'Friendship for Grown-Ups' evokes the ambiguity of everyday life
Keshiki is a chapbook series published by Strangers Press designed to showcase some of the most exciting writers working in Japan today. "Friendship for Grown-Ups" by Nao-Cola Yamazaki is the second book in the series. The recipient of five Akutagawa Prize nominations, Yamazaki's ...
Sawako Ariyoshi's 'The River Ki' explores characters who swim against life's current
When we read Japanese history it's easy to forget that the revolutionary changes that washed through the country from the 19th century into the 20th all took place within a single human life span. The River Ki, by Sawako Ariyoshi.256 pages KODANSHA, Fiction. Sawako Ariyoshi takes this ...
'A Dark Night's Passing': Naoya Shiga sounds the depths of rootlessness
It takes a brave writer to make their main character as unlikeable as Kensaku Tokito. It is even more startling because Naoya Shiga was consciously writing within the 'I' novel tradition, where the author deliberately draws on their life story for source material. A Dark ...
As the holiday season rolls around, it's time to dash about in a mad panic in search of gifts that say "I've given this one some thought, honest." Or you can just let us do the thinking for you, with gift suggestions from our ...
In simple terms, "Phantasm Japan" is a fantasy anthology on the theme of "light and dark, from and about Japan." Phantasm Japan, by Multiple authors.Haikasoru, Fiction. To outsiders, the overriding image of Japan is of ...
Fuminori writes noir, but not as we know it
Fuminori Nakamura has won many of the major literary prizes in Japan and is quickly making the same kind of impact in the English-speaking world. His third novel to be translated into English, "Last Winter, We Parted," is out now. It's a tense, layered ...
"The incident took place on April 16, 1996, a Tuesday." This meditative, clever novel from the author of 2011's "The Devotion of Suspect X" begins with a journal entry by Osamu Nonoguchi, a children's author who happens upon the body of his friend and ...
Osamu Dazai's "No Longer Human" comprises a series of three fictionalized notebooks, with each increasingly darker than the last. The character writing these books, Yozo, is detached from the beginning and is afraid of human interactions, but he learns how to socialize with people ...
This sprawling period piece from the prolific author of such works as "L.A. Confidential" and "The Black Dalia" takes place in Los Angeles and environs between Dec. 5 and 29, 1941. Central to the plot are the enigmatic slayings of a Japanese family of ...
If you'd nuked a city, you'd feel guilty too
The author T.C. Boyle in the preface to his book "Stories II" published last year made a convincing argument that runs counter to the conventional wisdom to "write what you know." Boyle said: "A story is an exercise of imagination — or, as Flannery ...
Masuji Ibuse's classic 1965 novel "Black Rain" takes readers into the everyday lives of a family poisoned by radiation sickness. The narrative structure carefully balances between the present time of the novel and journal entries from the bombings of Hiroshima to craft a carefully ...
Inner-city life, and the banal mystery that is other people
Beautifully banal. Perhaps not the most positive-sounding turn of phrase, but the one that best summarizes the appeal of Shuichi Yoshida's interwoven narrative of five young adults and their struggles living in an overcrowded Tokyo apartment. Parade, by Shuichi ...
