaguely familiar dystopian future, residents are collectively forced to forget certain objects, including ribbons, roses, maps and calendars as if they never existed. This forgetting is enforced by a mysterious and draconian force called the Memory Police. Those who disobey, or who are unable to forget, are rounded up and “disappeared”.

The story is narrated by an unnamed writer who is working on a novel about a woman who takes typing lessons in a disused lighthouse. Excerpts of this novel (which are published within the novel) show the power of books and writing to preserve the past unless, of course, they are made to disappear, too.

The book’s editor, the kindly R, is one of those unfortunate people who can’t forget what he is supposed to forget and he’s running the risk of being forcefully made to disappear. The writer makes a bold decision to take him away from his pregnant wife and hide him in her house in a makeshift room hidden under the floorboards. She enlists one of her most trusted friends, an elderly man she’s known since childhood, to help her set up the room so it’s functional and soundproof, and together they smuggle R into hiding.

It’s an astonishing risk to take. For R, living in such cramped conditions, with no access to daylight and separated from his wife and child, there is little to occupy his time — except to edit the book.

It was better for him, too, to have work to do. The healthiest way of living in the secret room was to wake in the morning thinking about the things that had to be done during the day; then, at night before going to bed, to check that everything had been accomplished, whether satisfactorily or not. Moreover, the morning agenda needed to be as concrete as possible, and the tasks ideally involved some sort of reward, no matter how small. Finally, the day’s worked needed to tire him out in both body and spirit.

Jeopardy comes in many forms over the course of the novel. R’s hiding place is under constant threat of exposure, while a clandestine love affair increases the danger. Rare objects, including a harmonica, are discovered in the writer’s home and while she does not understand their use, it’s clear that just having them in her possession puts her in peril. Meanwhile, more and more objects are consigned to history by the Memory Police, including books and libraries, seemingly at random, creating chaos, confusion and instability.

Echoes of the past

First published in the author’s native Japan in 1994, The Memory Police was translated into English last year and was shortlisted for the 2020 International Booker Prize.

It’s a brilliant treatise on totalitarianism, loss and control, about the ways in which humans often obliterate all that is good in the world, and the resilience of ordinary people to survive against the odds. It can also be seen as an allegory on growing old and dying. Indeed, there’s a lot to unpick in this relatively short but powerful novel, which is told with grace and flair.

Reading this book, I couldn’t help but recognise elements of human history we would probably rather forget — the constant hunt for food reminiscent of the North Korean regime; the rounding up of people for being different has echoes of Nazi Germany; the constant rewriting of history is very Orwellian; even R’s new life in hiding could be seen as a bit like living in Covid-19 lockdown — so perhaps the book’s overriding message is the importance to remember bad things in order not to repeat them in the future.

I definitely want to read this one again. Expect to see this on my top 10 at the end of the year. Yes, it really is that good.

This is my 4th book for #BIPOC2021, which is my plan to read more books by black, Indigenous and people of colour over the next year, and it is my 5th book for #TBR21 in which I’m planning to read 21 books from my TBR between 1 January and 31 May 2021. I also read this as part of Dolce Bellezza’s Japanese Literature Challenge 14. You can find out more about the challenge, which runs from 1 January to 31 March 2021, here.

Author, BIPOC 2021, Bitter Lemon Press, Book review, crime/thriller, Fiction, Japan, Publisher, Reading Projects, Riku Onda, Setting, TBR 21, translated fiction, women in translation

‘The Aosawa Murders’ by Riku Onda

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Fiction – paperback; Bitter Lemon Press; 346 pages; 2020. Translated from the Japanese by Alison Watts.

The Aosowa Murders by Riku Ondo turns the normal conventions of the crime novel on its head. Featuring multiple voices and multiple time frames, the story does not have a neat ending. It leaves the reader with more questions than answers. I finished it a week ago and I am still trying to process what happened.

Death by poison

The central focus of the story is a devastating mass murder in which 17 people (including six children) are poisoned and die agonising deaths at a family celebration in an impressive villa by the sea. The prime suspect is the family’s beautiful and bewitching blind daughter, Hisako, the only family member spared death, but why would she want to kill the loved ones who have given her such a comfortable and “normalised” life?

But The Aosowa Murders is not really a whodunnit because it emerges that another suspect — a young courier who delivered the drinks which were laced with poison — confessed to the crime in a suicide note he left behind when he hanged himself.

Instead, this novel is really about the long-lasting impact of such a horrendous crime on those directly affected by it, including the police who carried out the investigation, those who knew the family well (they were prominent doctors and ran a health clinic) and the local community.

It’s told retrospectively, several decades after the crime, and is as much about a young university student, Makiko, a childhood friend of Hisako’s who wrote a best-selling fictionalised account of what happened, as it is about the actual event and its aftermath.

Eye-witness testimonies

The book is structured around a series of testimonies in which the interviewer remains absent, so you are never quite sure what the questions are or who is asking them. This lends a one-sided dimension to each chapter, but this multi-voiced approach allows the reader to put together a narrative in his or her head, joining the dots and solving the crime without anything being spelt out by the author herself.

This makes for a challenging read, but it’s a refreshing take on the crime novel. It’s almost as if you become the detective and with each passing chapter you gather more “evidence”, some of which is pivotal to the crime and some of which is irrelevant — and the fun is trying to determine which is which.

It’s an excellent portrait of contemporary Japan, its manners and morals, but I think the biggest (and most important) question it raises is this: how do you make sense of a terrible crime if you don’t understand the motive behind it?

If you like books that make you think, then The Aosowa Murders is a good one to tackle, but if you prefer your crime stories to be relatively straightforward with all the loose ends tied up by the end, then this is probably not for you.

The Aosawa Murders won the 59th Mystery Writers of Japan Award for Best Novel and was selected by the New York Times as one of the most notable books of 2020. Lizzy liked it too.

This is my 3rd book for #BIPOC2021, which is my plan to read more books by black, Indigenous and people of colour over the next year, and it is my 2nd book for #TBR21 in which I’m planning to read 21 books from my TBR between 1 January and 31 May 2021. I also read this as part of Dolce Bellezza’s Japanese Literature Challenge 14. You can find out more about the challenge, which runs from 1 January to 31 March 2021, here.