Earthlings

In a similar way to Convenience Store Woman, Sayaka Murata’s second novel Earthlings examines the worlds created by people who find that the standards set by wider society don’t quite fit with who they are. It casts a light on the tendency in Japanese society towards rigid compliance and formality over feelings, contrasting the instincts of childhood with the conformity and regulation of adulthood. It also shows up the double standards in society, with a blind eye turned to some behaviours but not others. There are moments of humour and tenderness, but this story is much darker than Murata’s previous book.

Parade

In Parade, four 20-somethings share an apartment in Tokyo, each at a different stage in their life, each searching for something in their own way. Through them and their individual narratives we gain an idea of modern Japanese life, or Tokyo life at least.

Tokyo Redux

I waited 12 years for David Peace to write the final installment in his Tokyo Trilogy, plus an extra year for it to come out in paperback, and somehow another year after buying it to actually read it. Sometimes anticipation makes me wary. I loved Tokyo Year Zero and Occupied City. Peace’s writing in this trilogy draws from the style of Japanese authors, particularly Ryūnosuke Akutagawa. It’s a dark and unsettling series, meticulously researched so that his fiction feels like it fills the gaps in the historical record with truth.

Japanese Fairy Tales

Yei Theodora Ozaki’s translated compendium of Japanese fairy tales is a charming read. Published in 1903 and now out of copyright, I got mine from the Kindle store a while ago for free. It’s also available to download or read for free on Project Gutenberg.

In her introduction, Ozaki explains that she wanted to bring the world of Japanese fairy tales to a western audience and her selection of twenty-two stories is based on Sadanami Sanjin/Sazanami Iwaya’s Meiji era collection for children, with a few tales from other sources. Ozaki rewrote the stories into English with a younger audience in mind. While some are gentle in tone, the fact that they are for children is no guarantee that violence and brutality won’t make an appearance. Some of the stories are quite shocking and upsetting in their cruelty. I suppose an argument can be made that nature and the world are cruel and brutal things, and these stories are reflections of that. I don’t think it’s a collection that I would put in front of a child today, despite knowing what I was like as a child and how much I loved spooky stories.

Breasts and Eggs

I have been looking forward to reading Breasts and Eggs, Mieko Kawakami’s novel about writing that follows a working class woman in Tokyo and her battle to become an author, since I first saw it mentioned in a Must Read list. I treated myself to a copy at the start of the year and now its time has come, swapped into my 10 Books of Summer for Women in Translation Month.

The Box Man

Kōbō Abe is a writer I struggled with when I read his most famous book, The Woman in the Dunes. His dreamlike, psychological horror bent my brain. The Box Man promised a similar trip, as it follows a man who chooses to live inside a cardboard box, rejecting the normality of his previous existence in favour of the tenuous reality contained within his mind.

I’ve had the book on my To Read pile for almost 5 years, so I decided to add it to my 10 Books of Summer reading list. It turns out that its claustrophobic setting fitted well with the unusually oppressive sweltering heat of July in the UK.

The Tokyo Zodiac Murders

The Tokyo Zodiac Murders is a new kind of crime novel for me, from a Japanese genre called ‘honkaku’. The story is split between a series of murders that took place in 1936 and the attempts of two young men in 1979 to solve the mystery when a new piece of evidence comes into their possession.

10 Books of Summer

Cathy is running the summer reading challenge that aims to clear some books off your To Read pile again this year – hooray! I’m joining in with my usual ten book goal. As a target, it worked out well for me last year, despite being fooled by some tiny old books into thinking they were short reads. I only missed my goal by one. I’m confident that I’ll hit my goal this year, though, especially since I’ve averaged a book a week so far.

The challenge runs from 1 June to 1 September and you can find out more about what’s involved in Cathy’s introductory post on 746 Books. The main rule is that the rules aren’t tightly binding. So if you choose a book and then don’t fancy it, it’s more than okay to swap it for something else. Or if you have a bit of a reading slump and your target starts to feel like a stretch, then you should feel free to recalibrate to something more realistic. As long as something gets cleared off the To Read pile, you’re golden.

Killing Commendatore

Read 05/01/2020-22/01/2020

Rating 4 stars

First published in Japan in two volumes in 2017 and issued in English translation in 2018, Killing Commendatore is the fourteenth of Haruki Murakami’s novels to be published in the English language.

In this instalment of his epic tale of men who don’t understand women and don’t fully understand themselves, Murakami has chosen to tell the story of an unnamed artist. The novel incorporates a trio of mysteries.

Tokyo Ueno Station

Read 17/10/2019-20/10/2019

Rating 4 stars

Tokyo Ueno Station is a ghost story, an alternative history of Japan and a critique of Japanese society. Beginning among the homeless community who live in and around the busy commuter station near Ueno Park, it reaches back through time to the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, the post-war economic boom, the migration of workers to Tokyo to help build the Olympic park in 1964, and the devastating tsunami of 2011.

The narrator of the tale is called Kazu. Through him, we see a different Japan to the one portrayed in travel programmes and newspaper articles. It’s a harrowing story of loss and abandonment.