Japanese Literature discussion
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Alan wrote: "@Bill, my work is the same. The uni has cancelled all classes and has gone fully online for lectures. So I spend my day wiping the keyboard and card machine and door handles with anti-bacterial wip..."I wish. I’m not willing to replace his work phone for $900+ . But dang, it is LOUD. I bought him a set of headphones but he doesn’t like how they feel. Who does? Ack!!
Shut him in another room with it? Call it social distancing.Personally, all this sitting at home makes me restless. And when I'm restless I tend to start books and not finish them. So the pile of quarter-read books is growing...
I just got a copy of the newest Yukio Mishima “Life For Sale”.My first month of “isolation” (Japan is really taking a slow attempt at this, which is ??? I don’t know what to think) I didn’t read much, but with 3 weeks more now, I’m knocking off a bunch and might even get close to emptying my kindle.
Stay well all!
Bill wrote: "Shut him in another room with it? Call it social distancing.Personally, all this sitting at home makes me restless. And when I'm restless I tend to start books and not finish them. So the pile of..."
I know exactly what you mean, Bill. One of my friends used the word 'unsettling' to describe how she feels, unable to concentrate on anything for long. I'm at the point now I avoid turning on the TV or opening my news app on my phone until early evening.
Bill wrote: "Shut him in another room with it? Call it social distancing.Personally, all this sitting at home makes me restless. And when I'm restless I tend to start books and not finish them. So the pile of..."
It’s not just me then? I’ve never been this bad about starting and getting 20% through with so many books. I’m not even unhappy with them. I just keep starting different books.
On today's Japan Times website, 4 of their critics suggest some Japanese books to get you through lockdown. It's a bit of a mixture (they do try and 'justify' a choice but probably, just random books they have on their own bookshelf to read!!). One of them does actually mention the issue of not being able to fully concentrate, and suggests some short stories, so I think it's a common feeling, Bill and Carol.And it does include our choice for next month's read, Shipwrecks. Hurrah.
Here's a link to the article:
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/...
Currently reading A Wind Named Amnesia. This unrelated pair of SF novels was published in 1983, not 2005 as the GR listing says. I knew I'd seen a short anime version of this in the early 90s.In Wind Named Amnesia, everyone suddenly forgets everything, including language. Mass death and destruction ensue. The story begins three years later when a boy and girl who remember the past find each other and decide to drive cross-country. It's reminiscent of Kino's Journey in the way they come to a city with its own new society and problems, and solve them through violence. Slowly over the course of the novel the truth is revealed. It's an interesting addition to post-apocalyptic literature,
Reading A Man by Hirano. (Out June 1st)1/3 done and really interesting so far.
The back half of the book with A Wind Named Amnesia is another novel, Invader Summer, also from 1983. It begins as a high school drama which might develop into one or more love triangles, a plot more reminiscent of manga than novels.Then it takes a turn for the strange. Now, a turn for the strange can be a good thing, but not in this case. After it begins subtlely happening, all the adults starts talking about aliens and the supernatural with only the slimmest of pretexts. It's very unrealistic for people to acknowledge it so easily, and that's something that occurs too frequently in Japanese SF. It really spoils the tension and plausibility of it all. I won't be finishing it.
Reading Bankrupting The Enemy, a detailed history of US economic sanctions on Japan from 1937 to 1941.The author has a slight 'pro-sanction' bias, but doesn't let it interfere with analysis of the people and law involved. I hope later in the book he addresses the question of whether the sanctions caused the Japanese attacks in December 1941 (including on Pearl Harbor).
I recently read FIRES ON THE PLAINS by Shōhei Ōoka, and followed it with BEASTS HEAD FOR HOME by Kōbō Abe. They make a fruitful complementary pair.
Perhaps not the right place to mention manga, but whatever. I just finished volume 1 of Piece, and I still have no idea what it's about. I picked up the whole 10-volume set before starting it, and now I'm glad I did. This story about college students wasting time perhaps will have a kind of Honey & Clover feel to it, but without all the art classes.I won't be going straight to volume 2, though, because as a quarantine present to myself, I paid too much for the five latest volumes of Brides' Story shipped new from Japan. They appear to be about side characters we met in earlier volumes rather than about Amir and Karluk. But that's good, too.
The Inugami Curse ebook is 99p on Tuesday with the Pushkin Press deals. I can’t remember which thread we were talking about the last one in, whoops.
I liked Inugami, and the older version of the movie is on J-Netflix too!
