Despite the last decade’s increase in the amount of Japanese fiction being translated into English, several genres remain underrepresented. While English-speakers get access to a number of critically acclaimed literary titles, science fiction and romance, for example, are largely neglected despite their popularity in Japan. Historical samurai fiction, which maintains high Japanese readership, in particular,…
From 1976 to 1989, Hai Fan was part of the guerrilla forces of the Malayan Communist Party. These short stories are inspired by his experiences during his thirteen years in the rainforest.
The Malayalam edition of the Mini Krishnan-helmed collections of newly translated classic short stories offers readers a glimpse into the changing social landscape of Kerala. Covering stories written and published across forty decades, the writers of The Second Marriage of Kunju Namboodiri and Other Classic Malayalam Stories navigate the various promises of the early 20th…
Kyungha, a woman living in contemporary Seoul, is burdened by the emotional toll of her past. Deeply empathetic, Kyungha experiences panic attacks and symptoms of anxiety and depression stemming from a harrowing book she wrote about a massacre in a South Korean city. When her friend Inseon suffers an accident, she asks Kyungha to travel…
Renowned poet and Hebrew translator of Greek drama, Aharon Shabtai, now 85, has a new collection, Requiem and Other Poems, translated by Peter Cole, that spans the early years of Israel to the days just after 7 October 2023. The book, although concise at just 87 pages, provides a vivid and comprehensive look at a…
Banu Mushtaq has been peering into the homes of Muslim women in Southern India her entire life, and she doesn’t like what she sees. Husbands return from work angry, women are beaten, and children fight over food. These scenes populate Mushtaq’s short story collection, Heart Lamp. The stories have been selected from Mushtaq’s vast oeuvre…
In one story in Shusaku Endo’s Portraits of a Mother, the narrator lies in a hospital bed after a serious operation with the vague impression that his mother is holding his hand. He wakes to the realization that this was a dream and that the “gray shadow” of his mother is nothing more than a…
With no real uniting theme, Unusual Fragments is more of a miscellany than a collection. The authors were born over a span of 78 years. Three of the stories are by women who grew up during the Pacific War—Taeko Kono (1926-2015), Takako Takahashi (1932-2013), and Tomoko Yoshida (1934-). Another is by a woman, Nobuko Takagi…
In the transition from spring to summer, tensions at Towa Textile are heating up. Factory workers—demanding higher wages, severance pay and other benefits—prepare for a prolonged struggle against management. With the senior executive director abroad at a textile convention and union leaders at a meeting, company director Gosuke Nishinohata is found dead by the train…
From the look of the cover design and the description, readers may think that Mizuki Tsujimura’s novel Lost Souls Meet Under a Full Moon is yet another example of Japanese healing (or comfort) fiction. Most Japanese healing novels are slim with an inviting cover in soft pastels. The stories center around lost individuals who hope…
In Saou Ichikawa’s debut story Hunchback, a pendulum swings between desire and survival, told through the voice of a disabled woman in a group home. Translated from Japanese by Polly Barton, the novella has been long-listed for the International Booker Prize, and in Japan, it won the prestigious Akutagawa Prize upon release. Hilarious and provocative,…
Li Qingzhao (1084-1151 CE) is considered the greatest woman poet in Chinese history but, as translator Wendy Chen writes in her introduction, Li “remains relatively unknown in the West.” Chen, who first heard Li’s poetry as a child, is determined to help change this. The Magpie at Night is Chen’s translation of the Song-dynasty writer…
Who is Shuzo Takiguchi? Neglected and out of print for decades in Japan, ignored by the anglophone world, awareness of his contributions to 20th century Japanese writing and fine arts is long overdue. Profoundly influenced by French surrealism, Takiguchi’s heady mix of mythological rumination and avant-garde modernist poetry has finally been made available to an…
A young boy cracks open the front door and peers outside. The dark shadows from the roof and the trees give a foreboding sense of something to come. Three umbrellas sit neatly in their holder, right by the door. The boy goes out to play.
A new addition to the catalogue of stories about the Vietnamese diaspora, Khuê Phạm’s Brothers and Ghosts (translated, somewhat unusually, from the original German to English by Charles Hawley and Daryl Lindsey) follows the three intertwining stories of Kiều, a Vietnamese German journalist, her father Minh who arrived in Germany in 1968, and of her…