tmn The latest addition to my website is Hiromi Kawakami‘s 先生の鞄 (US: The Briefcase; UK: Strange Weather in Tokyo)/ This is the quirky tale of the relationship between a thirty-seven year old woman, Tsukiko, and her high school Japanese teacher, some thirty years her senior, whom she addresses as Sensei, the honorific term used by the … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Fumio Niwa‘s 菩提樹 (The Buddha Tree). This is a long novel, set in a Buddhist temple, with a detailed description of the temple and its rituals (Niwa descended from a long line of priests and trained as a priest before abandoning the profession to become a writer). However, … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Saiichi Maruya‘s 笹まくら (Grass for My Pillow). This is an excellent novel about a somewhat taboo subject in Japan: draft desertion. Shokichi Hamada is currently the assistant chief clerk in the registry office of a university. However, during the war, he decided not to serve and travelled around … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Yōko Ogawa‘s 博士の愛した数式 (The Housekeeper and the Professor). This is a delightful novel about a single mother, uneducated housekeeper, who goes to work for a professor of mathematics, who lost his memory in a car crash, so that he can only remember events before 1975 (seventeen years previously) … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Naoya Shiga‘s 暗夜行路 (A Dark Night’s Passing). This novel, written in the I-novel style, is a semi-autobiographical/confessional novel about Kensaku Tokito, a would-be novelist, who struggles to settle down, to find his place and to come to terms with his life and the world round him. His mother … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Fumiko Enchi‘s 女面 (Masks). This is a beautifully written book about masks (both real and figurative ones) as well as about various other topics but, in particular, love and betrayal and death. Mieko Toganō is a widow and a poet. She lives with her daughter-in-law, Yasuko, whose husband, … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Shūsaku Endō‘s 沈黙 (Silence). This novel is set in the early seventeenth century, when Japan had forcibly clamped down on Christianity. The religion was forbidden and all practitioners, be they Japanese worshippers or European priests, had to apostatise or face brutal torture and death. The story tells of … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Masahiko Shimada‘s 雁 (夢使い (Dream Messenger). This one could have been a good book but did not work for me, not least because the characters were flat, the story dragged on and it all seemed unconvincing. The story tells of Miko Amino, a super-rich widow, who wants to … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Keizo Hino‘s 夢の島 (Isle of Dreams). Keizo Hino has been compared to J G Ballard and, while they are different in many ways, they do share an interest in the urban landscape, particularly urban decay and high rises. This novel tells of Shozo Sakai, a widower in his … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Kyūsaku Yumeno‘s ドグラマグラ (Dogra Magra). This is another Japanese epic – seven hundred pages in the Japanese original – which is both an incredibly complicated detective story as well as a searing indictment of contemporary (i.e. Japan in the 1930s) psychiatry where the doctors may well be more … Read more