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Round-up of the 2019 Booksellers Award Nominees

April 8, 2019 / Erika / 5 Comments

Note: A few hours after I published this post, the winner was announced and it was indeed「そして、バトンが渡された」—an overwhelming favorite, with 435 points. The distant second-place winner was 「ひと」, with 297.5 points.

The winner of the 2019 Booksellers Award will be announced at 7pm on April 9 in Japan. I read those nominated books that appealed most to me (I wrote a brief summary of each of the 10 books nominated here). Unlike the Akutagawa and Naoki awards—in fact, most other literary awards—this award is based on the votes of booksellers around the country and is as close as we can get to an award given by ordinary readers (some bookstores even had charts up letting readers vote for their favorite). For that reason, it’s always intriguing to see what is chosen, even if it’s not my favorite.

I think「そして、バトンが渡された」(And then the baton was passed) by 瀬尾まいこ (Maiko Seo) has a good chance of winning, given the enthusiastic response in newspaper reviews. 本の雑誌 (Book Magazine) listed it as their top pick for the best books of the first half of 2018, and the magazine’s review panel was surprised that it hadn’t even been nominated for the Naoki Prize (having read the winner, 宝島, I am not at all surprised—the two books are on a completely different level). One panel member mentioned that it had been nominated for the Yamamoto Shugoro Prize, but had not won because the judges couldn’t believe that a 17 year-old girl could live with a 37 year-old man without the man become interested in her sexually and thus concluded that the entire novel is unrealistic. The entire panel properly expressed disgust and disbelief at this.

This novel, about a girl who has two mothers and three fathers and thus goes through three different last names by the time she graduates high school, does seem unrealistic, but you just have to suspend disbelief while reading. Yuko’s calm and practical way of looking at her situation makes her—and thus the book—very appealing. The first chapter begins with Yuko trying to think of some concern she can share with her teacher, who is convinced that Yuko, with her complicated family relationships, must have deep anxieties that she should share. Yuko desperately tries to think of something—anything—that will satisfy her teacher, but she can’t because she’s happy. Of course it helps that the reasons behind Yuko’s shifting family relationships have nothing to do with abuse or poverty or a broken foster care system, but Yuko also has, of necessity, adopted a philosophy that allows her to focus on the present without being dragged down by anxiety and sadness. She makes a conscious decision, when she is quite young, that she cannot be stuck in the past. Once separated from a parent, that was it—she had to focus on her current life and the people she is with. I found this quite sad, but her clear-eyed stance on the world is refreshing and the other characters in the book—especially Morimiya, her last father—are very entertaining.

Similar to 「そして、バトンが渡された」,「さざなみのよる」 by 木皿泉 (Night of Ripples by Izumi Kizara) takes what could be an unrelievedly sad story—the book begins with Nasumi as she dies of cancer and then shifts to the people she leaves behind—and tries to make it a little more redemptive by showing how Nasumi has affected people in her life. I loved Nasumi’s no-nonsense attitude toward life and her unwillingness to take shit from anyone, but once Kizara started introducing some magical elements into the story (for example, Nasumi’s spirit somehow makes an elevator repeatedly stop on the fifth floor—gokai in Japanese, which also means mistake or misunderstanding—to show a friend that she is making the wrong decision), she lost me a little. So while I enjoyed reading this novel, I was left wondering if simply “enjoying” a book is enough for it to merit an award. Perhaps it is in the case of the Booksellers Award? After all, this is an award given to the book that booksellers are most enthusiastic about recommending to customers, so this might skew the results toward a book with wide appeal that goes down easily.

I had been looking forward to「愛なき世界」by 三浦しをん (World without Love by Shion Miura) so much that I pre-ordered it from Japan so that it would ship as soon as it was published, instead of my usual method of adding books to my virtual shopping cart and placing an order every few months to save on shipping costs. I love the way Miura digs deep into professions and vocations we don’t normally think about, and the combination of botany and cooking seemed irresistible. But when it came to it, I lost interest about 100 pages in because I wasn’t in the mood for another story about a group of eccentrics immersed in strange occupations and a young woman so dedicated to her research that she has no time for romantic relationships. It felt a little too similar to her previous novels.

I also gave up on 「ひと」 by 小野寺史宜 (People by Fuminori Onodera) because, while perfectly pleasant, by this point I wanted something with a little bite. I was also sensing a theme among the books nominated this year, and sure enough, here was a book about a young man who has lost everything and yet remains good-natured and even finds a new family of sorts.

「ある男」(A Man) by 平野啓一郎 (Hirano Keiichiro) was what I needed. It made me realize that entertainment is not all that I look for in a book (unless I’m stuck on a plane)—I want writing so good that certain sentences beg to be read again, and something to think about when I can’t be reading. Some readers found 「ある男」to be a little affected, as if Hirano is showing off his knowledge, but I didn’t get that sense at all. It is certainly cerebral (especially compared to the other nominees), and the mystery is just the scaffolding that Hirano uses to build his theme. But the questions Hirano poses are fascinating

When Rie’s husband dies in a logging accident, she contacts his family, even though he had wanted no contact with them. When her husband’s “brother” comes to pay his respects at the family altar, he realizes that the man in the picture there is not his brother at all. Rie asks a lawyer, Akira Kido, to help her unwind this mystery of who her husband had really been. This is a fascinating mystery, especially because the koseki (family registry) system is so interesting, but you will be disappointed if you expect an edge-of-your-seat kind of mystery. Kido is able to identify Rie’s husband in the end only thanks to a series of coincidences and lucky conversations with colleagues—he doesn’t actually do much sleuthing, and for months at a time he seems to let it drop all together. What he does do is think (often with whiskey in hand and jazz on the radio)—about what it means to be a middle-aged man, how to define happiness, how to be a father, how to think of his heritage as a third-generation Korean man in Japan, how to live with the ever-present threat of earthquakes. When I picked up this book, I assumed that “ある男” (a man) refers to the dead man Kido is trying to identify, but I began to think that actually Hirano is referring to Kido.

Kido’s own crisis of identity begins after the earthquake in 2011, when he notices that the media has begun to mention the massacre of Koreans after the Great Kanto earthquake in 1923 and that jingoistic books and hate speech targeting Koreans and Chinese are finding a new audience. As if it weren’t bad enough to know that a fault line runs just below the surface in Tokyo, this threat of physical violence makes Kido feel increasingly vulnerable, and for almost the first time he is forced to grapple with what it means to be third-generation Korean in Japan. If he were stripped of his profession and his Japanese citizenship, and reduced simply to someone else’s perception of him as Korean, would he still recognize himself?

Kido became a lawyer because his father saw it as a profession that would keep him safe and earn him respect, and in fact he finds that his job gives him a chance to express who he is as a person—a source of both pleasure and anxiety. A con man Kido meets claims that Kido is essentially laundering his own identity—whitewashing his background to fit in to Japanese society. And Kido does almost envy his mystery man’s ability to take on a new identity. As he explains to his wife, at first he just felt sorry for this man, but gradually Kido became fascinated by the way he had taken on a new identity, and the search for him had become a form of escapism. In the end, Kido does manage to find equilibrium, but Hirano does such a good job of identifying the fragility of our sense of self that it seems precarious.

