In Tokyo’s Himonya district lives Kaede’s grandfather, a former school principal with a love of mystery novels that he has passed down to his granddaughter.
Japanese
Genpei Akasegawa (whose given name was Katsuhiko Akasegawa) was already famous as Neo-Dadaist artist when he began writing under the name of Katsuhiko Otsuji, and he soon proved himself able to work fruitfully in both domains, earning numerous awards. I Guess All We Have Is Freedom, beautifully translated by Matt Fargo, brings together five of Akasegawa’s short stories, some of them award winners, and all of which follow a narrator (presumably modeled on the author himself) through seemingly banal adventures as a father, professor, and denizen of Tokyo.
Rika Hourachi has an unusual talent. She’s fluent in conversational Latin. It makes her the perfect hire for an odd position at a nearby museum. The staff needs someone to keep one of their marble statues company. The first century Roman copy of a Greek statue of Aphrodite is lonely. After all, all the other art in the room speaks Greek. A deeply lonely human being, Rika quickly falls in love with the marble goddess.
Awarded Japan’s Yomiuri Prize for Literature, The Summer House is Masashi Matsuie’s debut novel. Also published as Summer at Mount Asama, the 2012 work reaches English readers through Margaret Mitsutani’s expert translation. Matsuie constructs the story just as his character Sensei, architect Shunsuke Murai designs buildings: with deceptive ease, creating spaces that beckon people to withdraw from the noise of the outside world. “You don’t want to talk loudly in one of Sensei’s houses,” explains the narrator.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In 1981, Japanese actress and television personality Tetsuko Kuroyanagi published a best-selling memoir, Totto-chan: The Little Girl at the Window, an engaging story set during her unusual primary school years that happened to take place during World War II. Her book sold 4.5 million copies in Japan in just its first year and has been translated into thirty languages, eleven from India alone. The book tells of Kuroyanagi’s rambunctious childhood that got her expelled from her first school, partly because she refused to sit at her desk and instead wanted to look out the window at the sparrows outside.
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