A family has gathered in a mansion to discuss the inheritance of a wealthy grandfather’s estate. It is a familiar mystery setup, and one that risks cliché, but Yasuhiko Nishizawa takes it into exciting new territory in The Man Who Died Seven Times. Nearly the whole story occurs within a single repeating day, much like the time-looping premise of the classic film Groundhog Day. Faced with his grandfather’s murder, the protagonist must sort out the nature of the crime (and try to prevent it) by altering the course of that day’s events.
Author: Ben Woollard
The ghosts of those wronged in war invariably call out for vengeance. When the conflict is a civil war, all the more so. Families may be split apart, feuds started, and children called upon to settle scores they weren’t alive to start. The civil war that swept through China from 1927 to 1949 is no exception, and the continued tension between Taiwan and the Chinese mainland is the legacy of that conflict. In his novel Ryu—translated into English by Alison Watts—Akira Higashiyama explores the history of the Chinese Civil War and the conflicts it engenders generations later. Although originally written in Japanese, Ryu (a transliteration of the novel’s Japanese title) is a thoroughly Taiwanese novel that takes readers on an exciting odyssey through life in Taipei in the 1970s.
Despite the last decade’s increase in the amount of Japanese fiction being translated into English, several genres remain underrepresented. While English-speakers get access to a number of critically acclaimed literary titles, science fiction and romance, for example, are largely neglected despite their popularity in Japan. Historical samurai fiction, which maintains high Japanese readership, in particular, rarely makes it into English. This trend may be shifting, however, with the recent publication of Shuhei Fujisawa’s Semishigure and the upcoming release of a new, three-volume, translation of Eiji Yoshikawa’s Musashi, which was previously available only in abridged form.
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