The latest addition to my website is Kōbō Abe‘s 方舟さくら丸 (The Ark Sakura). A man we know only as Mole lives in a huge underground abandoned quarry, preparing himself for the inevitable nuclear Armageddon. He is well stocked with food, weapons and other necessities but has not found anyone suitable to share his fate. At … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Hiromi Kawakami‘s 三度目The (Third Love). As is usual with Kawakami, this book is about love and its many complications. Riko falls in love with the older Naa-Chan when she is two and, much later, they will marry. However, Naa-Chan has a series of relationships which naturally upsets her. … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Yōko Ogawa‘s ホテル・アイリス (Hotel Iris). Mari, a seventeen year old Japanese woman works in her mother’s hotel and has no life of her own. There is an argument between a prostitute and her client in one of the rooms. Later Mari sees the man, a translator from Russian, … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Tatsuhiko Shibusawa‘s 高丘親王航海記 (Takaoka’s Travels). This is a highly imaginative and colourful account of the travels of the very real Prince Takaoka around South-East Asia as he tries to get to Hindustan and the birthplace of the Buddha. The book is set in the ninth century. Quite a … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Yōko Ogawa‘s 密やかな結晶 (The Memory Police). The novel is set on a remote island in an unnamed country. The narrator is an unnamed female novelist. The basic theme is that gradually things are disappearing. The Memory Police declare that a thing no longer exists – stamps, jewels, rose … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Kōbō Abe‘s 密会 (Secret Rendezvous). Even by Abe’s standards this is a seriously weird book. A jump shoe salesman and his wife are woken up at 4 am. by an ambulance which has come to take the wife to hospital. They did not summon the ambulance and she … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Yōko Ogawa‘s 余白の愛 [Love at the Margin]. Our unnamed heroine/narrator has suddenly had serious hearing problems . We learn later that her husband had left her the day before. From her room in the F clinic, she can see an old hotel and, two later, she will be … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Kōbō Abe‘s 燃えつきた地図 (The Ruined Map). On the face if it this is the story of a detective looking for a missing person. Our unnamed detective is working for a woman whose husband – a reliable, conventional man, who had just received a promotion at work – disappeared … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Maki Kashimada‘s 六〇〇〇度の愛 (Love at Six Thousand Degrees). This is something of a Japanese response to the film Hiroshima mon amour, scripted by Marguerite Duras, about a French woman who has an affair in Hiroshima with a Japanese man whose relatives were killed by the atom bomb. In … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Hiromi Ito‘s とげ抜き 新巣鴨地蔵縁起 (The Thorn Puller). She calls it a long poem but we might describe it as an autobiographical novel. On the one hand, she describes the difficult role that society that society imposes on women as a daughter and only child of ageing and ill … Read more