#japaneseliterature — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #japaneseliterature, aggregated by home.social.
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This time, I’d like to introduce one of my favorite works by Haruki Murakami.A story that quietly asks:
Who am I?
What are relationships?
What is life?It’s a story that lets you retrace that quiet, searching journey of thought.
🖊️ 4 Colorful Friends and My Colorless Self
— A Story to Read When You Feel EmptyFeel free to take a peek!
https://introvert-path.com/en/embracing-e/reading-habit/20260405-1/#JapaneseLiterature #selfreflection #introspection
#Bookish #Bookworm #Booklovers #Reading -
This time, I’d like to introduce one of my favorite works by Haruki Murakami.A story that quietly asks:
Who am I?
What are relationships?
What is life?It’s a story that lets you retrace that quiet, searching journey of thought.
🖊️ 4 Colorful Friends and My Colorless Self
— A Story to Read When You Feel EmptyFeel free to take a peek!
https://introvert-path.com/en/embracing-e/reading-habit/20260405-1/#JapaneseLiterature #selfreflection #introspection
#Bookish #Bookworm #Booklovers #Reading -
This time, I’d like to introduce one of my favorite works by Haruki Murakami.A story that quietly asks:
Who am I?
What are relationships?
What is life?It’s a story that lets you retrace that quiet, searching journey of thought.
🖊️ 4 Colorful Friends and My Colorless Self
— A Story to Read When You Feel EmptyFeel free to take a peek!
https://introvert-path.com/en/embracing-e/reading-habit/20260405-1/#JapaneseLiterature #selfreflection #introspection
#Bookish #Bookworm #Booklovers #Reading -
This time, I’d like to introduce one of my favorite works by Haruki Murakami.A story that quietly asks:
Who am I?
What are relationships?
What is life?It’s a story that lets you retrace that quiet, searching journey of thought.
🖊️ 4 Colorful Friends and My Colorless Self
— A Story to Read When You Feel EmptyFeel free to take a peek!
https://introvert-path.com/en/embracing-e/reading-habit/20260405-1/#JapaneseLiterature #selfreflection #introspection
#Bookish #Bookworm #Booklovers #Reading -
This time, I’d like to introduce one of my favorite works by Haruki Murakami.A story that quietly asks:
Who am I?
What are relationships?
What is life?It’s a story that lets you retrace that quiet, searching journey of thought.
🖊️ 4 Colorful Friends and My Colorless Self
— A Story to Read When You Feel EmptyFeel free to take a peek!
https://introvert-path.com/en/embracing-e/reading-habit/20260405-1/#JapaneseLiterature #selfreflection #introspection
#Bookish #Bookworm #Booklovers #Reading -
So sad to know that Koji Suzuki, the creator of the Sadako universe, and one of my favorite writers, passed away in May 8. Suzuki really left a great legacy in the Japanese Horror.
Rest in peace, master !!! -
So sad to know that Koji Suzuki, the creator of the Sadako universe, and one of my favorite writers, passed away in May 8. Suzuki really left a great legacy in the Japanese Horror.
Rest in peace, master !!!
#Japan #JapaneseLiterature #JHorror #鈴木光司 #SuzukiKoji -
New book on the round !
Haruki Murakami's After Dark. This is the very first book I read from him. Been curious about his works so I wanted to start with that book! Hope to enjoy it!#NowReading #Japan #JapaneseLiterature #Books #Reader #Reading #MurakamiHaruki #村上春樹
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New book on the round !
Haruki Murakami's After Dark. This is the very first book I read from him. Been curious about his works so I wanted to start with that book! Hope to enjoy it!#NowReading #Japan #JapaneseLiterature #Books #Reader #Reading #MurakamiHaruki #村上春樹
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New book on the round !
Haruki Murakami's After Dark. This is the very first book I read from him. Been curious about his works so I wanted to start with that book! Hope to enjoy it!#NowReading #Japan #JapaneseLiterature #Books #Reader #Reading #MurakamiHaruki #村上春樹
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New book on the round !