There’s a wonderful interview of Hirano on the podcast 人生に文学を (in Japanese) in which, in addition to discussing how writing styles have changed in the past 20 years and his Twitter habit, Hirano describes what it’s like to be older now than his father was when he died and imagining his father bathing him as he bathes his own son.

Updated to note that an English translation of this book will be published as “A Man” in May 2020, translated by Eli K.P. William.

One Round, One Minute, 34 Seconds

March 30, 2019 / Erika / 0 Comments

1R1分34秒、町屋良平、新潮社、2019

One Round, One Minute, 34 Seconds, by Ryohei Machiya; published by Shinchosha in 2019

The brief description of this book found on the publisher’s website gives the impression that this is a story about an athlete overcoming the odds and making a comeback. That is not quite what this novel delivers. Both the writing style and the narrator himself give us an uncomfortable reading experience that mimics the rhythm of boxing and the discomfort our boxer experiences in his training.

When the book begins, our boxer has lost a match and in short order also loses his trainer and his part-time job in a pachinko parlor. We are never given his name, and in fact the boxer’s lack of a name seems appropriate because his identity is so shaky. In the first half of the novel, he can no longer even believe in his body, he is tired of his physical and mental weakness, and no longer knows whether he even wants to fight anymore. In the second half, he has committed to another fight but his weight-cutting regime makes him nearly delirious and the reader cannot always distinguish between mirage and reality.

The new trainer that his gym assigns him, Umekichi, is the only character in this novel whose name we are given. A boxer himself, he hasn’t ever trained another boxer, but our boxer decides to try his unconventional methods. This is no heartwarming story of trust developing between two people—our boxer merely decides to try on “trust” for size and see if this “system” or “game” will work for him. In between training, our boxer goes on outings to museums and movies with his (only) friend, spends time with his “sex friend” (whom he kicks out without remorse when his training regime becomes too stringent for such diversions), and obsessively researches his next opponent. He even imagines hanging out with the opponent, watching a couple having sex in the bushes at a park or reading porn at the convenient store together. Yes, our narrator is a little strange…

Machiya makes this reading experience even more disjointed by writing words that would typically be written in kanji in hiragana instead, creating a staccato rhythm. He also occasionally threw in some difficult kanji that are no longer used, or used kanji for words not typically written in kanji (like 軟派instead of ナンパ). He almost seemed to be mirroring the boxer’s mental breakdown as he cuts weight.

There was one particularly striking scene that has stuck with me. His friend takes him on a “trip” when his next fight is scheduled, which is a tradition of theirs. They take a late train to the last stop, eat lots of meat at a Denny’s restaurant, and go down to the river, where his friend uses his iPhone to film him shadow boxing. His friend becomes almost delirious with excitement, and runs along the beach filming the rising sun and the boxer until he falls and nearly loses his iPhone. The phone is undamaged, but he has a bad cut on his hand. On the train on the way home, the boxer drips disinfectant onto his friend’s injured hand as he sleeps. He lays a towel underneath his friend’s hand (the only sign of gentleness we ever see from him in the novel). Then he pours the whole bottle of disinfectant on his friend’s hand in an effort to clean it, but forgets his intention as becomes entranced by the way the disinfectant traces tiny diamond shapes on his skin and reveals the cut, bleeding in spurts almost as if breathing. This oddly soothes the boxer so that he is finally able to fall asleep. For me, this summed up the boxer’s intensity and odd perspective on things.

Stag at Sharkey’s 1901, by George Bellows

The title refers to the last sentence of this book, when rigorous training and weight-cutting is robbing him of his sense of self:

“I’ll win; I’ll definitely win.” …Every 30 seconds he’d lose this resolve and then repeat it again. He had to go through two more of these nights, just for an unexpectedly easy win by TKO in one round, one minute and 34 seconds three days from now.

This expresses the frustration of putting so much time and work into preparing for a fight that can be decided in as little time as one minute and 34 seconds. Machiya marshals both writing style and content to show us that boxing has such a tight hold on this boxer that he cannot give up on this harsh sport.

No working after hours

February 14, 2019 / Erika / 8 Comments

Earlier this year, I read Kaeruko Akeno’s novel,「対岸の家事」(Someone else’s housework) because I was intrigued by the main character: a young woman who has always wanted to be a housewife and stay-at-home mom. Shiho finds her days with her young daughter to be lonely as her cohort of young mothers all seem to be working during the day, and the only ones at the neighborhood park are a little girl and her arrogant father, who has taken paternity leave as a test case for the government ministry he works for. Shiho also befriends a young mom next door, who is finding it impossible to care for her two young sons while still working, even at reduced hours. These two initially have nothing but contempt for Shiho’s choices, and yet end up turning to her for help. They in turn help her figure out who is sending her death threats (because of course stay-at-home mothers are social parasites). I enjoyed the book, but I couldn’t help but think that most of their problems could have been resolved if they lived in a society in which people worked reasonable hours. It is this issue that Akeno tackled in her next book, 「わたし、定時で帰ります」(No working after hours).

Like Shiho, Yui Higashiyama has a personal policy that seems very out of place–even unreasonable–in Japanese society: she leaves work exactly at 6pm. Only rarely does she work overtime, even during the busiest times. The president of the large IT company she works for encourages this policy and would like to see all employees follow her example, but Yui’s co-workers have their own reasons for staying late at work. One of her co-workers came back from maternity leave after only six weeks because she wants to be promoted and feels that working harder and later than anyone else is the only way to prove her mettle and keep up with the men—she’s even willing to wash her (male) superior’s coffee cup if it wins approval. Another of Yui’s co-workers has never missed a day of work because she’s afraid that she’ll lose her job in a weak economy, but also because she has nothing to do and no one to be with if she does go home. And Kentaro, Yui’s former fiancé, gets an adrenaline rush from work that is so addictive he can’t resist it.

Yui’s own dad was a workaholic who grumbled when called away to visit his daughter in the hospital, and spent his weekends golfing with clients and colleagues. Her mother even put his picture on top of the TV so Yui wouldn’t forget what he looked like. So Yui’s goal is to get to the Shanghai Bar before 6:30pm, while beer is still half-price (her new year’s wish is for another year of delicious beer). Her ten-year career plan, which she matter-of-factly submits to her manager, is to get married in a year, have her first child (a girl) at 33, take three years maternity leave, have her second child (a boy) at 36 and take another three years maternity leave, and then work reduced hours until her children are older.

The older men who drink at the Shanghai Bar with Yui often reminisce about Japan in the bubble period and how hard they had all worked. One of them shows her an old commercial for Regain, an energy drink advertised with the catch copy, “can you fight on for 24 hours?” The commercial that ran in 1989, during the bubble, shows a salaryman traveling overseas to win contracts from foreign companies.

