In the transition from spring to summer, tensions at Towa Textile are heating up. Factory workers—demanding higher wages, severance pay and other benefits—prepare for a prolonged struggle against management. With the senior executive director abroad at a textile convention and union leaders at a meeting, company director Gosuke Nishinohata is found dead by the train tracks near Kuki Station.
Japan
Japan is a favourite destination for tourists the world over, but one reason it appeals to Hong Kong tourists (for whom it is a particular favourite) is that Kanji allows them to more or less work things out despite not knowing Japanese at all. Zev Handel’s new book Chinese Characters Across Asia tells the story of how the Chinese writing system was adopted—and adapted—in Japan as well as Korea and Vietnam.
From the look of the cover design and the description, readers may think that Mizuki Tsujimura’s novel Lost Souls Meet Under a Full Moon is yet another example of Japanese healing (or comfort) fiction. Most Japanese healing novels are slim with an inviting cover in soft pastels. The stories center around lost individuals who hope to find happiness in their unfulfilling lives. And they often make use of magical realism. Tsujimura is one of Japan’s most highly-regarded mystery and fantasy writers and her best-known novel in English is the young adult fantasy Lonely Castle in the Mirror. Her entry into healing fiction makes sense, yet the beloved and award winning author’s book is different and more layered than stereotypical healing novels, as well as physically more substantial at almost 300 pages in Yuki Tejima’s English-language translation.
In Saou Ichikawa’s debut story Hunchback, a pendulum swings between desire and survival, told through the voice of a disabled woman in a group home. Translated from Japanese by Polly Barton, the novella has been long-listed for the International Booker Prize, and in Japan, it won the prestigious Akutagawa Prize upon release. Hilarious and provocative, Hunchback flashes between scenes from the group home and her scandalous tweets, between university assignments and swinger club erotica.
“I feel like there must be some way”, ends the title of one story in Tomoka Shibasaki’s A Hundred Years and a Day, “of visiting the places that exist only in people’s memories.” Each of the 34 fictional vignettes in this collection is a standalone slice-of-life that features a character, now advanced into middle-age, recollecting a formative experience of their youth. Through these recollections, Shibasaki creates a humanistic chronicle that touches on the tragic beauty of mortality.
Who is Shuzo Takiguchi? Neglected and out of print for decades in Japan, ignored by the anglophone world, awareness of his contributions to 20th century Japanese writing and fine arts is long overdue. Profoundly influenced by French surrealism, Takiguchi’s heady mix of mythological rumination and avant-garde modernist poetry has finally been made available to an international audience with the bilingual publication of A Kiss for the Absolute: Selected Poems of Shuzo Takiguchi, translated by poets Mary Jo Bang and Yuki Tanaka. Meticulously harvested from a cache comprising a ten-year period of intense literary composition from 1927-1937, this edition of thirty-five poems gives needed shape to Takiguchi’s wide-ranging legacy as an eclectic visionary—critic, translator, poet, artist, collector, curator.
A young boy cracks open the front door and peers outside. The dark shadows from the roof and the trees give a foreboding sense of something to come. Three umbrellas sit neatly in their holder, right by the door. The boy goes out to play.
Richard Overy’s Rain of Ruin is an epilogue of sorts to his epic global history of the Second World War from 2021, Blood And Ruins. This new work focuses on the final months of the war in Asia, something that has been a topic of other recent books, such as Mark Gallichio’s Unconditional (2020) and the early parts of Judgment at Tokyo by Gary Bass. Overy’s approach is to consider the air war, starting with the conventional bombing campaign against Japan’s cities, then moving on the atom bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and finally looking at how this history contributed to Japan’s surrender.
Set in an unmarked pawnshop tucked behind a ramen restaurant, Filipino author Samantha Sotto Yambao’s Water Moon revolves around clients who pawn their choices—sometimes ones they don’t even remember making. What is life, after all, if not a series of choices? The very act of pawning a choice leaves a void; choices—it turns out—are fragments of the clients’ souls, used to fuel the lives of those on the other side of the pawnshop.
At first glance, the premise of Junko Takase’s Akutagawa-Prize-winning novel May You Have Delicious Meals seems like the set-up for a romantic comedy. Nitani, Ashikawa, and Oshio work together in the sales division of a company. Nitani normally dates timid, feminine women like Ashikawa. Nitani and Ashikawa start a relationship. Sometimes Nitani spends his evenings at his apartment with Ashikawa, where she makes him nutritious, homemade meals. He spends other evenings at dive bars with his more brusque and professionally competent female colleague, Oshio.
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