Mario Menti

Really enjoyed this collection of short stories all linked to the Kobe earthquake, and the last one, Honey Pie, was just wonderful.

A lot shorter than I expected after seeing the Netflix series based on it, and it's always difficult reading a book after you've seen the TV adaption, but it does have the same, at times funny, but a lot of the other times deeply and genuinely sad feel about it.

When I come across a new book I really want to read, by an author I haven't read before, I often try and read one of their earlier books first (I'm not sure why).

Xiaolu Guo's I Am China is wonderful - covering language, politics and culture across multiple countries and continents, and yet deeply personal and very touching.

Hideo Furukawa's “Horses, Horses, in the End the Light Remains Pure” is the second book I read this month to remember 3/11. It's a difficult but very compelling mix of journal entry and novel, with interesting insights into the history of horses, which of course somewhat parallels that of humans - in the sense of horses being slaughtered at the whim of governmental powers, and the Fukushima nuclear power plant serving almost exclusively Tokyo (which was relatively unaffected by the disaster).

Not an easy read (it's too weird and infuriating for that), but very powerful.

I read this to remember the 10th anniversary of 東日本大震災, the Tohoku earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown in Fukushima, tomorrow (March 11).

Published a year after the event, it's a really interesting collection of short stories from Japanese writers, addressing the disaster in different ways.

Yoko Tawada's “The Island of Eternal Life” is a kind of sketch of what was to become her novel “The Last Children of Tokyo”, while the bleakest, angriest and most harrowing piece is a short manga by Brother & Sister Nishioka (“The Crows and The Girl”).

But I think my favourite was Shinji Ishii's “Lulu”, a magical, almost child-like story of translucent women and an imaginary dog (Lulu of the title) that helps orphaned children in an emergency evacuation centre come to terms with their trauma and grief. It's simple in some ways, but so emotionally charged and beautifully written it will stay with you for a long time.

This is a really compelling read.

Set in a dystopian (but all too plausible) near future where the “fight” (if only) against climate change has been lost, it follows Sol from Arizona to Okinawa in search of her long lost US marine father.

Featuring lots of drugs, booze, robots, Okinawan folklore and cats, and trying to highlight the terrible history (and present) of Okinawa, this was right up my alley (maybe helped by having visited Okinawa and Ishigaki twice before, but I think anyone who finds this description interesting would like it).

This is one of these books that pulls you in and gets better and more compelling as it progresses. It deals with some very serious issues (all the protagonists are Japanese teenagers who for one reason or another do not go to school), and is part fairy tale, part YA fiction, part magic realism, part fantasy, but really quite hard to categorise.

It's very cleverly plotted, with a number of plot twists that come thick and fast towards the end, and involves a truly moving denouement.

I started reading this book at least partly because I absolutely love Dorayaki (pancakes filled with sweet red bean paste). To be fair I love most sweets, so this is a low bar. And while it starts quite whimsically, the story soon changes and highlights something I never knew anything about - the treatment of Hansens's Disease (leprosy) sufferers in Japan.

Up until 1996 people that had suffered from the illness, even if they had been cured for decades with no risk of any transmission, were locked away in sanatoriums. This is a large part of what's behind this story, and it also serves as a way to more generally question the value of a life, and the notion that a life should or could be measured by its usefulness to society as a whole.

Really enjoyed this. A sharp political satire, in the form of a series of interconnected stories set in Beanstalk, a 674-story skyscraper and sovereign nation. It mostly concerns itself with matters of (visible and invisible) power, mass media and information and hype, but is both touching (the elephant Buddha story) and funny (the dog as important power broker) as well as smart.

And the Appendix is fantastic: consisting of the full length versions of some of the stories and pieces of writing that were mentioned in the plot of a number of the stories in the “main” part of the book.

I'm honestly not exaggerating when I say this is my favourite book not just this year, but for quite a few years. If you know Okinawa, it might have slightly more impact - I remember driving down from Nago to Naha, and we were literally driving along a US army base perimeter for nearly an hour, just to give an idea of its size - , but its real power is in its excruciating personal honesty about her relationship with her parents, and most importantly her mother.

This is one of the most outright fun books I've read in a while. Very short, surreal stories, but all connected in various ways, so it reads more like a novella than a collection of short stories.

I haven't (yet) read the Haruki Murakami short story that this novella is a “remix” of, but I really loved it. Perhaps strangely, for a book that is all about (unsuccessfully) leaving Tokyo, I actually think it helps to be just a little familiar with Tokyo, as it lives and breathes Tokyo geography and public transport.

Enjoyed this a lot, a sort of literary whodunnit with some supernatural touches. If you enjoy Haruki Murakami, then this might be for you (if this makes it sound derivative, it's not meant to, even if there are parallels in the writing style).