I am now reading a collection of short stories which includes „Friends” by Abe Akira. In this story the narrator mentions a book written either by an actual or fictional author, introducing it as „a lengthy novel by a post-war writer, a controversial figure when we were in college”. I’m guessing that the college period for the characters might have been somewhere in the 1950s. (Abe was born in 1934 and I assume he uses a more or less veridic historical context here.)Do you have any idea what novelist Abe had in mind here? The book is quite meaningful for the story, so I would really want to find out.
For the reference, the story is on pp. 311-330 in „The Shōwa Anthology” edited by Gessel and Matsumoto.
I read the first hundred pages of World Within Walls yesterday. It's Donald Keene's history of Edo literature, from 1600 to 1868. He's a very readable author and keeps the subject interesting, even when going through lots of detail.I also have History of Japanese Literature, Volume 2 by Kato Shuichi on the period, but it's considerably shorter and will be more dense reading. I was very impressed with his first volume, but I felt like reading the easier Keene book first.
I am reading 海辺のカフカ〈上〉, the first volume of Murakami's 'Kafka on the Shore'. It's been a while since I read anything in Japanese and against all odds it is going quite swimmingly. I used to take up to an hour per page (yes, an hour!) but can now read as much as a chapter in a sitting.
I am reading out loud as I find that it really helps my understanding the text and is very useful in remembering vocabulary and since I go through the same passages several times- until I can read them without a hitch- it is a time consuming process.
Hopefully I will finish this volume before the year is over.
Giving Mishima another go, and have started Death in Midsummer, a compilation of his short stories. If this goes well, I might finally finish his Sea of Fertility tetralogy (stuck halfway through The Temple of Dawn).
There's no need to push yourself on the Sea of Fertility. The last two books are nowhere near as good as the first two.
Bill wrote: "There's no need to push yourself on the Sea of Fertility. The last two books are nowhere near as good as the first two."Thanks, Bill. I feel better about that tetralogy after what you wrote. I have been consciously avoiding Mishima since the disappointment of Temple of Dawn - I put it down to liking Honda so much in the first two books that I just couldn't comprehend why he'd changed so drastically in the third book. Didn't help that there weren't really any likeable characters in Temple of Dawn either.
Hoping the short stories compilation will be good so at least I can attempt to read his other stuff.
I recently finished an Edelweiss copy of Where the Wild Ladies Are.I wrote a long-ish piece about the sento in the opening story, "Smartening Up." The sento also plays a role in Breasts and Eggs, also published this year.
https://readjapaneseliterature.com/20...
A bit behind the group (I think), I finished "Breasts and Eggs" this evening. A review was posted...
Jon wrote: "A bit behind the group (I think), I finished "Breasts and Eggs" this evening. A review was posted..."Jon, what were your thoughts?
I enjoyed the book overall. The writer's strong points are quite strong: female characters, ambiguous mental states (most of them are, which makes this convincing, and by comparison other writers whose character's minds operate like boardgames seem terribly flimsy), time passing without one really noticing it, the flitting yet constant state of consciousness. Her characters are nuanced and real.The weak points, to me, are structural. I really enjoyed the bulk of the second section and how it was ordered by months: a declaration that it was March and the sky looked so and so, or the weather was such and such. The rhythm of the narrative, the recurring trains of thought, the concentration not on the active peaks of a creative life but instead on the troughs, all worked well with the protagonist and narrative. However, as the section headed towards its later phases, the Return to One's Childhood Home part seemed terribly stock, as did the big conclusion. That is, for me, the writer was more adept spooling out a person's life and confusion, rather than hitting prepaid emotional highlights. Almost it seemed as if the writer, after tooling around very skillfully, often lyrically, for hundreds of pages, decided "OK, now I have to start writing something that is important!"
The novel has two sections, corresponding to two parts of the protagonist's life. That the second section is, in terms of writing, deeper and more accomplished, makes the novel feel like it was written by two different writers.
The key ideas in the book are extremely well-explored, emotionally and intellectually, while leaving most of what mystifies the characters about themselves satisfyingly unclear.
Her writing when the main character is in a fevered state is the most poetic. What about writers who become more dreamy and lucid, images and ideas melding and melting and blurring in a lovely way only when their characters are sick?
Perhaps needless to say: it was a pleasure for me to read a book by a Japanese author which was almost entirely about female characters. My long reading experience with Japanese fiction has been just about entirely books by men, populated largely by male characters.
I am interested to read more of her work -- especially short fiction.