In 1999, after the bubble had burst, the energetic song lauding 24 hours of work was replaced with music meant to soothe people who had worked too much.

But the “fight 24 hours” commercial was resurrected again in 2007, when the economy had made a modest recovery. It shows swarms of salarymen (and they are all men) fighting to get to work on time, running across highways, swimming through rivers and climbing up the side of the building. To Yui, they look like zombies whose sole goal now is to get to work on time.

This is the world that Yui wants to change.

The plot in this book centers around a project that Yui’s department is racing to complete. The department’s new manager, Fukunaga, had previously run his own company into the ground by winning contracts with such low estimates that his employees had to risk their physical (and mental) health. Kentaro had worked for Fukunaga, and in fact Yui had broken off their engagement when he missed the formal meeting between their parents due to sheer exhaustion from work. Now that both Fukunaga and Kentaro, an unrepentant workaholic, are working for Yui’s company, she fears that they will change her company’s work culture for the worse. True to form, Fukunaga has submitted a ruinously low bid for a project that, through a series of blunders, is approved. Yui decides to head up the project with the aim of showing that it is possible to work hard and still go home on time.

The story of the Battle of Imphal, a disastrous battle fought in World War II that was planned by Lieutenant-General Renya Mutaguchi, is told alongside the main plot as Yui learns about it from a documentary and her father. She is horrified by the parallels between her project and the battle. Although Mutaguchi’s superiors had serious reservations about his strategy for defeating the Allied forces at Imphal and invading India, they were eventually won over by his enthusiasm. Mutaguchi seemed to believe that sheer will power would be enough—he assumed that three weeks would be enough to defeat the British and Indian troops, and thus only allowed for enough supplies for this period. Nothing went as planned, and it was the largest defeat in Japanese military history. Luckily, Yui’s project does not result in any fatalities (although it’s a close thing), but both Mutaguchi and Fukunaga’s speeches about pushing harder and working toward even greater feats were enough to convince otherwise levelheaded people to ignore physical limits.

Despite its serious subject matter, this book is also quite funny and the huge cast of characters allows Kaeruko to present many perspectives. This is the kind of book I’d love to see translated into English—this is a straightforward novel with a conventional structure that is probably not going to win any literary prizes, but the stories Kaeruko tells will draw in readers until they empathize with her characters’ struggles, even if the culture is so entirely different. And isn’t that the goal of literature in translation—to make us feel close to people we will never meet and introduce us to a country (in all its imperfections) that we might never actually visit?

Edited to add: This New York Times article entitled “Japan’s Working Mothers: Record Responsibilities, Little Help from Dads” really brought home for me the need for Yui’s crusade.

日日是好日　(Every day is a good day)

February 1, 2019 / Erika / 5 Comments

「日日是好日」　森下典子 (Every day is a good day, by Noriko Morishita)

I have admired Noriko Morishita’s essays for many years, but the quiet tone of her writing and subjects aren’t qualities that usually earn authors a place on bestseller lists. So I was surprised to see that her book of essays on the tea ceremony, 「日日是好日」　(Every day is a good day), had become a bestseller in Japan, 16 years after it was first published. It made more sense when I saw that a film of the book had just been released, starring Kiki Kirin (who died in September 2018, just before the movie was released) and Haru Kurogi.

Noriko began studying the tea ceremony in her third year of college, at her mother’s suggestion. She was reluctant because she saw the tea ceremony and ikebana as something old-fashioned that only girls who believed that searching for a husband was equivalent to a job search did, but she agreed to go with her cousin Michiko. Her first classes were incredibly frustrating for her: the rules about how to walk into the tea room, how to sit, and which way to face seemed like empty formalism, summing up everything she hated about Japanese traditions. Noriko watched her teacher, Mrs. Takeda, take the fukusa (silk cloth) between her fingers, run it along the rim of the teacup and turn the cup three times, and then trace the character ゆ on the bottom of the cup, but when she asked why this was done, Mrs. Takeda said it didn’t matter and there was no need for a reason. And even once Noriko did become more interested, Mrs. Takeda wouldn’t let her take notes because the motions had to become part of her physical memory. For months she moved like a marionette under Mrs. Takeda’s step-by-step instructions. She had to trust in the process until finally, one day her hands moved on their own and each of the steps flowed together.

Kiki Kirin as Mrs. Takeda, Haru Kurogi as Noriko and Mikako Tabe as Michiko

These essays cover Noriko’s life from her 20s through her 40s. The tea ceremony is a constant in her life, getting her through a broken engagement just months before her wedding, doubts about her chosen career, and her father’s death. The tea ceremony’s ritualized celebration of the changing seasons became a way for her to encourage oneself and get through the more difficult seasons of her own life. Japan’s 24 sub-seasons—from 節分 (the traditional end of winter) and on to 立春 (the first day of spring), then 雨水 (rainwater), 啓蟄 (insects awaken) and so on until the cycle ends with大寒 (greater cold)—are all recognized with a change in the flowers and scroll hung in the tokonoma (a recessed space in a room). On お月見 (moon viewing day), the scroll simply showed a circle. During the rainy season, the scroll said 聴雨, “listen to the rain.” Even the sweets mirrored the seasons. Mrs. Takeda travelled to long-established shops all over the country to buy the sweets she used in her tea ceremony classes. In mid-December, they had yellow yuzu-flavored manju. In January, they had a dried sweet that looked like a flat white square of sugar but dissolved like snow on the tongue.

The tea ceremony is aligned to time both on the smaller scale of the seasons within a year and on the larger scale of the zodiac. Noriko noticed that the cups used in the first and last tea ceremonies of the new year are decorated with the zodiac animal for that year, and then they are put away again until their turn comes around again in 11 years. The tea ceremony continues to rotate through the 12 zodiac cycles without end, but a human life is only six or seven cycles, which gave Noriko a profound sense of the brevity of her life.

The changing of the seasons, and the way they are reflected in the tea ceremony, also forced Noriko to let go of thoughts and habits she had clung to. Every November, part of the tatami flooring is lifted to reveal a sunken hearth in which the kama (iron kettle) is placed for the tea ceremony. November is 立冬 (the beginning of winter) in the old calendar, representing the new year for tea ceremony practitioners. The hearth becomes the point of reference, which changes the placement of the utensils. In May, which is 立夏 (the beginning of summer) in the old calendar, the hearth is covered over again and the “summer tea ceremony” starts again. These changes confused Noriko at first, but Mrs. Takeda told her, “Do what is in front of you right now. Focus your emotions on ‘now.’”

This was particularly hard for Noriko when she felt like her own life was standing still as her friends all seemed to be marrying, trying to balance work with children, even moving overseas. She couldn’t seem to feel anything but impatience at her tea classes—she felt like she should be doing something, not just sitting. But there were moments when she just let herself enjoy the quiet, the ritual, and the mossy taste of the tea. Her head would empty and she would think of nothing, in a peace deeper than sleep. It reminded her of the way warriors had to take off their swords to come through the small entrance of the tea room, so that the warrior would be relieved of his role for as long as he was in the room and could just be a human being again.

