いつも旅のなか [Itsumo tabi no naka]

by Mitsuyo Kakuta

ロシアで国境の居丈高な巨人職人に怒鳴られながら激しい尿意に耐え、キューバでは命そのもののように人々にしみこんだ音楽とリズムに驚く。五感と思考をフル活動させ、世界中を歩き回る旅を、臨場感たっぷりに描く。

285 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2005

About the author

Mitsuyo Kakuta (角田光代, 1967–) set her sights on becoming a writer from an early age. Her debut novel—Kōfuku na yūgi (A Blissful Pastime), written while she was a university student—received the Kaien Prize for New Writers in 1990. She has been working continuously as an author ever since, never having had to support herself with a separate job. Three nominations for the Akutagawa Prize serve as a measure of the promise with which she was regarded from early in her career. Then, at the encouragement of an editor, she shifted toward the entertainment end of the literary spectrum, where she garnered a much broader readership with works depicting the lives of women in her generation, from their mid-thirties to forties. After publishing two brilliant novels in 2002, Ekonomikaru paresu (Economical Palace) and Kūchū teien (Hanging Garden), she went on to win the Naoki Prize for the second half of 2004 with Woman on the Other Shore (tr. 2007). Her successes continued with The Eighth Day (tr. 2010), which received the 2007 Chūō Kōron Literary Prize and was made into a televised drama series as well as a movie; the book sold more than a million copies, vaulting her into the ranks of Japan's best-selling authors. In 2012 she added to her list of honors by earning the Shibata Renzaburō Award for her novel Kami no tsuki (Paper Moon), and the Izumi Kyōka Prize for her volume of short stories Kanata no ko (The Children Beyond).

Mitsuyo Kakuta is currently working on translating the Tale of Genji into modern Japanese.
(source: BooksFromJapan.jp)

Reviews

[Misa · Rating 1 out of 5]

A collection of ‘travel’ essays, I set out to read the whole collection but found myself getting increasingly irritated so I chose to only read ones of countries I’ve visited and lived in myself and subsequently DNFed the book.

These are writings on personal recollections with random people the author encountered on her various trips but written from a narrow viewpoint, not recommended for someone who has travelled extensively.

The author visits so many different places but she does not talk about the place or the culture itself - very little to no attempt is made in contextualising any place other than what the reader’s own imagination can bring up about each of these countries without having been there (or a Google search of the country); if one actually visited those places and decided to compile essays about them, more information should be given to the reader, otherwise every essay sounds the same - where are the sights, sounds, the smells? These essays rather focus on conversations that go along the lines of: strikes up a conversation with a random local person who the author initially finds suspicious (!!!) but they speak a bit of Japanese and she decides to just go along with them, staying with those people or hanging out with them for days.

One doesn’t get the sense that she is very street smart, in fact, some of the things she did was extremely gullible and dangerous. Please do not read this book and think that you can behave in the ways the author did, constantly relying on random strangers - do your own research and be an independent traveller! You wouldn’t rely on a complete stranger to take you places or stay in their house in your own hometown, so why would you expect that this would be safe in a completely new country that you don’t know the custom of? Much of the commentary is peppered with a privileged, sheltered mindset, where descriptions of people or places met and visited were constantly in relation to the author’s surprise or shock at how different things are from Japan... I felt myself cringe reading some of this text.

I found this to be a complete waste of time and this has also turned me off this author in general. Luckily I read it on Kindle Unlimited and didn’t have to waste money.

[Emiko Igari · Rating 5 out of 5]

読むと旅に出たくなる本です。
この本を読んで、数年前スリランカに行きました。

[Minako · Rating 5 out of 5]

Most favorite essay. She traveled to Morocco, Russia,Florence, Spain etc.....to see herself. Her sentences are soft, casual and comfortable, but have strong message and drive us for a trip.
written by Japanese