The latest addition to my website is Kōbō Abe‘s 密会 (Secret Rendezvous). Even by Abe’s standards this is a seriously weird book. A jump shoe salesman and his wife are woken up at 4 am. by an ambulance which has come to take the wife to hospital. They did not summon the ambulance and she … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Yōko Ogawa‘s 余白の愛 [Love at the Margin]. Our unnamed heroine/narrator has suddenly had serious hearing problems . We learn later that her husband had left her the day before. From her room in the F clinic, she can see an old hotel and, two later, she will be … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Kōbō Abe‘s 燃えつきた地図 (The Ruined Map). On the face if it this is the story of a detective looking for a missing person. Our unnamed detective is working for a woman whose husband – a reliable, conventional man, who had just received a promotion at work – disappeared … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Maki Kashimada‘s 六〇〇〇度の愛 (Love at Six Thousand Degrees). This is something of a Japanese response to the film Hiroshima mon amour, scripted by Marguerite Duras, about a French woman who has an affair in Hiroshima with a Japanese man whose relatives were killed by the atom bomb. In … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Hiromi Ito‘s とげ抜き 新巣鴨地蔵縁起 (The Thorn Puller). She calls it a long poem but we might describe it as an autobiographical novel. On the one hand, she describes the difficult role that society that society imposes on women as a daughter and only child of ageing and ill … Read more
The latest addition to my website is László Krasznahorkai‘s Északról hegy, Délről tó, Nyugatról utak, Keletről folyó (A Mountain to the North, a Lake to the South, Paths to the West, a River to the East). This tells the story of the grandson of Prince Genji who seems to live in the present day, in … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Hiroko Oyamada‘s いたちなく (Weasels in the Attic). This book consists of three linked stories. In the first the unnamed narrator and his friend Saiki visit Shuzo Urabe who had an exotic fish shop which has closed. He now lives above the shop with his wife and daughter, The … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Hiroko Oyamada‘s 工場 (The Factory)>. We follow the stories of three employees as they go to work at the Factory and are still there, in the same jobs, fifteen years later. Their jobs seem mundane – one shreds documents one proofreads and one is meant to be developing … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Mieko Kawakami:‘s すべて真夜中の恋人たち (All the Lovers in the Night). Our heroine/narrator is Fuyuko Irie. She is a loner. We learn nothing about her parents and she seems to have no siblings. She has one (female) friend at school but they never meet outside school. After college, she becomes … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Masatsugu Ono‘s 森のはずれで (At the Edge of the Woods). An unnamed family – husband, pregnant wife and young son, possibly Japanese – move to a foreign country, to a house at the edge of the woods. The wife goes back to her parents to have her child, leaving … Read more