Noriko eventually realized, over the decades of her practice, that the tea ceremony is a way to experience the aesthetics and philosophy behind the way the Japanese live, in line with the rhythm of the seasons and through one’s own physical experiences. Even if Mrs. Takeda had explained all of this on the first day, she wouldn’t have been capable of understanding. Following the formal steps of the tea ceremony by relying on her body’s own memory of steps emptied her head so that it became a form of meditation, allowing Noriko—for fleeting moments at least—to just be.

The Tea Ceremony’s Lessons on How to be Happy, according to Noriko

1. Recognize that you know nothing

2. Do not think with your head

3. Focus on the present

4. Look with all of your senses

5. Observe the real thing

6. Savor the seasons

7. Connect to nature with all five senses

8. Live in the present moment

9. Trust your body to nature and let time pass

10. Take each moment as it is

11. Parting is inevitable

12. Tune in to oneself

13. On rainy days, listen to the rain

14. Wait for growth

15. Take the long view but live in the present

本屋大賞2019 Japanese Booksellers Award 2019

January 23, 2019 / Erika / 4 Comments

Even if I’m not interested in every book nominated, I always look forward to the announcement of the books nominated for the Booksellers Award because they are chosen not by a panel of judges looking for “literary merit” (which of course has its place too), but by bookstore staff, who vote for the books they enjoyed the most and recommend to others. These are the books nominated for the 2019 Booksellers Award, with the winner to be announced on April 9.

『愛なき世界』三浦しをん

World without Love, by Shion Miura

Miura often chooses a specific, overlooked sector of the world (the logging industry in 「神去なあなあ日常」, dictionary publishing in 「舟を編む」, running in 「風が強く吹いている」), and this book is centered on the botany department of a university. We see the department and its eccentric inhabitants—the professor who looks like an assassin, an elderly professor who adores potatoes, and a researcher dedicated to growing the largest cactus—through the eyes of Fujimaru, a young man working at a restaurant nearby. Luckily he is as unfamiliar with botany, microscopes and strange plants as most of us are, so his wonder at the beauty of a plant seen under the microscope is also ours. This is also a love story, although not one with much chance of success because the object of Fujimaru’s affections is Motomura, a graduate student more interested in the シロイヌナズナ (thale cress) she is studying than anything else.

『ある男』平野啓一郎

A Man, Keiichiro Hirano

Hirano, who won the 120th Akutagawa Prize in 1999 for 『日蝕』, has written here about a man who changes koseki (family register) with another man to escape his past, but after he dies in an accident his wife finds out that the name he was going by belonged to another man entirely. The lawyer she hires to unwind this mystery has his own problems as a third-generation Korean man. Readers write that this novel reads almost like reporting, with a heavy dose of philosophizing thrown in as well. (If a mystery based on a character taking on someone else’s identity sounds intriguing, I recommend 火車 by 宮部みゆき (Miyuki Miyabe), translated into English by Arnold Birnbaum as “All She Was Worth”).

『さざなみのよる』木皿泉

Night of Ripples, by Izumi Kizara

The first of these interlinking short stories is narrated by Nasumi, who is dying of cancer at age 43, and the rest of the stories are narrated by her family and friends, showing how she remains part of their lives in ways both profound and mundane. Through their reminiscences of Nasumi as a child, adolescent and adult, the reader ends up with a full picture of her life.

『そして、バトンは渡された』瀬尾まいこ

And the baton was passed, by Maiko Seo

Yuko has two mothers and three fathers, and has had to change her family name three times. This makes it sound like a novel about broken families and violent foster homes, but each family loves Yuko in their own way as she is passed like a baton, and this novel explores what makes a family.

『熱帯』森見登美彦

Tropical Zone, by Tomihiko Morimi

The first half of this novel, which is based on the Arabian Nights, revolves around a book (also called 熱帯) that no one has read to the end, and the second half is a fantasy that takes place within that book (and then a story within that book and so on like nested dolls). Many readers on bookmeter said they had no idea what was happening by the end, and one reader even wondered if maybe Morimi’s book was actually the one that no one could finish!

『ひと』小野寺史宜

People, by Fuminori Onodera

Kiyosuke loses both of its parents in succession and has to drop out of college. With his meagers savings, he tries to live on his own in Tokyo. Good luck brings him to a deli just when he most needs the help, and he finds a job here as well as people who help him get back on his feet. This sounds like a lighter novel with most of the characters being almost too goodhearted to be true, but there is definitely a time and a place for books like this.

『ひとつむぎの手』知念実希人

Hands of the soul savior, by Mikito Chinen

Mikito Chinen is a practicing doctor who comes from a family of doctors, but he always wanted to be a writer. His first novel was published in 2012 and he has since written several thrillers set in hospitals. This is no exception. Yusuke, a doctor at a university hospital, is ordered by the hospital director to take on the guidance of three residents with the promise of becoming a cardiac surgeon if they join the department. The director also tasks him with finding out who had sent him an anonymous letter denouncing him.

『火のないところに煙は』芦沢央

Smoke where there is no fire, by Yo Ashizawa

This is a collection of six horror stories with the connection becoming clear in the last story. They are narrated by a novelist (Ashizawa herself) who is asked to write a ghost story set in Kagurazaka. Although she starts by writing about the experience of a friend, a few months after this first story is published in a literary magazine, she begins hearing from other people about their actual experiences. Ashizawa writes as if these were true stories she is merely reporting.

『フーガはユーガ』伊坂幸太郎

Fuga is Yuga, by Kotaro Isaka

This SF mystery begins with Yuga talking to a man in a family restaurant in Sendai. He talks about his twin brother Fuga and their childhood, marked by their father’s domestic violence and bullying, but made bearable by their special skill—they can switch places on their birthday, once a year. As adults, they become involved again in an incident from their childhood. It might sound depressing, but in Isaka’s hands it becomes something different. The twins’ names, which sound like “who” and “you,” are just one example of Isaka’s playfulness.

『ベルリンは晴れているか』深緑野分

Is it sunny in Berlin? by Nowaki Fukamidori

Nowaki has written a historical mystery set in Germany just after WWII. Seventeen year-old Augusta works in a canteen for US soldiers, but when she learns of the mysterious death of a man who had protected her during the war, she sets out on a search for his nephew to tell him the news. She runs into a good-natured former actor turned thief named Kafka on the road, and they become traveling companions. Augusta’s own story of how she survived the war is told in intervening chapters.

