At first glance, the premise of Junko Takase’s Akutagawa-Prize-winning novel May You Have Delicious Meals seems like the set-up for a romantic comedy. Nitani, Ashikawa, and Oshio work together in the sales division of a company. Nitani normally dates timid, feminine women like Ashikawa. Nitani and Ashikawa start a relationship. Sometimes Nitani spends his evenings…
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,…
One of the publisher’s most recent of its national anthologies, The Penguin Book of Korean Short Stories provides portrayals of the country in the years 1905 to 1945, when the nation was under imperial Japanese rule, as well as glimpses of life in the Republic of Korea (ROK, aka South Korea), which came into existence…
For fans of Korean film, the uncompromising film director Lee Chang-dong needs little introductions. With a brief but powerful filmography of six films made between 1997 and 2018, he has braved controversial topics to critical acclaim. Burning, his 2018 comeback film after an eight-year hiatus, was shortlisted for an Oscar and won numerous other awards….
Some years back as a graduate student enrolled in a mandatory DEI training for college teaching, I distinctly recall raising a question about dealing with the unabashed misogyny, depictions of sexual violence and child abuse bursting out of the primary sources so often used in the history classroom. Encountering More Swindles from the Late Ming:…
Ukrainian-born nurse Kateryna Ivanonva Desnytska became a Thai princess at the turn of the 20th century as wife of the Siamese prince Chakrabongse Bhuvanath. This story, with echoes of that of King Chulalongkorn and his English tutor Anna Leonowens (immortalized in The King and I) , has obvious potential for artistic adaptation: it was made…
Originally written in Russian by Ukrainian novelist Igor Zavilinsky, A Dream of Annapurna spans Nepal, Italy and the US. The book has an equally broad time frame, ranging from the 1950s to 2015.
In a dystopia-lite future, singles in Korea opt for pseudo-marriages under the mysterious Wedding & Life (W&L for short), an exclusive and expensive matchmaking company that hosts the VIP branch of “New Marriages” (NM). In an NM, W&L clients could pay for a new spouse—either a field wife or field husband (FW or FH)—for a…
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…
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…
It is a tribute to the literary diversity of India that this anthology of ten excerpted classics includes eight or nine different languages. They also represent four different religious traditions. Yet the texts are unmistakably Indian, sharing a love for words, sounds and images and exhibiting an exuberance rarely found in other cultural traditions.
Originally written in Bengali, Shabnam presents a passionate love story set in 1920s Afghanistan. What is love? asks author Syed Mujtaba Ali: a dream or a dreamy reality? Maybe, it is like an overnight train journey through a long tunnel, in which the traveler stays awake to catch a glimpse of the sun’s first rays,…
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…
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…
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…