The City and Its Uncertain Walls is Haruki Murakami’s fifteenth novel since his first, Hear the Wind Sing, published in 1979. His most recent is unmistakeably his, unmistakeably an addition to his body of work and his own special brand of magic realism as practiced by the South American writers Jorges Luis Borges, Julio Cortazar, and Gabriel García Márquez, as well as Japan’s Kobo Abe and Yoko Ogawa, and writers like Mo Yan, Salman Rushie, and Toni Morrison. Murakami’s approach is metafictional magic realism to the extent to which he explicitly questions the nature of realism and truth throughout the novel. Murakami’s readers will not be surprised.
Japan
Several women walk children down a flagstone path to a hot spring in the cozy opening scene of Hiromi Kawakami’s Under the Eye of the Big Bird. The children play while the women enjoy the warm water. The narrator has been married for five years to a factory worker. He works while she takes care of the children.
Seen through the lens of a career, Yukio Mishima is a difficult author to classify. In the introduction to this new collection of the author’s stories, Voices of the Fallen Heroes, Mishima biographer John Nathan notes that, by his death at the age of forty-five, Mishima had written dozens of novels, forty plays and 170 short stories. Such an impressive tally necessitates variety. However, the last decade of the author’s life—from which editor Stephen Dodd selects all of the stories here—was unified by a virulent patriotism that found its real-life consummation in Mishima’s theatrical suicide, committing seppuku after delivering an impassioned but ill-received speech intended to incite military insurrection. While the stories in Voices feel at first eclectic in nature, it is possible to see Mishima’s burgeoning nationalist sentiment, specifically tied up with a personal fear of ageing, a resentment of those who waste their youth, and the impact of such profligacy on the spiritual purity of the Japanese nation.
Beginning in 2018, a Japanese person might log on to YouTube only to find a video featuring a thin figure clothed entirely in black. A white papier-mache mask—blank, with holes for eyes and mouth and a peak for the suggestion of the nose—provides the only contrast. The figure speaks in an artificially processed, saccharine voice and posts enigmatic, sometimes uncomfortable videos. One shows the figure awkwardly playing music on a child’s toy piano. Another features the figure receiving an odd and disquieting Christmas gift from a barely visible and sinister Santa-san.
It is a cliché that retiring academics look forward to some variation of “finally getting some research done”, freed of the daily tasks that come with a university career. William Steele retired from International Christian University in Tokyo in 2018, and his newest book, Rethinking Japan’s Modernity, draws upon a career of teaching 19th- and 20th-century Japanese history, and a personal collection of prints and images.
That Kazushige Abe’s Mysterious Setting is difficult to read has nothing to do with the prose, which in Michael Emmerich’s translation is pacey and accessible, but is instead due to the novel’s relentlessly grim narrative. In a story replete with bullying, gaslighting and exploitation, the foreshadowing that often accompanies the end of a section becomes little more than a reinforcement of the obvious. We already know what to expect: yet more uninterrupted misery for the unfortunate protagonist, Shiori. And yet, for those willing to endure the relentless tragedy of this young girl’s plight, Mysterious Setting has a lot to say about the dissolution of truth and empathy in the modern world.
Izumi Suzuki was a Japanese science fiction writer of the 1970s and early 1980s with two collections of short stories currently available in English—Terminal Boredom and Hit Parade of Tears. Both are the collaborative work of several translators, and both were widely lauded for their innovation and biting social commentary. When I reviewed Terminal Boredom for the Asian Review of Books, I noted that, “Suzuki’s feminist spirit is as relevant and her stories as piercing today as they were more than thirty years ago.”
Sunny Seki opens his new children’s book, Hokusai’s Daughter, with Hokusai, the famous painter and printmaker from the Edo period, walking alongside his young daughter.
The diversification of Japanese Literature available in translation means that the release of a new novel by Haruki Murakami is not met with quite the fanfare it once was, but interest in movie adaptations of the author’s work is higher than ever. This is due at least in part to the enthusiasm with which critics have greeted recent adaptations, with Lee Chang Dong’s Burning winning the FIPRESCI Prize at Cannes in 2018, and Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car taking Best International Picture at the 2021 Academy Awards. Following this success is renewed academic focus on movies based on Murakami’s work, with Marc Yamada’s newly-released Murakami Haruki on Film providing the first English-language overview of the author’s cinematic adaptations.
In the wake of the COVID pandemic, tourism is again booming in Japan. July 2024 saw the highest inflow of visitors ever recorded—more than 3 million entries in the month alone. For many, if not most, tourists, the city of Kyoto will rate a very high priority. The spring and autumn are usually regarded as the best times to visit, because of the pleasant temperatures and the cherry blossom or autumn colors, respectively. By contrast, the summer is very hot and humid. However, those July visitors will have had the chance to see one of the highlights of the Kyoto calendar: the Gion festival.
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