I just finished ME. I expected it to be more crime thriller and less existential crisis. But I liked it!Here are my thoughts:
https://readjapaneseliterature.com/20...
(There are spoilers from Earthlings in the post, too.)
Bill wrote: "I read the first hundred pages of World Within Walls yesterday. It's Donald Keene's history of Edo literature, from 1600 to 1868. He's a very readable author and keeps the subject i..."I love this book as well. It is excellent as a history of the genre, relying far more on examples than exegesis. This is true even though if you flip through it, it appears to be more text than poetry.
Just finished my first venture into the work of Banana Yoshimoto. Read Hardboiled & Luck, two novella’s bundled in a Faber publication, this evening and liked both a lot. Sensitive and meditative stories on coping with loss. Looking forward to Kitchen!
I’m currently reading The Perfect World of Miwako Sumida, I got an arc from netgalley. It’s based in Japan, written by an Indonesian Singaporean author but it feels very authentic so far. I’m really enjoying it. I would recommend.
I finished The Honjin Murders and it was a great read, I really enjoyed it. Now about five chapters into Killing Commendatore and not sure what to make of it yet.
J wrote: "I finished The Honjin Murders and it was a great read, I really enjoyed it. Now about five chapters into Killing Commendatore and not sure what to make of it yet."About Commendatore, maybe you never will. For me it is Murakami's formal novelistic statement how (his) art is made / what real art is all about, covered in a very very long story where nothing is really what it seems.
I really loved it. But is was long :)
Agnetta wrote: "About Commendatore, maybe you never will. For me it is Murakami's formal novelistic statement how (his) art is made / what real art is all about, covered in a very very long story where nothing is really what it seems.I really loved it. But is was long :)"
Thanks, Agnetta. I think your perspective has helped me enjoy this more and I can see what you mean and how it seems to be coming together. I'm still only 10 chapters in, and this mystery with Menshiki is intriguing, sort of. Not an opera fan, so I could do with less of that, but it doesn't really bother me.
Does anyone here listen to audiobooks of Japanese fiction or non-fiction about Japan? Could you recommend your favorites? Also, do you know of any source of Japanese audiobooks which would be a viable alternative to Audible?I know there is Seidensticker’s translation of Genji available via Audible (not to be found on CD at the moment). Did you try it? If so, is it comprehensible in audio form?
I started I Want to Eat Your Pancreas last night. You'd expect a book about a teenage girl with a terminal illness to be grim, but this is perhaps best described as 'bubbly'. The personality of the girl, and her attitude towards the end of her life and the new friend she makes along the way. The novel I would most compare it to is the darker-toned I Want to Kick You in the Back.I Want to Eat Your Pancreas has 'Light Novel' printed on the back, which confused me, so I consulted an expert. I have no clue how to decide if something is or isn't one. He says it isn't. The US licensor probably printed that on the back hoping to increase sales.
Libro.fm is a good alternative to Audible. You can link your Libro.fm account to an indie bookstore of your choice. Their selection isn’t as wide, but there are several good titles there; the library seems to be constantly growing. These are the titles I’ve listened to on Libro.fm:
Life for Sale
ME
Memoirs of a Polar Bear (by a Japanese writer, but translated from German)
Lots of Murakami H
The audiobook of Shogun is just... wow... I haven’t had a literary crush in a long time, but Blackthorne is something else
A Brief History of Japan
Embracing Defeat
A History of Japan
Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan
In Praise of Shadows
The Japanese Mind
I’m not sure if you get anything from a personal invite, but here’s one in case it helps: http://libro.fm/referral?rf_code=lfm9....
Currently reading Japanese Folk Literature.I guess you would call this an 'index'. It summarizes journal articles and books on Japanese folk literature. When it's just listing tables of contents I skim past, but it also contains brief summaries of a large number of folk stories (with a lot of variations). Seeing how I'm unlikely to come across these pre-1982 books, this is as close as I'm going to come to these stories. It's like reading Diogenes Laertius to glean bits of books you'll never get to read directly.
No, I didn't know what this was when I bought it. I bought it because the author was my first Japanese literature professor. We've all bought books for similar reasons, right?
I’ve just started The Last Children of Tokyo by Yoko Tawada... I’m enjoying the story but there’s been a few editorial errors I’ve spotted which took me out of it. I wish I could turn off my QA brain sometimes.
Just finished The Mother of Dreams, an anthology by and/or about Japanese women.Most of the stories are remarkably good, and only one do I recall having read elsewhere. The editor was also considerate enough to provide brief biographies of the authors and years of publication of the stories included.
