Book news, reviews and recommendations
Nanae Aoyama’s A Perfect Day to Be Alone is already a bestseller in several European countries, translated into German, French and Italian before Jesse Kirkwood’s English version. Spanning a year in which twenty-year-old Chizu lives with an elderly distant relative, it’s a quiet coming-of-age story. It turned out that when you put three people with […]
I enjoyed Hiroko Oyamada’s Weasels in the Attic this time last year, ending my review saying that I was keen to explore more of her writing. Originally published in Japan in 2013, The Factory is set in the world of work. Despite the increasingly surreal thread which runs through the novella, it struck a chord
The Factory by Hiroko Oyamada (transl. David Boyd): Busy doing nothing Read More »
I’ve long felt uneasy about the relationship between celebrities and the public, not least the way the media refers to them by their first name as if we know them intimately. It’s particularly painful when the celebrity in question was a child star. Rin Usami’s Idol, Burning examines that relationship through a young girl who
I’d not read any Japanese fiction for quite some time when I spotted Hiroko Oyamada’s eye-catchingly titled Weasels in the Attic on NetGalley and liked the sound of it. Billed as a novel, it reads more like closely linked short stories in which a middle-aged man recounts three separate meals shared with his best friend,
Weasels in the Attic by Hiroko Oyamada (transl. David Boyd): A tale of three dinners Read More »
I’ve long been fascinated by Japan, partly because it’s so very different from my own country and partly because it seems to me to be a place of contradictions – on the one hand a set of very traditional, sometimes ancient values and beliefs, on the other an ultra-modern, throwaway urban culture. Or at least
Five Japanese Novels I’ve Read Read More »
I seem to have been on a bit of a Oneworld roll recently: first They Know Not What They Do – not without its faults but worth reading – then The Invisible Life of Euridice Gusmao, which looks set fair to be one of my books of 2017, and now Durian Sukegawa’s Sweet Bean Paste.