Tag: Japanese literature

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.

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.

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.

Author, Book review, crime/thriller, Fiction, Fuminori Nakamura, Japan, Publisher, Setting, Soho Books, translated fiction

‘The Kingdom: A Novel’ by Fuminori Nakamura

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Fiction – paperback; Soho Crime; 202 pages; 2016. Translated from the Japanese by Kalau Almony.

The Kingdom: A Novel is typical Fuminori Nakamura fare. Morally dubious central character. Tick. The world of the criminal underclass. Tick. Shadowy goings-on. Tick. Themes of alienation and dislocation. Tick. Sexual violence. Tick.

But this dark mix of anger, excitement and paranoia isn’t enough to sustain what is essentially a fairly mediocre plotline. I came away from this novel thinking I’d wasted my time reading it, which is not what I normally feel when I read Nakamura. I’ve read four of his novels now, but this one — his tenth and supposedly a companion piece to his rather thrilling The Thief — was a major disappointment and left a horrible after taste.

Set in Tokyo, it tells the story of Yurika, a woman employed by a secret organisation to trap men in compromising situations so that they can be blackmailed. She does this by posing as a prostitute, getting the “target” alone, usually in a hotel room, then drugging them so she can take off their clothes and take incriminating photographs.

But when she’s approached by a rival organisation to get information on her boss, she begins to play the two sides off each other in a rather dangerous life-or-death game — with mixed results.

An unconvincing heroine

The Kingdom: A Novel is written in the first person from Yurika’s point of view. I found it difficult to accept her as a female character; her mindset, particularly her obsession with masochistic sex, felt too male. And while Nakamura tries to round her out by giving her a sympathetic back story — she grew up in an orphanage and as a young adult loses two people to whom she is closest, the pain of their loss conveyed via flashbacks — the details didn’t feel convincing to me.

There are some distasteful scenes in the book, too, including many references to (and depictions of) rape. In part, it reads like a misogynist’s sexual fantasy, which probably explains why I didn’t like it very much.

This is despite the fact I admire Nakamura’s prose style, free from adjectives and with every word carefully chosen to move the fast-paced plot ever closer to its conclusion. It’s full of recurring motifs — the moon, guns and glittering jewellery — and explores themes of weakness, obsession, religion and survival in an interesting way. But it lacks any light and is so full of sadistic characters it’s hard to recommend this book to anyone other than a hardened reader of Japanese noir.

This is my 2nd book for #BIPOC2021, which is my plan to read more books by black, Indigenous and people of colour over the next year. 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. 

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5 fast reviews: Anne Enright, Taylor Jenkins Reid, Yukio Mishima, Bruce Pascoe & Tara June Winch

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Sometimes I can’t quite review books as fast as I can read them. I am now working from home (thanks to the coronavirus lockdown), which means there’s little separation between working and home life, and when I finally turn off the computer I’m too exhausted to do much other than flop in front of the TV to watch Netflix or ABC iView or some other streaming service. I really can’t summon up any extra energy to pen a book review.

In the interest of keeping you all informed about what I’ve been reading, here are five books I’ve read in recent months, which I know I will never get around to reviewing in full. This is a pretty eclectic list but a good demonstration of my reading tastes and interests.

As per usual, the books have been arranged in alphabetical order by author’s surname.

‘Actress’  by Anne Enright
Fiction – paperback; Jonathan Cape; 264 pages; 2020.

I am an Anne Enright fan. I was so looking forward to this novel that I bought it on the day of release in Australia and spent a weekend reading it at home on my balcony.

It’s about an aged Irish actress, the fictional theatre legend Katherine O’Dell, as seen through the eyes of her daughter, Norah, but it’s less about acting (though that is a major theme) and more about the ties that bind mothers and daughters, and what it is like to live in the shadow of a famous parent. (The cover, by the way, is a nice reflection of the story: it’s Carrie Fisher as a child watching her mother Debbie Reynolds on the stage.)

But for all its beautiful language and its rich characterisation and the authentic insights into human relationships, I came away from this novel thinking, So what?  It’s full of dark truths and hidden secrets (but is nicely balanced with a touch of subtle comedy), and I loved the way it chartered Katherine’s career from Hollywood to London’s West End and then her slide into obscurity, but there was just something missing that meant I struggled to fully engage or care about the people depicted…

‘Daisy Jones and The Six’ by Taylor Jenkins Reid
Fiction – paperback; Arrow Books; 401 pages; 2020.

I bought this novel to read on a longish four-hour flight from Darwin to Perth last month (just days before the WA borders were closed) and I absolutely loved it.

It’s very much in the vein of a music “documentary”, structured around a series of interviews with members of a (fictional) band that was big in the 1970s. It mainly centres around Daisy Jones, an ingénue singer-songwriter, who joins The Six and helps propel the group to worldwide fame.

