Mario Menti
I don't think I've read a David Mitchell book yet that I didn't love. This is in many ways a much more straightforward book than you might be used to from him, but the combination of vivid writing, humour, an incredible amount of historical research (it's set on a Dutch trading outpost in the bay of Nagasaki in 1799) makes it if anything an ever stronger read.
How he straddles the different sensibilities of the Dutch, Japanese and English through language is amazing, but of course this wouldn't count for much if it wasn't also a very emotionally captivating novel.
This is probably one of the strangest books I've ever read, in a good way - but not for the faint-hearted.
Poetic, highly surreal, visceral, violent, explicit about everything bodily, shocking, but also very funny at the same time. I think (but could be wrong) a lot of the often gruesome violence has its origins in the Tayan (Taiwan's indigenous people) myths that pervade the storytelling.
I loved this (I read his later book The Stolen Bicycle first, which made me pick up this one).
It might be one of the saddest, and yet most beautiful books I've read. A mixture of magical realism, environmental concerns, and Taiwanese indigenous culture, it was written over 10 years ago, and the environmental issues it predicts have only gotten worse and more hopeless since. In the end it's down to a small black and white rescue cat to give the main protagonist a reason to keep living, which seems apt.
Really enjoyed this touching and often laugh-out-loud funny novel.
It's about love, about language and translation, and then differences of thinking in Chinese and English. And some of her observations, especially about English food, from the perspective of a newly arrived visitor from China are hilarious.
There are some writers I always meant to read but somehow never got around to. This is the first Kazuo Ishiguro novel I've read, and boy am I glad I did. Brilliant, oppressive and disturbing.
I absolutely loved this collection of short stories (her first book written in English). The stories and their settings are incredibly varied - my two favourite stories were one about meeting someone in the cinema, adding them on Facebook, only for them to kill themselves the same day, leading to a rumination on whether you could fall in love with someone simply through their online presence, and the other a tour de force on the politics of succession in Confucian times.
I first came across Tash Aw when in Malaysia a couple of years ago, just as the excellent “We, The Survivors” was published (I have this thing that I like to read books local to where I'm travelling).
“Five Star Billionaire” was written a few years earlier. I finally got around to reading it, and I loved this just as much - the intersecting stories of five Malaysian expats from very different backgrounds trying to make it in Shanghai.
Loved this latest collection of stories by Sayaka Murata in all their weirdness. Some of them I could easily see expanded into novels.
Enjoyed this a great deal. A Taiwanese horror/ghost story, centered around a down-on-his-luck Taipei taxi driver and his wider family. While at times quite creepy and scary, it's far more than just a horror or ghost story, and Chang Yu-Ko manages to weave in a lot of history - especially the Japanese occupation -, folk tales and customs of the indigenous people of Taiwan (in this case mostly the Bunun), and some of the abuse these people suffer to this day.
This is a quiet but beautiful book. A little like Miura's The Great Passage, it's about work, craft and craftmanship, and the pride in work well done, as well as a quite touching coming of age story. It manages to weave in a lot of other very Japanese themes too, the hyperaging society, depopulation of the Japanese countryside (there is literally just one age-appropriate girl in the village for teenager and main protagonist Yuki... it's lucky he fancies her, even if she doesn't feel the same way about him).
There are Shinto shrines, customs and festivals everywhere, and I loved how Miura combines and contrasts the traditional Japan (the very off-the-beaten-track Kamusari village) with contemporary Japan (Yuki, who comes from Yokohama).
An extremely moving novella - meditative. opaque, and yet full of very precise and beautiful observations; of nature, of everyday objects and scenes, of people, and of art. On the face of it a tale of a young woman and her mother visiting Japan together, it gets less and less clear how much of this story is actually real and how much is imagined.
There's a sentence towards the end almost explicitly warning you not to believe what you're reading, comparing writing to a painter painting over what was previously there:
“It was only in this way that one could go back and change the past, to make things not as they were, but as we wished they had been, or rather as we saw it. I said, for this reason, it was better for her not to trust anything she read.”
Au also manages some wonderful descriptions of Japan, that almost physically took me back there:
“The streets were so small that there were often no footpaths but rather white lines drawn on the asphalt to indicate where you could walk. Occasionally, we'd pass a cluster of convenience stores and small shops and coffee houses, which you could always spot at a distance by their brightly coloured vertical signs.”
And about learning Japanese:
“I thought of learning Japanese, how childlike I still felt in the language, how I was capable only of asking for the simplest things. And yet, I persisted, because I dreamed one day of being able to say more. I thought of the instances when I had been able to converse in a string of sentences, like with the woman at the bookshop, and how good this had felt, how electric.”
I absolutely loved this book. And I think I read it at the right time (not to mention the right age), shortly after seeing Yasujirō Ozu's Tokyo Story.
He explicitly mentions this scene at the end of the film, which is one that I genuinely will never forget:
“Life is disappointing, isn't it?” says a young girl who's just lost her mother, near the movie's end. Her sister-in-law, only slightly older but a widow already, breaks into a radiant smile. “Yes,” she says, in the voice of classical Japan. “It is.”