Winners of 160th Akutagawa and Naoki Prizes

January 17, 2019 / Erika / 1 Comment

The winners of the 160^th Akutagawa and Naoki Prizes—the last in the Heisei era—were announced on January 16. I always look forward to reading the winners of the Naoki Prize, which is generally awarded to an “entertainment” novel written with a straightforward, approachable style, but sometimes the Akutagawa Prize seems more like a lens into what Japanese literary critics value in literary fiction today than a guide for my own reading. This year all three (two novels won the Akutagawa Prize this time) look interesting, and are also quite varied in subject and style.

上田岳弘 (Takehiro Ueda) won the Akutagawa for his novel 「ニムロッド」 (Nimrod). He previously won the Shincho Prize for New Writers with his debut novel, 「太陽」 (Sun), and the Mishima Yukio Award for 「わたしの恋人」(My Lover). “Nimrod” begins when the main character, a man employed at a server maintenance company, is ordered to record bitcoin transaction data. Ueda describes how the entire bitcoin scheme rests on the notion that our existence is verified when our data is recorded, but also incorporates the everyday with scenes between the main character and his girlfriend and his exchanges with co-workers. A novel that one of these co-workers is writing is also skillfully woven in. One of the judges said that Ueda’s novel won for its “skill in linking a bold world view with the everyday.” In this novel, Ueda explores how to best live as individuals in an information society, but he seems to answer this question for himself through his writing: in an interview he stated that “continuing to engage in art, regardless of whether it has any meaning, guarantees our humanity.”

町屋良平 (Ryohei Machida) 「１Ｒ１分３４秒」(One Round One Minute 34 Seconds) won the Akutagawa Prize for his novel about a professional boxer who has never won a match since winning by knockout in his debut fight. He has lost all sense of his place in the world, both at his boxing gym and his part-time job, but this begins to change when he meets an eccentric trainer. Machida described his feelings on hearing that he’d won the Akutagawa as similar to winning by “technical knockout”—he’d written all out and suddenly it was over.

真藤順丈 (Junjo Shindo) was awarded the Naoki Prize, as well as the Yamada Futaro Award, for his novel 「宝島」 (Treasury Island) about the ties between three close friends living on Okinawa. The novel covers the 20 years from 1952 to 1972, when the US government handed control of Okinawa back to Japan. Shindo has said that as he is not from Okinawa, he hesitated to write this story, but his interest in the demonstrations against the bases in Okinawa and incidents involving US soldiers spurred his interest in Okinawa’s post-war history. In his research, he learned about a gang of Okinawans who looted US bases for food, and was inspired to write about it. Shindo hopes that this novel will be an opportunity for people to think about the problems people face in Okinawa–this may make it sound heavy, but reviews of this book all mention its humor and sense of hope.

From left: Junjo Shindo, Ryohei Machida, Takehiro Ueda. Source: Japan Times

「ニムロッド」and 「１Ｒ１分３４秒」 will be published later this month. 「宝島」 was published in June but is now on backorder. Hopefully the publishers will catch up with demand soon. For now, you can listen to 荻上チキ discuss all three books with a literary critic on his Session-22 podcast (here).

Goodnight, Tokyo

December 15, 2018 / Erika / 0 Comments

Atsuhiro Yoshida is the perfect author when you’re looking for an escape from the everyday that still keeps your brain working. His world is recognizably ours, but skewed just enough that it catches you off guard. Reading Yoshida’s books allows me to take on his whimsical, eccentric way of seeing things for a little while.

「おやすみ、東京」(Goodnight, Tokyo; not available in English translation) is Yoshida’s paean to nights in one of the world’s largest cities, and the most population dense. This allows him to give free rein to his imagination and yet remain in the realm of plausibility: surely if there really is a city in which you can find a peanut crusher and arrange a proper interment for an old phone at 3am, it would have to be Tokyo.

The book is set between about 1am and 4:30am over a series of nights. When the book begins, Mitsuki (the first in a large cast of characters) is at work at 1am in a warehouse that could easily fit two airplanes, but that in this case is full of shelves and drawers crammed with everything a film director could want on his set. The walls are covered with clocks, tapestries and calendars. Mitsuki sees it as a “box of time,” a place in which the past 300 years has been preserved in the shape of this detritus. And yet tonight, the director does not want a trunk from the Taisho era, but a loquat. It’s nearly the end of the season for this fruit, and she only has a few hours in which to locate it. Luckily, Mitsuki has an accomplice in her nighttime searches—Matsui, a taxi driver who works the night shift. Matsui’s driving around the city has given him an intimate knowledge of the city, and he often helps her with her searches. But in the end, it’s not Matsui who helps her find the loquat, but her boyfriend, who has become an amateur scholar of crows during his newspaper route (we’re in Yoshida’s world, after all) and knows of a loquat tree that is a particular favorite with crows.

And it is up in this tree that Mitsuki finds the “loquat thief,” a young woman all dressed in black whom Mitsuki at first mistakes for a very large crow herself. This is Kanako, who collects loquat every year to make wine, carrying on the tradition of her brother even after he disappeared from their apartment one day. She also works at night, answering phones for a support hotline. The people who call don’t necessarily have problems, but just want someone to talk to or just want to be heard. To Kanako, this is completely normal (and in fact,she is a former caller)—wouldn’t anyone who found herself alone in a room at night want someone to talk to?

Yoshida weaves his large cast of characters (also alone at night, sometimes looking for someone to talk to) in and out of his stories. There’s the young woman who collects old phones for disposal at any time of the day or night, the four women who run a shokudo (casual restaurant) that is open all night, a former bartender who now works with Mitsuki and still makes unforgettable coke high balls, and a man who runs a secondhand store that is only open at night because he has day and night mixed up. Then there is Shuro, the “great detective” who, after a day spent going back and forth across Tokyo to visit all of the 19 places he has lived in, takes Matsui’s taxi to a small cinema to watch a film in which his father had a bit part. All of Yoshida’s characters are looking for someone—Shuro is looking for glimpses of his father in old films, Kanako is searching for her brother, Matsui still yearns after a woman who rode in his taxi once, Ayano wonders what has happened to the man who used to come to her shokudo and order ham and eggs, and of course Mitsuki looks for something different every night. All of these characters eventually overlap in some way,but with Yoshida, you can’t expect a pat ending with the characters neatly paired off and reunited. That’s not his way—he seems to respect the solitude of his creations.

All the tropes and themes that crop up so often in Yoshida’s books are here—the shokudo at a crossroads, magicians, movie theaters and obscure films, the search for something or someone, and people who live small lives and find contentment in small (and sometimes slightly weird) things. 「金曜日の本」(Friday’s Books), a snapshot of Yoshida’s childhood, gave me a sense of where these stories may have come from.

Some of his vignettes could have come straight from his fiction. He writes of his family life as an only child with 20 aunts and uncles and innumerable cousins. He tells of buying a bag of senbei on the way back from the sento (public bathhouse) and sharing them with an old monkey kept in a cage in someone’s yard. And of course he writes about books and libraries.

