A round-up of reviews of works in translation from Japanese, including fiction and non-fiction, novels, story collections and children’s books. Click on the title for the review.

Novels

The Easy Life in Kamusari by Shion Miura, translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter

The Easy Life in Kamusari, also by Shion Miura, is about a diligent worker in Japan’s forestry industry. Yuki Hirano has just graduated high school. His grades weren’t great, so he plans to become a “freeter”—a worker in Japan who won’t make it into a career with lifetime employment. His mother has other ideas and signs him up for a forestry apprenticeship in far-away Kamusari.

Bullet Train by Kotaro Isaka, translated by Sam Malissa

Kotaro Isaka’s thriller Bullet Train moves as fast as the train—the Shinkansen—it takes place on and is named after. Already destined to be a movie starring the not-very-Japanese Brad Pitt and Sandra Bullock (one imagines some changes en route), Bullet Train, a guilty pleasure if there ever were one, is something of a cross between Murder on the Orient Express and Train to Busan. People continually get on, but few manage to get off, at least not alive.

Colorful by Eto Mori, translated by Jocelyne Allen

We all probably at one point or other in our lives have wanted a do-over. Go back to take the left fork in the road, instead of the right. Take back words said in anger, or say words not voiced. In Eto Mori’s novel, Colorful, a nameless soul from a person who committed an egregious sin is allowed another chance at life to make up for that transgression. However, the soul must agree to accept the conditions of the do-over, or face eternal death, never being able to reincarnate.

Lady Joker, Volume 1 by Kaoru Takamura, translated by Allison Markin Powell and Marie Iida

Among the most unsettling words that can come at the end of a 600-page procedural crime thriller are: “End of Volume One”. Kaoru Takamura’s Lady Joker has a long backstory. This translation comes almost a quarter-century after the book was first published in 1997. The much-acclaimed author, known as the “Queen of Mysteries”, has never been translated—at all, apparently, to say nothing of into English. The book has twice been adapted for film and TV, is taught in Japanese classrooms—and is based on a notorious true-life unsolved case of corporate kidnapping and product blackmail from 1984 perpetrated by a group which called themselves the “Mystery Man with 21 Faces”.

The Woman in the Purple Skirt by Natsuko Imamura, translated by Lucy North

There is a growing interest in a behavioral phenomenon the Internet has dubbed “main character syndrome”. Whether motivated by narcissism or a healthy sense of self-worth, some people live as though they were the hero in a fictional story and interact with the world around them as though they were its center. The narrator of The Woman in the Purple Skirt is not one of these people. She barely sees herself as a character at all.

Heaven by Mieko Kawakami, translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd

Heaven is excruciating. Readers share viscerally in the protagonist’s victimization at the hands of sadistic bullies. Fans of Breasts and Eggs, Mieko Kawakami’s first novel published in English in 2020, might be expecting another women-centered narrative. Heaven is radically different. This time, an unnamed male narrator describes his appalling position in the social hierarchy of his junior high school.

An I-Novel by Mizumura Minae, translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter

Mizumura Minae’s An I-Novel begins with a caveat: the author herself once suggested that translating the novel, originally published in Japan in 1995, into English was singularly impossible. Mizumura is deeply invested in the study of language. In her 2008 The Fall of Language in the Age of English, she explored the ways that the global reach of English both helps and harms human learning and expression. An I-Novel is an innovative expansion on that theme.

Lonely Castle in the Mirror by Mizuki Tsujimura, translated by Philip Gabriel

Kokoro can’t bring herself to go to school anymore. She has been the victim of an intense bullying campaign that culminated in a destructive assault on her home; if the bullies find her, she is afraid they will drag her outside and kill her. Kokoro is twelve years old. Bullying plays a major role in contemporary Japanese fiction, including one of 2021’s most anticipated books in translation, Mieko Kawakami’s Heaven. Lonely Castle in the Mirror takes up the related issue of futoko—students like Kokoro who, for a variety of reasons, simply refuse to go to school.

Touring the Land of the Dead by Maki Kashimada, translated by Haydn Trowell

In Touring the Land of the Dead, author Maki Kashimada writes about one woman’s trauma with razor-perfect concision and an austere beauty. Natsuko is deeply scared by a life of catering to other people. She spent her childhood humoring her mother, a widow who has fallen on hard times. Now she is married to a man who was diagnosed with a degenerative seizure disorder soon after their wedding. After a lifetime of caretaking, Natsuko is exhausted. When the couple travels to a once-prosperous, now-dilapidated spa resort, she wonders whether her life is worth the trouble.

Tono Monogatari by Shigeru Mizuki, translated by Zack Davisson

Shigeru Mizuki’s Tono Monogatari has a complicated lineage. During Japan’s rapid modernization in the early 20th century, a man named Kunio Yanagita set out to preserve Japan’s cultural heritage of magic and the supernatural. Along the way, he met a young writer, Kizen Sasaki. Together they traveled Japan’s Tono region, today about five hours northeast of Tokyo by train, recording folktales and evaluating whether they might be true. In 1910, Yanagita published a chronicle of his travels and the stories he collected: Tono Monogatari (“Tales of Tono”). Many Japanese regard Tono Monogatari as a defining text of Japanese folklore, a Japanese equivalent of the tales of the Brothers Grimm.

Stories

Things Remembered and Things Forgotten: Stories by Kyoko Nakajima, translated by Ginny Takemori and Ian MacDonald

When grieving is over, when no one pauses to remember, things will be forgotten forever. Things Remembered and Things Forgotten is a collection about memory, but it is also a collection about grief. Gathered from author Kyoko Nakajima’s published work, the stories assembled here speak about loss—of a loved one, of a place, of a culture—and what comes next.