Haruki Murakami's After Dark. This is the very first book I read from him. Been curious about his works so I wanted to start with that book! Hope to enjoy it!#NowReading #Japan #JapaneseLiterature #Books #Reader #Reading #MurakamiHaruki #村上春樹
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New book on the round !
Haruki Murakami's After Dark. This is the very first book I read from him. Been curious about his works so I wanted to start with that book! Hope to enjoy it!#NowReading #Japan #JapaneseLiterature #Books #Reader #Reading #MurakamiHaruki #村上春樹
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New book on the round !
Haruki Murakami's After Dark. This is the very first book I read from him. Been curious about his works so I wanted to start with that book! Hope to enjoy it!
#NowReading #Japan #JapaneseLiterature #Books #Reader #Reading #MurakamiHaruki #村上春樹 -
New book on the round !
Haruki Murakami's After Dark. This is the very first book I read from him. Been curious about his works so I wanted to start with that book! Hope to enjoy it!
#NowReading #Japan #JapaneseLiterature #Books #Reader #Reading #MurakamiHaruki #村上春樹 -
And of course my lovely lady doesn't want to be left out 😸
#CatsOfMastodon #FediCats #BlackCats #JapaneseLiterature #Caturday -
Everyone knows that cats and Japanese literature go well together 😼
#CatsOfMastodon #FediCats #BlackCats #JapaneseLiterature #MiekoKawakami
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In older Japanese articles, essays etc., authors often used 君 to refer to their peers. While it’s a casual "you" today, it then functioned as a formal and respectful way to address a colleague in public discourse.
It’s not casual intimacy but a sign of intellectual equality and professional esteem, closer to a respectful "my friend" or a formal address than the "tutoying" (duzen) style it implies today.
#Japanese #JapaneseLanguage #Linguistics #JapaneseLiterature #Etymology
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In older Japanese articles, essays etc., authors often used 君 to refer to their peers. While it’s a casual "you" today, it then functioned as a formal and respectful way to address a colleague in public discourse.
It’s not casual intimacy but a sign of intellectual equality and professional esteem, closer to a respectful "my friend" or a formal address than the "tutoying" (duzen) style it implies today.
#Japanese #JapaneseLanguage #Linguistics #JapaneseLiterature #Etymology
-
In older Japanese articles, essays etc., authors often used 君 to refer to their peers. While it’s a casual "you" today, it then functioned as a formal and respectful way to address a colleague in public discourse.
It’s not casual intimacy but a sign of intellectual equality and professional esteem, closer to a respectful "my friend" or a formal address than the "tutoying" (duzen) style it implies today.
#Japanese #JapaneseLanguage #Linguistics #JapaneseLiterature #Etymology
-
In older Japanese articles, essays etc., authors often used 君 to refer to their peers. While it’s a casual "you" today, it then functioned as a formal and respectful way to address a colleague in public discourse.
It’s not casual intimacy but a sign of intellectual equality and professional esteem, closer to a respectful "my friend" or a formal address than the "tutoying" (duzen) style it implies today.
#Japanese #JapaneseLanguage #Linguistics #JapaneseLiterature #Etymology
-
In older Japanese articles, essays etc., authors often used 君 to refer to their peers. While it’s a casual "you" today, it then functioned as a formal and respectful way to address a colleague in public discourse.
It’s not casual intimacy but a sign of intellectual equality and professional esteem, closer to a respectful "my friend" or a formal address than the "tutoying" (duzen) style it implies today.
#Japanese #JapaneseLanguage #Linguistics #JapaneseLiterature #Etymology
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"I was truly surprised. I wasn't even on the nominee list in the beginning, so I did not expect to be chosen," Takaki told the Japan Times, adding that her name was added in the second round of nominations. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2026/04/05/books/japan-poetry-prize-mr-h/?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=mastodon #culture #books #poetry #mrhprize #japaneseliterature
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Not Quite Kafkaesque – All Atmosphere, No Gravity, All Symbol, No Substance: On Reading Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore
March 25, 2026When Surrealism Forgets the Human Center
There is a peculiar kind of disappointment that arrives not with anger, but with a shrug. That was my experience reading Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami, coming right after Norwegian Wood, which, for all its melancholy excesses, at least held together as a recognizably human story. Here, the seams are not just visible. They are the point. Or perhaps they are meant to dissolve altogether. I am not convinced they do.
