The latest addition to my website is Saiichi Maruya‘s 笹まくら (Grass for My Pillow). This is an excellent novel about a somewhat taboo subject in Japan: draft desertion. Shokichi Hamada is currently the assistant chief clerk in the registry office of a university. However, during the war, he decided not to serve and travelled around … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Yōko Ogawa‘s 博士の愛した数式 (The Housekeeper and the Professor). This is a delightful novel about a single mother, uneducated housekeeper, who goes to work for a professor of mathematics, who lost his memory in a car crash, so that he can only remember events before 1975 (seventeen years previously) … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Naoya Shiga‘s 暗夜行路 (A Dark Night’s Passing). This novel, written in the I-novel style, is a semi-autobiographical/confessional novel about Kensaku Tokito, a would-be novelist, who struggles to settle down, to find his place and to come to terms with his life and the world round him. His mother … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Fumiko Enchi‘s 女面 (Masks). This is a beautifully written book about masks (both real and figurative ones) as well as about various other topics but, in particular, love and betrayal and death. Mieko Toganō is a widow and a poet. She lives with her daughter-in-law, Yasuko, whose husband, … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Shūsaku Endō‘s 沈黙 (Silence). This novel is set in the early seventeenth century, when Japan had forcibly clamped down on Christianity. The religion was forbidden and all practitioners, be they Japanese worshippers or European priests, had to apostatise or face brutal torture and death. The story tells of … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Masahiko Shimada‘s 雁 (夢使い (Dream Messenger). This one could have been a good book but did not work for me, not least because the characters were flat, the story dragged on and it all seemed unconvincing. The story tells of Miko Amino, a super-rich widow, who wants to … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Keizo Hino‘s 夢の島 (Isle of Dreams). Keizo Hino has been compared to J G Ballard and, while they are different in many ways, they do share an interest in the urban landscape, particularly urban decay and high rises. This novel tells of Shozo Sakai, a widower in his … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Kyūsaku Yumeno‘s ドグラマグラ (Dogra Magra). This is another Japanese epic – seven hundred pages in the Japanese original – which is both an incredibly complicated detective story as well as a searing indictment of contemporary (i.e. Japan in the 1930s) psychiatry where the doctors may well be more … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Fumiko Hayashi‘s 浮雲 (Floating Clouds). Before saying anything else about it, I should point out that this Fumiko Hayashi is nothing to with the politician of the same name and the book is nothing to do with the 19th century novel of the same name by Futabatei Shimei … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Mori Ōgai‘s 雁 (The Wild Geese). This is a gentle novel of love. Okada is a medical student at Tokyo University, a good-looking, very fit young man, who enjoys his evening walk, visiting second-hand bookshops. On returning from his walk, he has been accustomed to seeing an attractive … Read more