Terminal Boredom: Stories by Izumi Suzuki, translated by Polly Barton, Sam Bett, David Boyd and Daniel Joseph

The stories collected in Terminal Boredom take up themes that might feel familiar to readers of contemporary Japanese fiction. The characters criticize, challenge, or defy social conventions. Narrators raise questions about identity and agency. But unlike, say, Mieko Kawakami or Sayaka Murata, author Izumi Suzuki died more than three decades ago. Suzuki was active as a writer in the late 70s and early 80s, long before the “Lost Decade” and years of economic stagnation in Japan. Hers was the Japan of the Economic Miracle, a Japan with the second-fastest GDP growth in the world. Tokyo had become a global financial hub. English-language movies like Alien predicted the eventual triumph of Japanese businesses. People all over the world were learning the Japanese language.

Children’s Books

How Do You Live? by Genzaburo Yoshino, translated by Bruno Navasky

How Do You Live?, written by Genzaburo Yoshino, is a Japanese classic first published in 1937. On its face, it is a coming-of-age story about fifteen-year-old Copper, a talented Tokyo schoolboy under the looming shadow of World War Two. Together with a close-knit group of friends, he faces the timeless challenges of growing up. Bruno Navasky’s new English-language translation of How Do You Live? has generated a great deal of interest, especially with the hoped-for release of a Studio Ghibli adaptation in 2023 or 2024. Without Hayao Miyazaki’s endorsement, though, it’s difficult to imagine the book would have been published in English at all.

Temple Alley Summer by Sachiko Kashiwaba, illustrated by Miho Satake, translated by Avery Fischer Udagawa

Not many novels open with the narrator peeing out the window. But Kazu, the protagonist of Sachiko Kashiwaba’s newly translated Temple Alley Summer, is an unapologetically average kid. His classmates nickname him “third” because he is third in his class, in sports, and in popularity. He’s just fine with that.

Monkey Man by Takuji Ichikawa, translated by Lisa Lilley and Daniel Lilley

A summer 2021 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicted thirty years of worsening climate impacts—and that nothing can be done to stop it. Heat waves. Droughts. Wildfires. Flooding. Given bleak environmental news, staggering global inequality (the world’s richest 1% hold more than 40% of the world’s wealth), a resurgent refugee crisis, and the growth of authoritarianism worldwide, young people could be forgiven for thinking they don’t have much to look forward to. “In this era,” author Takuji Ichikawa asks, “What should a novel look like?” Monkey Man, translated by Lisa and Daniel Lilley, is his answer.

Soul Lanterns by Shaw Kuzki, translated by Emily Balistrieri

Shaw Kuzki’s middle-grade novel Soul Lanterns begins in August 1970. A generation earlier, an atomic bomb leveled Hiroshima. Nozomi and her friends have grown up attending yearly memorials and learning about “the flash” in their peace studies class. When a much-loved art teacher takes an unexpected leave of absence, Nozomi begins to wonder about how the war really affected the adults in her life.

Non-Fiction

In the Shelter of the Pine: A Memoir of Yanagisawa Yoshiyasu and Tokugawa Japan by Ōgimachi Machiko, translated by GG Rowley

If you are in Tokyo and you’re riding on the Yamanote Line, you are likely heading to one of the major shopping destinations on that line, such as Shibuya, Shinagawa, or Tokyo Station. If you are going to Tokyo Station, you will pass through Komagome, once a place in the country where people had villas with gardens. It was where the noblewoman Ogimachi Machiko (ca 1679-1724), second concubine to Lord Yanagisawa Yoshiyasu (1658-1714) composed her classic memoir, In the Shelter of the Pine, covering the years from 1690 to about 1710.

Memoirs of a Kamikaze: A World War II Pilot’s Inspiring Story of Survival, Honor and Reconciliation by Kazuo Odachi, Shigeru Ohta, Hiroshi Nishijima,  translated by Alexander Bennett

For nearly seventy years, Kazuo Odachi, a respected police officer, insurance investigator, and Kendo-sensei in Japan, kept secret that during the last months of World War II he was a young kamikaze pilot who flew eight suicide missions but miraculously survived. Odachi’s memoir was published in Japanese in 2016, and has now been translated into English. It is a remarkable story of youth, comradeship, courage, honor, despair, recovery, introspection, and closure.

Pax Tokugawana: The Cultural Flowering of Japan, 1603-1853 by Toru Haga, translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter

Few nations can boast eras of peace and prosperity as long as the Tokugawa period in Japan, which lasted almost 300 years from the 17th through 19th centuries. Pax Tokugawana: The Cultural Flowering of Japan, 1603-1853 by renowned Japanese studies professor Toru Haga offers a detailed and nuanced portrayal of life under the strict rule of the Tokugawa Shogunate, and how the peace established by the stringent policies of the ruling warrior class defined the zeitgeist of the era.

A Gap in the Clouds: A New Translation of Ogura Hyakunin Isshu, translated by James Hadley and Nell Regan

“100 poems by 100 poets”: compiled in the 13th century by the famed poet, Fujiwara no Teika, (1162–1241) the Hyakunin-isshu (百人一首) is the most widely-read poetry anthology in Japan. Long celebrated in the arts, including in a famous woodblock series by Hokusai, the anthology is part of the curriculum of all Japanese school children, much as students in England might study Shakespeare. With so many people able to recite the poems by heart, there is even a traditional card game played at New Year based on the poems, called utagaruta. The anthology was also, according to Peter MacMillan (more on whom below), the first work of Japanese literature to be translated into English—by Frederick Victor Dickens in 1866.