One thing I love is going to charity shops and look through their fiction books, just to see if there's something there that looks like I'd enjoy it. Very often this is the way I come across an author I've not heard before, and often it's books that were up for an award a few years ago, but that I've missed.

Yiyun Li's collection of short stories “A Thousand Years Of Good Prayers” is one such book I absolutely loved. Beautifully spare, it tells the story (and history) of modern China through the protagonists' “insignificant” (to history) lives. At times wickedly humorous, but more than anything utterly heartbreaking in their honesty, these are stories that will stay with me. And it feels like it shines a light onto the complex history of modern China more than any other fiction book I've read recently.

This was wonderful, possibly my favourite (although that might be a tough call) Banana Yoshimoto book.

I couldn't stop reading this. A brilliant, totally captivating story set mostly in 1940s Malaya. It's a mix of fact and fiction (even though I've been to Malaysia and the Batu Caves outside KL, I never knew about the Batu Caves Massacre, where most of the leaders of the communist Malayan People's Anti-Japanese Army (MPSJA) were betrayed and killed). But more than anything, it's a story of love and a more personal kind of betrayal - the story of one man told from three very different perspectives.

Really loved this. A philosophical, quite deep, but very modern detective story. I wish more of his work was translated into English.

Recommended by my daughter who moved to the Lake District earlier this year, I absolutely loved this book. It talks about issues that I believe most of us are more or less aware of, but makes them a lot more tangible and personal.

It's a book in three parts - in the first part, Rebanks talks about his childhood helping out on his grandfather's fell farm in the Lake District, which his grandfather is farming in the old, “traditional” way.

The second part, and perhaps the most powerful one to me, describes the modernisation of farming over the last few decades, with the availability of new technology, pesticides and chemical fertilisers, and the pressure for efficiency and productivity forcing farmers into ever more intensive farming practices in order to survive. Rebanks becomes increasingly disillusioned with this trend, seeing the impact it has both on nature and on the farmers themselves.

The final part is all about Rebanks inheriting his grandfather's farm after his father's death, and trying to farm it in a as-sustainable-as-possible way. This is the most hopeful and almost romantic part, although he is at pains to point out that this type of farming barely pays the bills and he has to work off the farm to make ends meet.

Unless our food system, with its emphasis on cheap prices (especially for meat) and the major supermarkets driving a race to the bottom, is completely changed, then sustainable farming will forever be an unrealistic option for the vast majority of farmers.

Kyoko Nakajima's The Little House (translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori) is wonderful. Similar to what she does in many of her short stories, she leaves the really impactful bits right to the end.

Most of the book is set between 1930 and the war and told by Taki, a housemaid in Tokyo, until the very last chapter, which is set in the near present and took my breath away - it somehow amplifies the story, and takes it way beyond everything you've read up to that point.

Much like everything I have read so far by David Mitchell, I loved this.

The last part of the book, “Sheep's Head, 2043”, is one of the darkest, bleakest, and yet most plausible descriptions of a post-oil post-civilization near-future I have ever read, and its ending is surprisingly emotional - I suppose because by then we have spent over 600 pages and 60 years with Holly Sykes, from teenage runaway in Kent in 1982 to grandmother in a dystopian Ireland in 2043, via many other parts of the world (or should I say “worlds” - this is a fantasy novel in many parts).

Loved this - beautifully written and moving, and epic in scope if not in length.

This is a short but very powerful novella.

One of the top selling books in S Korea this century, it brutally lays bare gender inequality and prevailing attitudes. Told from a dispassionate 3rd person perspective, I found the statistics and footnotes initially odd in a novel, but as it goes on they become strangely compelling.

Loved this book. Looking at Taiwan through its nature and natural history, as well as the personal history of Lee's family, especially through a letter of her grandfather, this is a fantastic read for anyone interested in Taiwan.
Gorgeously written, and equally good at describing mountains, geography, plants, natural history, language, politics and family.

Ryu Murakami, when not called “the other Murakami”, is usually called the enfant terrible of Japanese literature.

This was the third of his books I've read, after Coin Locker Babies and In The Miso Soup. I loved Coin Locker Babies, but didn't like In The Miso Soup quite as much - I think I generally have quite a strong stomach for violence in novels, but even for me it was a difficult book to read that made me feel quite queasy.

69, on the other hand, couldn't be more different from either of those books, being a lighthearted, semi-autobiographical story set in the author's small hometown at the end of college in 1969 (when the author is 17). It touches on how Western culture (rock music, jazz, films, etc) was a breath of fresh air to Japanese youth at the end of the sixties, but mostly it's just a very funny, quite often laugh-out-loud funny story of coming of age, of being at that precious and difficult age where you're influenced by everything, but haven't figured out yet, or had the experience to be able to figure out, who you are.

Really enjoyed this one.

I'm not the biggest fan of crime fiction, and picked this up in a charity shop but it's brilliant!