After school, I always played dodgeball in the schoolyard with wild abandon. One day, in the middle of the game, I up and left, and without even being aware of what I was doing, I snuck into the school building, and from there into the lonely library. The air changed at once. I was drawn to the words running along the spines of the books ranged on the shelves. I sensed that the books were in the midst of an ongoing conversation in quiet voices almost impossible to hear. So this was why libraries are always so quiet…

The library he went to was always quiet and dimly lit, built in a forest on the edge of a park. Even as a child, he understood the importance of going to the library alone. He would make his weekly trip on Saturdays, when it always seemed to be raining. Lest we find his description too charming and picturesque, he mentions that one day he saw a dead man hanging from a tree in these woods. It reminded him of a scene from Edogawa Ranpo’s The Boy Detectives Club. The poverty that was so rampant after WWII still had a hold on his neighborhood (Yoshida was born in 1962). The war lingered in other ways as well. Barracks built up around Shimokitazawa Station housed strange stores selling goods that couldn’t be found anywhere else, and still had the feel of the black markets that sprang up after WWII.

A black market in Ueno in 1949; Source: Asahi Shimbun

Growing up, Yoshida was happiest in libraries, book stores and stationery stores: “There is nothing like the quiet excitement I felt when I bought a folding knife to sharpen pencils, when I bought my first mechanical pencil, or when I picked up a special adhesive called ‘Cemedine concrement.’” Maybe his love of books was a genetic inheritance from his father, much in the way that eye color or dimples in the cheek are passed down. During the war, Yoshida’s father and his family had evacuated to Ichikawa in Chiba, where they rented a room in a small used bookstore. At night, the owner would close up the shop and go home, but Yoshida’s father had free rein and read everything in the shop.　Yoshida said that what he read “became his blood and muscle.”

I wasn’t ready to leave Yoshida’s company yet, so I went on to「雲と鉛筆」, a short novel that is long on philosophizing and short on plot (a good combination when Yoshida is the author). By this point, Yoshida had piloted me safely past the midterm elections here in the US, but to soften my entry back into the “real”world, I began reading a volume of his short stories called 「台所のラジオ」. This would be a good entry point for anyone new to Yoshida as these 12 short stories have everything I love about his writing. The radio makes an appearance in every story, but this is the old-fashioned analog radio with a dial, not radio streamed from a mobile phone. Food is the prompt for the characters’ memories and actions here—thinly-sliced fried pork, nori maki, beefsteak, coffee and ochazuke. A paragraph in the story　「油揚げと架空旅行」 (Deep-fried tofu and imaginary travel) sums up the feel of this book (and Yoshida’s writing in general):

I was listening to the radio, in the kitchen. I don’t watch television, nor do I have the bad habit of tying up my acquaintances in long telephone conversations. My one entertainment is the radio, and whenever possible I prefer to listen peacefully to a female announcer with a quiet voice. The perfect program is aired in the evening. A woman with a quiet voice talks about the small things, not the big things, of the world. But the content is not what matters. I am listening to the sound of her voice, not what she is saying.

This is also a good description of Yoshida’s writing: it is not so much the stories he tells, but the atmosphere he creates and the feelings he evokes. In 「金曜日の本」, Yoshida writes that a friend asked him one day what kind of books he read, and at first he said he’d read anything, but when pressed, he realized that the common thread running through the books he’d read was that they “warmed” him. This is what Yoshida’s books do for me.

*I reviewed Yoshida’s book about a female radio announcer (and an eccentric department store clerk) here.

For all of Yoshida’s love of the library, he likes to own his books: “Buying books was like buying a promise that you’d read that book in the future. Borrowed books had deadlines. The future that book should have had was too short and left me disappointed. But books that I had made my own came with unlimited futures. I realized that buying a book is a promise made with the future.”

Earthlings

October 29, 2018 / Erika / 0 Comments

地球星人, 村田沙耶香, 新潮社, 2018

Earthlings, by Sayaka Murata, Shinchosha, 2018

*Since this post was written, the English translation has been published as Earthlings, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori.

This was a hard book to read, dealing as it does with emotional abuse, incest, pedophilia, sexual abuse, and even cannibalism (would you care for some chunks of human meat in your miso soup? or perhaps simmered with daikon leaves?).

The first half of the book tells the story of Natsuki’s childhood. She believes that she is a witch with powers given her by her stuffed animal, Pyuto. Sensing that the earth is in danger, he came from the star Pohapipinpobopia (that never got any easier to read smoothly) to train Natsuki as a witch so that she can protect the earth.

Her cousin Yu believes he is an alien come from another planet—his mother certainly tells him often enough that she doesn’t know where he could have come from. They meet every summer for the Obon holiday in Akishina, where their large extended family gathers. Natsuki’s grandparents live in a farmhouse where the family had raised silkworms for several generations. The silkworms lived on the upper floors of the farmhouse, and when they became moths, they were allowed to fly around the house. During these summer visits, Natsuki’s uncles pile up rocks to dam a small river and make a swimming hole for the cousins, they play in the rice paddies, eat watermelon, and welcome the ancestors back at the start of Obon with fire (mukae-bi) and send them off again at the end of Obon (okuri-bi). These scenes were warm and really effective in creating a sense of nostalgia, even if it is just borrowed. The warmth of her grandparents and aunts and uncles makes it that much harder to read about the emotional abuse and neglect Natsuki experiences at home.

It is perhaps this abuse and constant denigration that explains why Natsuki sees the world as a factory. In her eyes, the neighborhood she lives in is a warren of burrows for humans. The children will one day be shipped from the factory, where they will be trained so that they can bring food back to their own nests and produce children. Natsuki also sees herself as the family garbage can—when her parents’ and sister’s pent-up anger explodes, Natsuki takes the brunt of it.

Part 2 ends with a bang, when Natsuki is still a child, and quietly takes up the story again when she is 34. Instead of fantasizing about Pyuto and earthling factories, we get a string of quotidian details about the mineral water she has bought, her husband watering their house plants, and the unseasonably warm weather for November. But Murata dispelled my concern that Natsuki had just become another cog in the factory a few pages later. Both Natsuki and her husband have refused to be brainwashed, but they know they will only be allowed to stay in the factory if they pretend they are properly functioning parts. They had found each other on a site out of the public eye for people looking for partners and help with marriage, debt, and suicide. To escape their parents, they married in name only but live separate lives. Natsuki’s husband loves to hear stories about Akishina. It’s when they go together to visit and meet up with Yu again that the story really turns grotesque. Frankly, it felt like a betrayal when Murata tore down the almost idyllic picture of Natsuki’s family home by turning it into the setting for a horror show.

Due to the dark nature of this book and the difficulty in keeping my gag reflex in check, especially in the last 40 pages of this book, I had to read lighter books in tandem for relief. One of these was 偽姉妹 (Fake Sisters), the latest novel by Nao-cola Yamazaki (山崎ナオコーラ). Like Murata, Yamazaki is looking at social problems (in this case, an aging society and smaller families) and trying to find a solution to them, but she does so with a light touch. Three sisters live in a house that is essentially all roof, with impractical touches such as a spiral staircase and few doors. Masako, the middle sister, built it with lottery winnings, but when her marriage (amicably) dissolved and she had a baby, her sisters moved in.

