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.
Japanese
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.
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.”
A much-loved memoir about a Japanese author’s relationship with her cat is translated into English for the first time by award-winning translator, Ginny Tapley Takemori. Writer Mayumi Inaba won many prizes for her stories and poems before her untimely death from cancer in 2014. She was well-known as a cat lover, particularly her calico, Mii. This modern classic—published as Mornings with My Cat Mii in Britain and forthcoming as Mornings without Mii in the US—describes the close bond they shared over the 20 years of Mii’s life.
In the corner of a busy cafe in Tokyo, three men meet over coffee. But the trio of Goto, Takumi, and Sasaki are not who they seem—they are rehearsing carefully scripted roles in a property scam. With real estate values soaring in the city, schemes to make a quick profit are on the rise.
In Rio Shimamoto’s prize-winning novel First Love, a young woman kills her father. Her legal defence team must comb through the past and present, exploring her platonic, sexual, and romantic relationships to find a motive for murder. Though the novel begins as a crime thriller, it’s a genre-bending story that transforms into a romance, murder mystery, and, finally, a courtroom drama. First published in Japanese to critical and commercial acclaim—spawning a film adaptation—the novel is now available to the wider world through Louise Heal Kawai’s translation.
Is it a commendation or criticism of the author or translators that one would never have imagined, had one not already known, that Keiichiro Hirano’s Eclipse was originally written in Japanese for a Japanese readership? Set in late 15th-century France and deeply permeated with Christian theology and late medieval philosophy, Eclipse evokes nothing as much as Umberto Eco. This is perhaps the literary equivalent of award-winning Japanese whiskey, an achievement—given the need for a specific literary idiom in English—that perhaps belongs as much to the translators Brent de Chene and Charles De Wolf as the author.
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