The novel disperses itself almost immediately into two narrative streams. One follows Kafka Tamura, fifteen, self-exiled, self-mythologizing, carrying an Oedipal prophecy like a private curse. The other trails Nakata, an old man whose cognitive simplicity masks something like metaphysical permeability. Their paths gesture toward convergence, though not in any way that satisfies the ordinary appetite for causality. This is not negligence. It is design. Still, design does not always translate to engagement. I kept reading, yes. But often out of habit, or perhaps out of a faint hope that coherence would eventually coalesce from the fragments. It rarely did.
Kafka himself, for a protagonist, feels curiously sealed. He speaks with an interiority that seems pre-assembled, as though he has read too many books about alienated boys and decided to become one. That may well be the point. A constructed self, performing its own narrative. Yet even that awareness did not make him more interesting to me. He remains distant, almost airless, even in moments that should carry emotional charge. His flight from home is framed as a coming-of-age, but it is less a transformation than a prolonged suspension. Things happen around him, through him, sometimes to him, but seldom because of him in any psychologically persuasive way.
Nakata, on the other hand, is meant to charm, or at least to disarm. His conversations with cats should have delighted me. I love cats. I wanted to be delighted. Instead, those passages felt oddly inert, as though the whimsy were being insisted upon rather than discovered. And then there is that scene. The grotesque violence inflicted on the cats. It arrives with such lurid intensity that it fractures whatever fragile enchantment the novel had been attempting to build. I did not find it profound. I found it unbearable. Not in a way that deepens the work, but in a way that made me recoil from it. I nearly closed the book. I considered, briefly, not returning to it at all.
And yet I did return. Because Murakami can write. This is the maddening part. The prose is smooth, almost frictionless. Sentences carry you forward with a quiet insistence. Even when the content fails to grip, the texture of the writing persuades you to continue. There is a kind of narrative hypnosis at work. You keep turning the pages, not out of urgency, but out of rhythm. It is like listening to a piece of music that does not move you emotionally, yet is structured so elegantly that you cannot quite stop listening.
Speaking of music, the references scattered throughout the novel were among the few things that genuinely engaged me. Franz Schubert, Ludwig van Beethoven. These are not mere ornaments. They function as tonal anchors, moments where the novel briefly aligns with something outside itself, something I could latch onto. There is a certain pleasure in recognizing these names, in recalling the music, in letting it echo against the text. Perhaps that says more about me than about the book. An admission, maybe, that I was searching for footholds wherever I could find them.
Murakami’s narrative logic operates less like a chain and more like a constellation. Events do not follow one another so much as they resonate across distance. A raining of fish, a talking cat, a forest that feels less like a place than a threshold. These are not meant to be explained. They are meant to be accepted. Or, more precisely, they are meant to be lived through as one would live through a dream. The problem, for me, is that dreams are compelling when they carry an emotional truth that persists even after the details dissolve. Here, the details linger, but the emotional truth remains elusive.
Fatalism saturates the novel. Kafka’s prophecy, delivered by his father, hangs over everything with the weight of inevitability. You will kill your father. You will sleep with your mother. You will sleep with your sister. It is an inheritance of doom, a script that Kafka both resists and fulfills. Or believes he fulfills. The ambiguity is deliberate. Did he commit these acts, or did he merely dream them, imagine them, internalize them to the point where the distinction no longer matters? Murakami seems less interested in the factual answer than in the psychological condition of believing oneself bound by fate.