If you're interested in Japan, and (ideally, like me) getting on a bit, I highly recommend this quite beautiful rumination on Japan, aging and death.
I loved this book, and I think anyone interested in language in general, and Japanese in particular, would too. Tawada is from Japan, lives in Berlin, and writes books in both German and Japanese (this one was written in Japanese). I loved her take on languages, their influence on identity, and in particular national identity, when the nation in question no longer exists (here, Japan has ceased to exist and is now simply known as the “country of sushi”).
Apparently this is the first book in a trilogy, which I am very happy about - can't wait for the other two books to be written/published!
A few quotes that I found particularly memorable, or just loved enough to take note of:
“No, I'm not a Buddhist. I'm a linguist.” “Is that a religion?” “Not really, but languages can make people happy, and show them what's beyond death.”
“Yes, the idea of getting an extra identity just by learning a new language was exciting. I wasn't ashamed of being an Eskimo, but a whole life with just one identity seemed kind of dull.”
“But most native speakers are too busy to think much about language, and tend to use the same words and phrases all the time, whereas non-natives, who move back and forth between two languages, are always looking for new words and expressions — so who's more likely to have a bigger vocabulary?”
“This word natsukashii seemed to be made of mist, a mist I was wandering through with unsteady steps. In Panska, I might have said something like “memories of the past are so delicious I want to eat them” instead.”
And finally, probably the nerdiest way of saying you want to visit Japan
I'm not sure if there is such a thing as reading a book pre-emptively, but that's what I did with this, when I heard that there is a big budget film adaption coming in August (starring Brad Pitt and Sandra Bullock, amongst others).
It's probably not the kind of book I usually read, but it turned out to be absolutely glorious, violent fun. In reviews, I've often seen comparisons to Pulp Fiction, and it's easy to see why - a Shinkansen full of a collection of professional hit men of various levels of competence, and other assorted criminals and psychopaths with conflicting aims, all having random discussions covering a whole range of bizarre random philosophical questions and - more than anything else - Thomas the Tank Engine, while attempting to kill each other, or at least avoid being killed.
It's full of clever twists and turns, and towards the end there is one final particular twist that is so unbelievably delicious, if I told you I would have to kill you. But it's not really a spoiler to note that by the time the Shinkansen reaches its final destination, the number of dead bodies on the train vastly outnumbers those still alive.
This collection of short stories really deserves its nomination for the International Booker.
Absurd, often frankly horrific and very dark, these stories draw on phantasy, horror and twisted folk tales, but are firmly rooted in the concerns of our modern, capitalist and patriarchal world and its very real horrors.
And Anton Hur's translation from Korean is nothing short of masterful.
Really enjoyed this - a very twisty, clever crime drama involving a vigilante serial killer, set in Chengdu. I came across it by chance in a charity shop, and as it's the first of a trilogy, I've already bought the second book (not sure the third one has been translated into English yet).
Kaoru Takamura's Lady Joker (volume 1) took me a while to finish, but it's not because it's not good, it's just very long and very detailed. It's definitely a psychological thriller in the sense that almost everything you read happens in people's heads, rather than any outright action. It's pretty scathing about capitalism, the Japanese corporate culture and the “keiretsu” system, with corporations in bed with organized crime.
But it ended on a cliffhanger, so even after 600 pages, I have no idea how it will end. Volume 2 will have all the answers i guess
This is one of my favourite books I've read this year.
It's a kind of meta-fiction centered around the history of bicycles in Taiwan, and covers the Japanese occupation of Taiwan, the Second World War in British Malaya, and especially the role of bicycles (and, more upsettingly, elephants) in the war.
Wu Ming-yi himself seems a bit of a renaissance man (writer, artist, environmental activist and more) and a fascinating person. Sadly only two of his books have so far been translated into English.
If you're interested in Taiwan, its history, WWII in SE Asia, bicycles (of course), the nature of Taiwan (especially butterflies), and love elephants, then you'll probably love this.
Natsuko Imamura's The Woman In The Purple Skirt is gripping enough that I read it in a single sitting today. Starting off quirky but always unsettling (it's a book about obsession after all), it gets progressively darker as it continues, but not without a certain dry sense of humour throughout. Really enjoyed this!
What a wonderful collection of short stories!
The 10 relatively stories are mostly understated and quiet, but paint a vivid picture of a modern Japan where the past and the dead are ever present. And many of the stories have rather satisfying plot twists right in the very last sentences.
I really liked the first collection of Izumi Suzuki's short stories that came out in English a couple of years ago (Terminal Boredom). Hit Parade of Tears, the second collection, is just as good.
Suzuki, who died in 1986 at the age of just 37, was a pioneer of Japanese “punky” science fiction. Most of these stories are simultaneously quite sad and very funny, and despite being steeped in Seventies Japanese counterculture, somehow still feel very fresh today.
Just finished books 1 & 2, and wow, I think I will have to start book 3 right away.
Particularly loved the “town of cats” story; and the scene towards the end, where Aomame is watching Tengo sitting on the slide in a park in Koenji from her balcony, is so well written, it felt like actually seeing it or being there.