The novel is really an exploration of what happens when Masako decides that she’d rather live with her two friends and make them her sisters. She realized, once her sisters had moved out and her friends had moved in, that she had felt pressure to like her blood relatives and be liked in turn. She wanted to live with a family she had chosen herself. She had named her son after Yukio Mishima, but she hopes that he will feel so free in his life that he will be able to toss off his origins and choose a new meaning for his name. In the epilogue set about 40 years later, people are able to enter into family contracts with other people to share assets, help each other through sickness and grow old together.

The main characters in Earthlings seemed to descend into mental illness, in contrast to Murata’s novel, Convenience Store Woman, in which Keiko has a way of looking at the world that reflects back to us a clear, undistorted look at the social norms that most of us take for granted. The sisters in Pretend Sisters, both real and chosen, were also a welcome contrast with their frank and honest relationships and eagerness to change the parts of society they don’t like. By the end of Earthlings, there was no one for me to sympathize with, which dulled whatever message Murata was trying to get across.

To get a full idea of Sayaka Murata’s range, read this blog post on Brain on Books about her collection of short stories, 殺人出産 (Satsujin Shussan).

A Lake in the Sky

May 2, 2018 / Erika / 0 Comments

「空にみずうみ」、佐伯一麦、中央公論新社、2015

A Lake in the Sky, Kazumi Saeki, Chuo Koron Shinsha, 2015

This book relates a year in the life of Hayase, a writer living in the Tohoku region, and his wife Yuzuko, a textile artist, as they return to some semblance of normal life after the earthquake and tsunami that hit the region in March 2011. The book covers the period from June 2014 to May 2015, when it was serialized in the Yomiuri Shimbun (in a post-modern touch, Hayase is writing this novel as we read it, lagging behind the reader by about three chapters). Kazumi Saeki, who worked as an electrician and a magazine reporter before writing full-time, has always mined his own life for his books, and it’s fair to say that Hayase and Yuzuko are thinly veiled versions of Saeki and his wife.

水琴窟 (suikinkutsu)

When the book begins, Hayase is lying awake listening to the calls of a Chinese hwamei. He began hearing this bird three years ago, and wonders if it had been accidentally released from its cage (Saeki leaves it up to the reader to make the connection between this timing and the circumstances that could have led to the bird’s escape). The bird’s singing is interrupted by a noise from his verandah similar to that made by a 水琴窟 (suikinkutsu), a buried earthen jar that makes a melodic sound when water drips into it. It sounds like a bass string is being plucked, and Hayase speculates that it comes from nearby broadcasting towers.

He first began hearing this bass sound in early May three years ago, when he and Yuzuko took a friend to the public gardens. This friend, a reporter for a national newspaper, had been walking the coast of Tohoku for the past three weeks. The area with the suikinkutsu was blocked off due to the risk of landslides so they are unable to reach it, but it is just two weeks later that he hears a similar sound from his own house.

The book’s last paragraph is an echo of its beginning, with Hayase back in the public garden listening to the suikinkutsu. He is reminded of his childhood, when he would flee to a nearby river when his parents got mad at him and throw rocks into the river, until he became so interested in the way that the impact of the rock on the surface of the water created a series of concentric circles that he forgot his tears. He likens this to people, who drop into this world at their birth and create ripples that expand slowly outward as they live.

These outwardly expanding circles are reflected in the structure of the book as well, with each chapter starting close to home as Hayase listens to the birds marking the changing seasons or discovers a new beetle in the hallway as he makes his way to his study at dawn. From there, the day gradually opens up to include friends and neighbors, with passing references to Hayase and Yuzuko’s pasts. Hayase helps a neighbor who has lost electricity in half of the house, which sparks his memories of working as an electrician when he was younger. When Yuzuko cooks soybeans to make miso, it brings Hayase back to his youth, when he delivered newspapers to earn money to buy books and records, and his route passed by a miso and soy sauce factory. But it is really the earthquake through which he filters events.

Although the word “earthquake” itself is mentioned only once, and in a completely different context, the twin disasters that hit the Tohoku region in March 2011 are always there in the background of this book. Hayase never mentions them, but simply refers to “that spring three years ago” –March 2011 has become the point from which he dates time now.

The earthquake seems to lie behind every interaction and memory. When Hayase is out drinking with an old friend, they talk about his friend’s move inland three years ago (code for “after the earthquake”) after spending his entire life living by the ocean. He and his wife climb in the mountains every day to build up their strength, “just in case”—he even wears weights around his ankles. Later, Hayase eats chilled tofu he bought from a man who drives around the neighborhood selling fresh tofu. He is just out of the bath, drinking sake and sitting at a low table with clothes drying around him. He feels he has gone back to a time with no air conditioners, computers or mobile phones. Just as he seems to be relaxing (and the reader with him), Hayase remembers that the tofu maker had begun selling from his truck, rather than his store, in that summer three years ago.

Lying in bed on a summer night, listening to the cicadas, Hayase thinks of a poem written about waking at dawn to the sound of cicadas, written in 1941. Hayase wonders if the sound of cicadas—usually not noteworthy—had special significance during wartime, when people would have been thankful for the everyday. This gratitude for normality is reflected in this book, which relates how Yuzuko made miso over several pages with enough detail that it could easily be used as a recipe, as well as how they dealt with a snake in the backyard and identified the beetle lopping off tree branches. There is even an entire chapter on the process of selecting a new desk for Hayase, and another on replacing their tatami.

The チョッキリ(chokkiri; there is no direct English equivalent that I could find, but they are similar to the Japanese weevil) that turned out to be culprit behind the branches lopped off in the woods. Source: parkinsect.exblog.jp

At one point, Hayase had suffered from depression. All of his senses were focused inward. Once he pulled out of this, he was able to see the scenery around him, and could hear again too. And once he was aware of the sights and sounds surrounding him, he knew he would be ok. I got the sense that Hayase and Yuzuko’s focus on the birds, trees and insects around them was not entirely due to their love of nature, but is also an effort to find comfort and reassurance in the sheer energy of the natural life around them, whether it’s the wasp nest under construction on their verandah or the snake shedding his skin in their yard. Their building manager comments that no matter how many times he sweeps away spider webs in the passages, they’re always back the next day. He says that you just can’t beat nature. This must be both comforting and frightening to someone who has lived through the Tohoku earthquake.

Throughout this novel, Hayase listens to Henryk Górecki’s Symphony No. 3, also known as the Symphony of Sorrowful Songs. I read this as an expression, however indirect, of Hayase/Saeki’s grief over everything that was lost in the earthquake. The symphony is based on a series of traditional melodies, of which one—the lament of a mother mourning a son killed in war—has the refrain “where has he gone, my dear young son?” Another is based on the words, written on the walls of her prison cell, of a woman killed in 1944 by the German Gestapo, asking her mother not to mourn. The third melody is based on a 15th century Polish folk song, in which Mary speaks to her son dying on the cross. The drawn-out voice of the string players layered with the quiet notes of the piano reminds Hayase of the bass note of the suikinkutsu and ripples on the water spreading outward.