There is also the matter of the title, which invokes Franz Kafka and, with it, a very particular expectation. “Kafkaesque” is not merely a synonym for strange or surreal. It suggests a precise texture of experience: the claustrophobia of opaque systems, the slow suffocation of the individual under incomprehensible authority, a logic that is internally consistent yet fundamentally hostile to human understanding. It is dread sharpened by bureaucracy, anxiety given form through labyrinthine rules that cannot be mastered, only endured. Murakami’s novel, for all its dreamlike qualities, does not quite inhabit that space. Its surrealism is softer, more ambient, less punitive. The world of Kafka on the Shore does not trap its characters in the same merciless machinery; it lets them drift. Even its violence and its omens feel diffused, unmoored from the kind of existential pressure that makes something truly Kafkaesque. The title gestures toward that lineage, but the novel itself never fully delivers on it.
There is something almost Greek about it. Not in structure, but in sensibility. The idea that one cannot escape what has been foretold, that every attempt at avoidance becomes a step toward realization. Yet unlike Greek tragedy, where the machinery of fate is stark and inexorable, here it is diffuse, almost vaporous. Omens appear, but they do not compel. They suggest. They whisper. The characters move as though guided by an unseen current, yet they also drift, hesitate, double back. Fate, in this novel, is not a straight line. It is a fog.
The sexual elements complicate this further. They are not incidental. They are central. Kafka’s encounters with Miss Saeki, with Sakura, are charged not just with desire but with the possibility, or the fear, of incestuous fulfillment. Miss Saeki, in particular, exists in a kind of temporal dislocation. She is both the woman she is and the girl she once was. Kafka’s attraction to her is entangled with memory, with projection, with the spectral presence of a past he never lived. Their relationship resists easy categorization. It is tender, in moments. It is also deeply unsettling.
The age difference cannot be ignored. A fifteen-year-old boy and an older woman. There is a cultural and literary context in which such dynamics are often treated with a certain permissiveness, especially when filtered through a male gaze. But reverse the genders. Imagine Miss Saeki as the minor, Kafka as the adult. The reception would be entirely different. The discomfort would not be aesthetic. It would be immediate, moral, perhaps even outraged. This asymmetry reveals something about how we process narratives of desire, about whose vulnerability is foregrounded and whose is obscured.
Murakami does not sensationalize these scenes. That is to his credit. They are written with a kind of restraint, a quietness that avoids cheapness. But restraint does not neutralize implication. If anything, it intensifies it. The lack of explicit judgment leaves you alone with the material, forced to navigate it without guidance. I did not find clarity there. Only a lingering unease.
And perhaps that is the point. Not clarity, but unease. Not resolution, but suspension. The novel refuses to settle into a single mode. It is part coming-of-age, part metaphysical inquiry, part surrealist exercise. It gestures toward meaning without ever quite delivering it. For some readers, this is precisely its strength. The openness, the interpretive freedom, the invitation to construct one’s own coherence. For me, it felt less like freedom and more like absence. An emptiness where something should have been.
Still, I cannot dismiss it outright. There are passages of real beauty here. Moments where the language, the imagery, the rhythm align in a way that feels almost luminous. A sentence will catch you off guard. A description will linger. Murakami knows how to create atmosphere, how to sustain a mood, how to keep you inside a particular emotional register even when the narrative itself feels diffuse.
So I am left in a peculiar position. Admiring the craft, resisting the content. Turning the pages, yet rarely feeling compelled by what I find on them. It is one of those books where you acknowledge the author’s control, his precision, his ability to orchestrate a complex structure, and yet you remain unmoved by the experience as a whole. A kind of aesthetic respect, divorced from genuine engagement.
Maybe that is enough for some. It was not quite enough for me.
And yet, I read it to the end.
That, perhaps, is its own kind of testament.
#bibliophilia #bookReview #books #fiction #HarukiMurakami #JapaneseLiterature #KafkaOnTheShore #literature #novels #reading -
Not Quite Kafkaesque – All Atmosphere, No Gravity, All Symbol, No Substance: On Reading Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore
March 25, 2026There is a peculiar kind of disappointment that arrives not with anger, but with a shrug. That was my experience reading Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami, coming right after Norwegian Wood, which, for all its melancholy excesses, at least held together as a recognizably human story. Here, the seams are not just visible. They are the point. Or perhaps they are meant to dissolve altogether. I am not convinced they do.
