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.
Category Archive: Fiction
In Mistress Koharu, a Hungarian love doll comes to life, turning heads as she stalks the streets of Tokyo, while the man who bought her—Akira—strings along two other relationships in a spectacular feat of multitasking greed that benefits no one, least of all him. Written in Japanese by Noboru Tsujihara and translated by Kalau Almony, the novel, leaning bizarre and absurdist, is still an insightful meditation on lust, power, and greed.
Bornean-Australian novelist, playwright, poet, rapper and visual artist Omar Musa comes with a bit of a pedigree. His debut novel Here Come the Dogs was long-listed for the International Dublin Literary Award and for the Miles Franklin Award. He was named one of the Sydney Morning Herald’s Young Novelists of the Year in 2015.
A collage of epigraphs make up the first few pages of The Elsewhereans. Each subsequent chapter is heralded by a series of locations, dates, photographs, and quotes—some perhaps falsified. Jeet Thayil’s newest work is exactly what its subtitle—“A Documentary Novel”—claims: a partially-fictional documentation of Thayil’s family history, recorded scrapbook-style in bits and pieces. Dedicated to his late mother, who passed away earlier this year, The Elsewhereans reads as an attempt to capture forever the spirits and lives of his family in a single fluid location, to bind them in the pages of a novel’s created home.
Though the Tamil freedom fighter and writer, CS Chellapa, was initially influenced by the energy and zeal of Bhagat Singh’s anarchical resistance to the British Empire, he grew increasingly enamoured by the non-violent, subtle resistance of Mahatma Gandhi. It’s a seismic shift from Singh to Gandhi, one that many in India adopted pre-independence. Yet it is precisely the tension between these two vastly different forms of resistance that forms much of the meat of Vaadivaasal: The Arena, a novella published in Tamil in 1949, now revitalised in graphic novel form under the careful script of Booker-nominated Perumal Murugan and the harsh, brutal illustrations of Appupen.
Nine years in the making, Jemimah Wei’s debut novel is a complicated story of two sisters who found and lost each other amidst the busy, urban, competitive island of Singapore. It provides a glimpse of Singapore without the glitz and glamour, a Singapore in which the expectation of excellence drives a wedge through even the strongest bonds of sisterhood.
Izumi lost her husband and her job. Now she spends her time doing craft projects like sewing handmade stuffed animals. She has come to realize that she spent 20 years acting the role of “successful woman”.
It never rains but it pours. From having no English translations of Akutagawa Prize-winning Rie Qudan, three of her novels have (or soon will have) become available in a matter of months, the first two—“Schoolgirl” and “Bad Music”—in a combined volume from Australian publisher Gazebo and Sympathy Tower Tokyo from Penguin in Britain and Summit in the US.
In Kyung-Ran Jo’s Blowfish, two people flirt with death in their own traumatic ways, only to find themselves slowly entangled in one another. Translated from the original Korean by Chi-Young Kim, the novel unfolds through alternating perspectives and flits between Seoul and Tokyo. Blowfish privileges atmosphere over plot, unfolding as a moody and cinematic meditation on the slow ascent from the depths of depression.
New Story of the Stone by Wu Jianren is one-part fan fiction, one-part historical fiction, and one-part science fiction. A full translation by Liz Evans Weber gives English-language readers access to the early 20th-century novel and a fascinating perspective on a moment in China’s history that speaks volumes about its present and possible futures.
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