After the earthquake, Hayase began counting the days using a lunar calendar, so he does not mark the fourth anniversary of the earthquake on March 11, but on an evening five days after the spring equinox, when the moon is the same as on that night four years ago. He listens to a new recording of Górecki’s Symphony No. 3, and recalls a poem written by Hiroshi Osada, a poet from the Tohoku region:

The spring equinox is near

when you wake up in the morning,

look up at the sky,

and greet a pale blue, clear morning,

as if the sky were a lake in the heavens.

The dead nestled close to our hearts

Return without a sound.

In a New York Times editorial published just four days after the earthquake (which you can read here), Saeki wrote, “Will I ever again experience such peace?” This book seems to be his attempt to answer this question. Although it succeeds in capturing the moments of peace he has found since then, he seems all too aware of the impermanence and fragility of the life he has made.

Note: Hayase writes about visiting one of his favorite bookstores, and from his description (a bookstore housed in a building from the Meiji era with a white noren, home to globes, professional-grade microscopes, moss specimens, turtles and cats), it must be Miho Tanaka’s Mushi Bunko, which I wrote about here. Although I’d like to think there are many bookstores like this in Japan, it seems unlikely…

Winner of the 2018 Japanese Booksellers Award

April 10, 2018 / Erika / 1 Comment

『かがみの孤城』(The Solitary Castle in the Mirror) by 辻村深月 (Mizuki Tsujimura) won the 2018 Japanese Booksellers Award, announced on April 10. Although it wouldn’t have been my choice, it wasn’t a surprise, given the rave reviews from other readers. And it’s always interesting to try and identify the source of a book’s appeal, even if it escapes me personally.

Mizuki Tsujimura at the award ceremony. Source: Jiji Press

I have liked several of Mizuki Tsujimura’s other novels, but at more than 500 pages, this book needed a more aggressive editor—it could have been cut by about half without losing much. I may have not have been her intended audience either, since it seemed to be directed toward young adults. This was in part because her writing seemed more simplistic than in her other novels, and any adult could unravel some of the mysteries about 100 pages before the children did. It was also hard for me to relate to Kokoro, the main character, perhaps because her over-sensitive reactions to every word and look directed at her—while no doubt an entirely accurate depiction of a young girl—became a little tiring.

The description of the book gives the impression that this is an adventure story, with seven children given a year to search in a castle for a key that will grant the finder a wish. However, the actual search for the key was carried out in a half-hearted way –and only mentioned in passing–until the last 50 pages or so. One of the mysteries is why these seven children have been gathered at the castle. All but one have stopped going to school, although they have given up on school for different reasons. None of the children characterized their experiences as “bullying,” and the range of their experiences speaks to the depth of the problem. According to the Ministry of Education’s statistics for the 2014 school year, 26,000 elementary school students and 97,000 middle school students were absent for 30 days or more, the official definition of “school refusal” (the actual figure is certainly higher since the absences of some children are attributed to “medical reasons” to save the child embarrassment and the school its reputation). Both of these figures were up by about 2,000 over the previous year. The reasons given run from bullying to lack of friends and embarrassment over academic performance. The castle gives the seven children a place to feel comfortable and at ease. This search for a sense of belonging is something to which many people, both children and adults, can relate, which probably explains why this book has resonated so much with readers.

My favorite of the books nominated this year was Kotaro Isaka’s “AX”. Kabuto (his nickname among his colleagues on the dark side) is a salesman for a stationery manufacturer by day and a professional assassin by night. He has nerves of steel when it comes to killing, but he is petrified of his wife, and this makes for much of the humor in the book. The book starts with Kabuto talking with his fellow killers-for-hire about the best food to eat when arriving home late after a job. Cup ramen would seem to be the natural choice, but there is a risk of waking up his wife with the sounds he’d make tearing off the plastic wrap, pulling back the lid, and pouring in the boiling water. No, Kabuto informs his respectful disciples, after much trial and error, the only food he has found that is both satisfying and quiet is fish sausage. Kabuto has made such a study of placating his wife that Katsumi, Kabuto’s son, later finds a notebook complete with flow charts that map out possible conversations with his wife and how to respond in a way that will not provoke her.

“AX” is a series of interrelated stories from the time Katsumi is in high school until he is an adult with a son of his own. Kabuto’s attempts to convince the “doctor” who assigns him jobs to let him leave this work, without putting his wife and son at risk, underlie all of these episodes. He is a lonely man, despite his deep love for his family, and almost pathetically grateful for the few friends he makes during the course of this book. However, his profession always gets in the way of these friendships. He makes a friend at a bouldering gym, of all places (they share tips on how to appease their wives), but when they are attacked by a thief on their way to a bar one night, Kabuto is forced to deal with the situation in a way that gives away the fact that he is not just a stationery salesman. This is not exactly a thriller, nor do we get many details about the people he kills and why—his profession is simply a vehicle through which Isaka explores fatherhood and loyalty and sacrifice, with a lot of humor to leaven any heaviness.

I attempted to read 『たゆたえども沈まず』(Fluctuat nec mergitur) by 原田マハ (Maha Harada), but it seemed too formulaic and I gave up after plodding through about 75 pages. I also tried 『百貨の魔法』(The Department Store’s Magic) by 村山早紀 (Saki Murayama), but it was like being trapped in a heavily perfumed room and forced to listen to Muzak versions of classical music.

I quite enjoyed 『キラキラ共和国』 (The Sparkling Republic) by 小川糸 (Ito Ogawa), which sees Hatoko start a new stage in her life with her husband and step-daughter. This is a good one to read in the bath or before bed—nothing prize-worthy here, but a solid comfort read, and there’s always a place for books in that category.

The Booksellers Award has apparently come under criticism for not living up to its original purpose of turning more obscure titles into bestsellers, particularly last year, when Riku Onda won both the Booksellers Award and the Naoki Prize for 蜜蜂と遠雷 (Honey Bees and Distant Thunder). This year they seem to be trying to make up for that with their winner in the translated novel category, Stephanie Garber’s Caraval, translated by Kaoru Nishimoto. The Japanese translation has only sold 9,000 copies in Japan so far, but this award will likely change that.

Tsundoku Reader

Page 3 of 7

Round-up of the 2019 Booksellers Award Nominees

One Round, One Minute, 34 Seconds

No working after hours

日日是好日　(Every day is a good day)

本屋大賞2019 Japanese Booksellers Award 2019

Winners of 160th Akutagawa and Naoki Prizes

Goodnight, Tokyo

Earthlings

A Lake in the Sky

Winner of the 2018 Japanese Booksellers Award

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