The novel disperses itself almost immediately into two narrative streams. One follows Kafka Tamura, fifteen, self-exiled, self-mythologizing, carrying an Oedipal prophecy like a private curse. The other trails Nakata, an old man whose cognitive simplicity masks something like metaphysical permeability. Their paths gesture toward convergence, though not in any way that satisfies the ordinary appetite for causality. This is not negligence. It is design. Still, design does not always translate to engagement. I kept reading, yes. But often out of habit, or perhaps out of a faint hope that coherence would eventually coalesce from the fragments. It rarely did.
Kafka himself, for a protagonist, feels curiously sealed. He speaks with an interiority that seems pre-assembled, as though he has read too many books about alienated boys and decided to become one. That may well be the point. A constructed self, performing its own narrative. Yet even that awareness did not make him more interesting to me. He remains distant, almost airless, even in moments that should carry emotional charge. His flight from home is framed as a coming-of-age, but it is less a transformation than a prolonged suspension. Things happen around him, through him, sometimes to him, but seldom because of him in any psychologically persuasive way.
Nakata, on the other hand, is meant to charm, or at least to disarm. His conversations with cats should have delighted me. I love cats. I wanted to be delighted. Instead, those passages felt oddly inert, as though the whimsy were being insisted upon rather than discovered. And then there is that scene. The grotesque violence inflicted on the cats. It arrives with such lurid intensity that it fractures whatever fragile enchantment the novel had been attempting to build. I did not find it profound. I found it unbearable. Not in a way that deepens the work, but in a way that made me recoil from it. I nearly closed the book. I considered, briefly, not returning to it at all.
And yet I did return. Because Murakami can write. This is the maddening part. The prose is smooth, almost frictionless. Sentences carry you forward with a quiet insistence. Even when the content fails to grip, the texture of the writing persuades you to continue. There is a kind of narrative hypnosis at work. You keep turning the pages, not out of urgency, but out of rhythm. It is like listening to a piece of music that does not move you emotionally, yet is structured so elegantly that you cannot quite stop listening.
Speaking of music, the references scattered throughout the novel were among the few things that genuinely engaged me. Franz Schubert, Ludwig van Beethoven. These are not mere ornaments. They function as tonal anchors, moments where the novel briefly aligns with something outside itself, something I could latch onto. There is a certain pleasure in recognizing these names, in recalling the music, in letting it echo against the text. Perhaps that says more about me than about the book. An admission, maybe, that I was searching for footholds wherever I could find them.
Murakami’s narrative logic operates less like a chain and more like a constellation. Events do not follow one another so much as they resonate across distance. A raining of fish, a talking cat, a forest that feels less like a place than a threshold. These are not meant to be explained. They are meant to be accepted. Or, more precisely, they are meant to be lived through as one would live through a dream. The problem, for me, is that dreams are compelling when they carry an emotional truth that persists even after the details dissolve. Here, the details linger, but the emotional truth remains elusive.
Fatalism saturates the novel. Kafka’s prophecy, delivered by his father, hangs over everything with the weight of inevitability. You will kill your father. You will sleep with your mother. You will sleep with your sister. It is an inheritance of doom, a script that Kafka both resists and fulfills. Or believes he fulfills. The ambiguity is deliberate. Did he commit these acts, or did he merely dream them, imagine them, internalize them to the point where the distinction no longer matters? Murakami seems less interested in the factual answer than in the psychological condition of believing oneself bound by fate.
There is also the matter of the title, which invokes Franz Kafka and, with it, a very particular expectation. “Kafkaesque” is not merely a synonym for strange or surreal. It suggests a precise texture of experience: the claustrophobia of opaque systems, the slow suffocation of the individual under incomprehensible authority, a logic that is internally consistent yet fundamentally hostile to human understanding. It is dread sharpened by bureaucracy, anxiety given form through labyrinthine rules that cannot be mastered, only endured. Murakami’s novel, for all its dreamlike qualities, does not quite inhabit that space. Its surrealism is softer, more ambient, less punitive. The world of Kafka on the Shore does not trap its characters in the same merciless machinery; it lets them drift. Even its violence and its omens feel diffused, unmoored from the kind of existential pressure that makes something truly Kafkaesque. The title gestures toward that lineage, but the novel itself never fully delivers on it.
