Tomoko lost her father when she was six years old. Now that she’s twelve, she will spend a year living with her mother’s wealthy sister in Ashiya while her mother goes back to school to study dressmaking. Ashiya is a city about two hours east of her childhood home by the brand new shinkansen.
Author: Alison Fincher
Yoko Tawada’s Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel, originally published in German in the fall of 2020, was an early—one might even say premature—response to the anxiety caused not only by COVID-19, but also government lockdown policies implemented worldwide. The novel is narrated in the third-person by Patrik, a literary researcher who most frequently refers to himself as “the Patient”. COVID lockdown seems to have inspired some truly debilitating fears for Patrik, including agoraphobia, and obsessive compulsive behaviors.
Riko, the first-person narrator of Hiromi Kawakami’s densely intertextual The Third Love, is a forty-year old woman in contemporary, Reiwa Era Japan recalling her life. Riko isn’t even two years old when she falls in love with her cousin, Naruya Harada (“Naa-chan”). It’s almost a fated love, and it has shaped the narrative of her life.
Tatsuhiko Shibusawa’s 1987 novel Takaoka’s Travels opens like a straightforward volume of history: “On the twenty-seventh day of the first month in the sixth year of the Xiantong era, Prince Takaoka set sail from Guangzhou on a ship bound for Hindustan.” Takaoka was a real historical figure, son of the Japanese Emperor Heizei (ruled 806-809 CE).
Ludwig II was born in 1845. He became King of Bavaria in 1864, when he was only 18 years old. Within Bavaria, he is sometimes called the Swan King or even the Fairy Tale King. Outside of Germany, he is sometimes called Mad King Ludwig.
Kiyoko Murata’s A Woman of Pleasure is a story of Japan’s pleasure quarters in 1903 and 1904. Fifteen-year-old Aoi Ichi grew up on a rocky volcanic island, “the sort of place where stumbling upon a folkloric demon would come as no surprise”. She always expected to grow up like her mother, a strong swimmer and diver who supports her family with the fish and shellfish she catches. But now, to support a loan to her impoverished family, she has been sold to an exclusive brothel in Kumamoto, a regional capital along an inland sea on Japan’s southern island of Kyushu.
Harlequin Butterfly opens on a transpacific flight. Businessman AA Abrams introduces himself to an unnamed, first-person narrator and shows him a tiny butterfly net. “I use this net to go around capturing fresh ideas. That’s my trade,” he says. The rest of the chapter explains who Abrams is and the role of his net in his vast business empire.