Bill wrote: "Just finished The Mother of Dreams, an anthology by and/or about Japanese women.Most of the stories are remarkably good, and only one do I recall having reading elsewhere. The edit..."
wow - this sounds fab and I hadn't heard of it. Thanks for the rec, Bill.
I've been reading Breasts and Eggs. I'm DNFing it now. I feel like it was setting up some really good conversations about being a woman just to go and shit on them in part 2. I'm angry, but I don't know if that was just my expectations/ personal opinions or if other people would feel the same. Also there was a really disturbing scene in part 1 that shows Japan's views on transgender people are... Hmmn.
Jeshika wrote: "Also there was a really disturbing scene in part 1 that shows Japan's views on transgender people are... Hmmn.!Gay rights activist 石川 大我 covers this briefly in his autobiography, ボクの彼氏はどこにいる? Boku no kareshi wa doko ni iru? . Trans rights are in the pits.
One of Taiga's colleagues, Kawamura Aya, is the first trans politician to ever get elected to office in Japan and she receives death threats pretty much daily. At one point, she shared them with followers online because it made it feel less terrifying when so many others could read them.
Nocturnalux wrote: "Gay rights activist 石川 大我 covers this briefly in hi..."I really wish that was translated, I would love to read it. I read your review for it though, very detailed. Thank you. :D
That is really awful, its pathetic that people feel the need to actively hate on someone for being themselves. She's clearly harming no-one, let her live! Humanity is gross.
Jeshika wrote: "I really wish that was translated, I would love to read it. I read your review for it though, very detailed. Thank you. :D"Thanks! I too wish it'd be translated, I toy with the idea of shooting Taiga a tweet to that effect as he is very active on twitter. I suspect it would find plenty of readers abroad.
Jeshika wrote: "That is really awful, its pathetic that people feel the need to actively hate on someone for being themselves. She's clearly harming no-one, let her live! Humanity is gross."
I am not too sure if it was Aya herself or another female politician who shared how once, during a meeting, an establishment politician completely lost it and began screaming against women in politics. To these very traditional politicians, Aya and any and all non straight man person, are harming the system considerably. I suspect they do not even like Koike either, party be damned.
Do you ever put a volume of short stories back on the shelf?I read a hundred pages of Nathaniel Hawthorne short stories, left the bookmark in, and put it back on the to-read shelf. I enjoyed it, but had had enough of them for now and will enjoy the rest some other day.
Bill wrote: "Do you ever put a volume of short stories back on the shelf?I read a hundred pages of Nathaniel Hawthorne short stories, left the bookmark in, and put it back on the to-read shelf. I enjoyed it, ..."
Yes. It's difficult for me to feel any guilt - as if I must finish a short story collection, particularly if it's an anthology without a common theme or connection between the stories. You sampled it. That's plenty for today : )
I'm two chapters into Fingersmith by Sarah Waters and it takes some effort to read, but it's interesting enough that I want to continue. After that, perhaps I'll watch the Korean film adaptation.
I was inspired by all the talk about Natsuo Kirino and Women in Translation month. The Goddess Chronicle was wonderful.Here's a piece I wrote about the ambiguous place in The Kojiki: https://readjapaneseliterature.com/20....
~☆~Autumn♥♥ wrote: "I just finished The Nakano Thrift Shop. It was wonderful."I loved that one, and Strange Weather in Tokyo. I did not love 10 loves of Nishino.
Now I am reading
Manazuru, and Kawakami conquered me back, it may be even better than thrift shop and Strange weather in Tokyo, although it is much less accessible. I frequently reread paragraphs before I am able to fully grab what she is implying with the small trivials she is mixing in her descriptions.
Agnetta wrote: "~☆~Autumn♥♥ wrote: "I just finished The Nakano Thrift Shop. It was wonderful."I loved that one, and Strange Weather in Tokyo. I did not love 10 loves of Nishino.
Now I am reading..."
I have a friend who feels the same about 10 Loves of Nishino.
Japanese Literature
Books mentioned in this topic
When the Museum Is Closed (other topics)Nan-Core (other topics)
Chieko, and Other Poems of Takamura Kotaro (other topics)
Chieko's Sky (other topics)
Tale of the Princess Kaguya Picture Book (other topics)
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Authors mentioned in this topic
Kotaro Takamura (other topics)Iori Kusano (other topics)
Fehu Kazuno (other topics)
David Guterson (other topics)
Donald Keene (other topics)
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I hope everyone is doing well in these crazy times.