It charts the group’s rise in popularity and recalls the legendary tours, the chart-topping songs and the volatile recording sessions, and provides startling insights into the personal lives of the main players, including their drug addictions and their relationships outside of the music industry. It’s very much a story about sex, drugs and rock’n’roll, and the enormous pressures fame exerts on those whose creativity is the basis of their success.

Fans of Fleetwood Mac (whom the band is supposedly modelled on) will find a lot to love here. It’s hard not to see Daisy as Stevie Nicks and The Six’s narcissistic leader Billy Dunne as Lindsey Buckingham. This is a fun read but has a sad ending…

(For a similar sort of novel, I can also highly recommend Joseph O’Connor’s much-underrated and deliciously entertaining The Thrill of it All, which is the fictionalised memoir of a guitarist from a rock band that made it big in the 1980s.)

‘Star’ by Yukio Mishima
Fiction – Kindle edition; Penguin; 87 pages; 2019. 

Published as part of the Penguin Modern series of novellas and short stories, Star is a story about fame. First published in 1961 not long after the author himself acted in a film, it focuses on a movie star and eligible young bachelor called Rikio. A heartthrob growing more famous by the day, wherever he goes he is greeted by screaming fans. This feeds Rikio’s narcissism and arrogance, and much of the story focuses on his quest to remain relevant so that the fame does not disappear.

But 24-year-old Rikio has a secret. He has a lover, Kayo, an unattractive older woman — “She looked at least forty but was barely even thirty. Her two front teeth were silver, and she wore her hair in a messy bun” — who is, in fact, his assistant. She does his hair and makeup, and because his good looks are so central to his success, she is his constant companion.

The novella examines the artifice of celebrity. It demonstrates how difficult it can be to live a life that is not your own and the stresses you must endure to be unfaithful to your true self. I wouldn’t say rush out and read it, but I found it kept me entertained over a couple of lunch times.

‘Dark Emu’ by Bruce Pascoe
Non-fiction – paperback; Magabala Books; 278 pages; 2014.

There won’t be many Australians who haven’t heard of this legendary non-fiction book which debunks the long-held belief that Australian Aboriginals were nomadic and did not build houses or practise agriculture.

Pascoe painstakingly excavates evidence from the papers and letters of the first white settlers and explorers to show that pre-colonial Aboriginals did, indeed, do those things — and more. He finds written evidence that they built dams, farmed wild plants for food, constructed settlements and fashioned landscapes to suit their ends. They even had their own system of government. And he explains why it suited colonialists to suppress that evidence, to maintain the myth that Aboriginals were simply hunter-gatherers, a myth that remains to this day.

Dark Emu is a truly eye-opening book. I loved Pascoe’s simple prose, his well-thought-out arguments and his plea for better understanding between black and white Australians so that we can move forward together. If the book has a single message it is this: white Australians have an amazing opportunity to learn from 60,000 years of sustainable custodianship of this land and all it contains — but they have to acknowledge it first.

‘Swallow the Air’ by Tara June Winch
Fiction – hardcover; University of Queensland Press; 216 pages; 2006.

First published in 2006 but reissued in 2018 (in a really lovely small-format hardcover), this is a gripping account of a young Aboriginal girl whose single mother dies, leaving her (and her older brother) in the care of an auntie. When Auntie’s fondness for drink and men who throw their fists around gets too much May strikes out on her own. 

Told in a series of self-contained short chapters and vignettes (a bit like short stories), the narrative charts May’s ups and downs, the heartbreak she contends with, the crappy jobs she works, and the people — good, bad and indifferent — that she meets along the way as she comes to term with her past and seeks out her own indigenous culture. The redemptive ending, when she returns to her childhood home as a proud Wiradjuri woman, makes this beautiful, heartfelt book such a powerful one. Written in lush language, it contains so many evocative descriptions of people, places and experiences that it’s the kind of book you want to savour rather than rush through.

Oh, and did I mention it’s won a million awards?

I read ‘Actress’ as part of Cathy’s Reading Ireland Month 2020, an annual initiative to read books from Ireland. You can find out more about that on Cathy’s blog 746 Books.

I read ‘Star’ as part of Dolce Bellezza’s #JapaneseLitChallenge13. You can find out more about the challenge, which runs from 1 January to 31 March, here. This is also my 11th book for #TBR2020 in which I plan to read 20 books from my TBR between 1 January and 30 June. I bought it on Kindle last November for £1.99, not realising it was basically a short story.

I read ‘Swallow the Air’ as part of the 2020 Australian Women Writers Challenge. It is my 6th book for #AWW2020.