The Osaka-based Hasegawas used to be a model family—happily married, two sons, a daughter, and a dog. But when the elder son Hajime dies at the age of twenty, their lives start falling apart. Each reacts to loss differently: Kaoru, the younger son and the narrator of the story, leaves to study in Tokyo but struggles to fit in; his sister Miki becomes socially withdrawn; the mother engages in compulsive overeating; and the father just disappears. Four years later, following his sudden return, they gather to spend the New Year holidays together and try to pick up the pieces of what remains of their family.
Category Archive: Fiction
In 2023, University of Minnesota Press released a translation of Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again. The two novellas (published as one volume with a thorough explanatory afterword by translator Jeffrey Angles) add the often-forgotten backstory to one of the world’s most iconic monster movies, often credited solely to the imaginations of director Ishiro Honda and special effects visionary Eiji Tsubaraya. In reality, science fiction author Shigeru Kayama wrote the scenario for the film, meaning he created the movie’s “entire foundation… the plot, characters, themes, and structure”. The publisher returns to the tale of another movie monster with The Luminous Fairies and Mothra, again translated by Angles.
Originally published in Japan in 1964, and now translated for the first time into English, Kobo Abe’s The Traitor starts with a writer’s visit to a country town of Akkeshi. There he learns from an innkeeper, Fukuchi, the story of three hundred convicts who escaped into Hokkaido after the end of the brief Boshin War, a power struggle between the Meiji Emperor and the Tokugawa Shogunate. These men are followed by Enomoto Takeaki, an officer in search of the convicts. While the framing is fictional, Enomoto is a real historical figure: a leader of the Shogunate faction and later a prominent member of the Meiji government.
The Korean word “han” is difficult to translate precisely into English, but the concept revolves around a profound sadness, regret, resentment and a loss of a collective identity that arises from historical injustice, such as occupation, war, and separation. It is, in other words, a generational trauma with Korean characteristics. Lisa Lee’s debut novel American Han, set during the time of the first tech boom, is anchored in the despair and rancor that defines the Kim family of the San Francisco Bay. Jane Kim is a third year law student at a second tier law school in San Francisco, when her mother relocates to start a new life for herself, an impulse Jane understands.
Jackson Alone is a singularly unique novel that subverts expectations with a cast of characters who are each vividly imagined, performing confusing and surreal acts in a Twilight Zone ethereality. Written by Jose Ando—a winner of the prestigious Akutagawa Prize—and translated by Kalau Almony—known for his translations of unique and intense stories—Jackson Alone is a slim novel that gut-punches weirdness.
Karan Mahajan’s ambitious third novel, The Complex, spans roughly fifteen years of Indian family life, from 1980 to the mid-1990s. It charts the Chopra clan of Modern Colony, North Delhi, through the assassination of Indira Gandhi, the anti-Sikh pogroms of 1984, the rise of the BJP and the Mandal Commission agitation against caste-based affirmative action. It is a serious, carefully constructed novel, yet also, at times, a genuinely exhausting one.
Few institutions in India have shaped the imagination of the nation as profoundly as the railways. Rahul Bhattacharya’s Railsong places this vast network of tracks, workshops, stations and employees at the centre of a sweeping narrative that follows one woman’s life alongside the evolving story of modern India. Moving from the decades after Independence to the politically charged early 1990s, the novel traces how personal journeys and national history travel along the same lines.
More than technology or trade, even more than defense, all societies need food, and agriculture is thus a vital hinge of power. Such is the focus of Nahoko Uehashi’s three-volume fantasy novel Kokun: The Girl from the West, the first volume of which has recently appeared in an English translation by Cathy Hirano.
1869 was a time of Russian expansion into Central Asia and British anxiety about India’s northern borders. Because Tibet was closed to Europeans during this “Great Game”, the British trained Indians in surveying and sent them across the mountains as covert mapmakers.
Agri Ismaïl’s Hyper is an unusual migrant family saga of an unlucky, Kurdish family’s epic displacement across countries; refugees who struggle and fail to achieve a sense of being at home anywhere they live. An inventive novel of ideas, it is a hard, pitiless satire on migrants’ love of Western values (whether Marxism or Capitalism), whose black humour consistently points to darker themes. In this ironic exploration of modern globalised capitalism and its effect on immigrant families, characters are often exaggerated and behave inconsistently, while the plot is often driven by the themes.
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