Studio Ghibli’s 1988 film Grave of the Fireflies has been described as the greatest film someone will only watch once. Deeply emotional, director Isao Takahata’s tale of two Japanese war orphans struggling and failing to survive in the closing days of World War II is almost too painful to bear. But the story isn’t Takahata’s—Grave of the Fireflies is a loosely autobiographical novella by Japanese Renaissance man Akiyuki Nosaka. Available in English-language bookstores for the first time in translation by Ginny Tapely Takemori, the novella isn’t nearly as gut-wrenching as its visual counterpart. Instead, the narrator tells the story with matter-of-fact detachment that stirs up different emotions altogether.
Category Archive: Fiction
The Shimabara Rebellion of 1637-38 has long been a shadowy footnote in Japanese history: an uprising of poor farmers and hidden Christians, crushed with such ferocity that 37,000 men, women, and children were slaughtered at Hara Castle. In most textbooks it garners a brief mention, a prelude to the closing of Japan, when the Tokugawa shogunate expelled the Portuguese and turned suspicion of foreign influence into full-blown xenophobia.
In her 1944 essay “Writing of One’s Own”, Eileen Chang wrote “I do not like heroics. I like tragedy and, even better, desolation”. Twenty-one years earlier, in his speech “What happens after Nora leaves home?”, discussing the ending of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, Lu Xun raised the awkward question of what will become of a woman after her liberation if she has no viable means to support herself materially.
I was born in Bombay and lived there, not far from the Gateway of India, for the first sixteen years of my life. I left the city by the bay soon after turning sixteen. When I returned decades later, I barely recognised it. The city and I had both gone through dramatic changes in the interim. So it was with real anticipation that I picked up The Only City, an anthology of stories about the city of my birth, edited by Anindita Ghose.
Across fifty-odd flash stories (particularly short pieces of fiction) in The Woman Dies, Aoko Matsuda and translator Polly Barton lean into the weird, nitty-gritty world of womanhood. For the most part, there is no immediate throughline connecting the stories—and their rich inner worlds—to each other. Yet eventually, the lines blur enough for images of women, glittery face highlighter, and lingerie frills to appear, blending the stories into a sparkling collection. All the stories play a part in building Matsuda’s world, where girlhood is a state of mind that can never be outgrown; it is at once a curse and blessing, the only thing the world values and despises in equal measure.
V Vinicchayakul, the pen-name of Vinita Diteeyont, is prolific by any measure, reportedly with more than one hundred novels under her belt, many adapted for television and film. Only a very few have made it into English; had not she been championed by translator Lucy Srisuphapreeda, perhaps none would have been.
Natsuo Kirino has a real gift for seeing the worst in people. Her characters cheat, steal, and murder with an apparent lack of remorse that makes them (one hopes) unrelatable for most, but they are at least sympathetic in being partially the result of their bleak environments. Kirino’s hopeless worlds of economic and social pressure suit the hard-boiled detective genre she has made her home, but with Swallows, the Japanese author attempts something different. Dispensing with thriller tropes, she tells a grounded story of human commodification that proves a sobering indictment of consumerism in Japanese society.
Shōtarō Ikenami’s The Samurai Detectives, the first volume in his celebrated Kenkaku Shōbai series, arrives in English translation by Yui Kajita as a lively entry into Japanese historical fiction. Originally published in 1973, this novel captures the shadowy underbelly of Edo-period Japan through the eyes of Kohei, a grizzled ronin turned detective, his 24-year-old son, Daijiro, and an enigmatic swordswoman, Mifuyu. Set against the rigid social order of the Tokugawa shogunate, the story unfolds as a series of episodic cases involving assassinations, lost swords, and illicit love in the bustling capital of Edo (modern Tokyo). Ikenami, a titan of the genre whose prize-winning works sold millions, crafts vivid tales of samurai life that have inspired over a dozen films and TV adaptations.
Although Half Light takes place on the cusp of India’s 2018 decriminalisation of homosexuality, Mahesh Rao uses this historic transition not as a centrepiece but as a lens to investigate the quieter dramas and private reckonings of those in the shadows of moments of social transformation.
The Sun family seems to have everything—a multi-squillion dollar empire, homes and compounds in prime California real estate and no shortage of power, influence, notoriety and fame. But the one thing access to the Sun family trust requires is the one thing the family doesn’t have: a male heir. But some members of the Sun clan have plans to change this and soon there is a race to see which grandchild can first produce a male heir.
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