There is something almost Greek about it. Not in structure, but in sensibility. The idea that one cannot escape what has been foretold, that every attempt at avoidance becomes a step toward realization. Yet unlike Greek tragedy, where the machinery of fate is stark and inexorable, here it is diffuse, almost vaporous. Omens appear, but they do not compel. They suggest. They whisper. The characters move as though guided by an unseen current, yet they also drift, hesitate, double back. Fate, in this novel, is not a straight line. It is a fog.
The sexual elements complicate this further. They are not incidental. They are central. Kafka’s encounters with Miss Saeki, with Sakura, are charged not just with desire but with the possibility, or the fear, of incestuous fulfillment. Miss Saeki, in particular, exists in a kind of temporal dislocation. She is both the woman she is and the girl she once was. Kafka’s attraction to her is entangled with memory, with projection, with the spectral presence of a past he never lived. Their relationship resists easy categorization. It is tender, in moments. It is also deeply unsettling.
The age difference cannot be ignored. A fifteen-year-old boy and an older woman. There is a cultural and literary context in which such dynamics are often treated with a certain permissiveness, especially when filtered through a male gaze. But reverse the genders. Imagine Miss Saeki as the minor, Kafka as the adult. The reception would be entirely different. The discomfort would not be aesthetic. It would be immediate, moral, perhaps even outraged. This asymmetry reveals something about how we process narratives of desire, about whose vulnerability is foregrounded and whose is obscured.
Murakami does not sensationalize these scenes. That is to his credit. They are written with a kind of restraint, a quietness that avoids cheapness. But restraint does not neutralize implication. If anything, it intensifies it. The lack of explicit judgment leaves you alone with the material, forced to navigate it without guidance. I did not find clarity there. Only a lingering unease.
And perhaps that is the point. Not clarity, but unease. Not resolution, but suspension. The novel refuses to settle into a single mode. It is part coming-of-age, part metaphysical inquiry, part surrealist exercise. It gestures toward meaning without ever quite delivering it. For some readers, this is precisely its strength. The openness, the interpretive freedom, the invitation to construct one’s own coherence. For me, it felt less like freedom and more like absence. An emptiness where something should have been.
Still, I cannot dismiss it outright. There are passages of real beauty here. Moments where the language, the imagery, the rhythm align in a way that feels almost luminous. A sentence will catch you off guard. A description will linger. Murakami knows how to create atmosphere, how to sustain a mood, how to keep you inside a particular emotional register even when the narrative itself feels diffuse.
So I am left in a peculiar position. Admiring the craft, resisting the content. Turning the pages, yet rarely feeling compelled by what I find on them. It is one of those books where you acknowledge the author’s control, his precision, his ability to orchestrate a complex structure, and yet you remain unmoved by the experience as a whole. A kind of aesthetic respect, divorced from genuine engagement.
Maybe that is enough for some. It was not quite enough for me.
And yet, I read it to the end.
That, perhaps, is its own kind of testament.
#bibliophilia #bookReview #books #fiction #HarukiMurakami #JapaneseLiterature #KafkaOnTheShore #literature #novels #reading -
Not Quite Kafkaesque – All Atmosphere, No Gravity, All Symbol, No Substance: On Reading Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore
March 25, 2026When Surrealism Forgets the Human Center
There is a peculiar kind of disappointment that arrives not with anger, but with a shrug. That was my experience reading Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami, coming right after Norwegian Wood, which, for all its melancholy excesses, at least held together as a recognizably human story. Here, the seams are not just visible. They are the point. Or perhaps they are meant to dissolve altogether. I am not convinced they do.
The novel disperses itself almost immediately into two narrative streams. One follows Kafka Tamura, fifteen, self-exiled, self-mythologizing, carrying an Oedipal prophecy like a private curse. The other trails Nakata, an old man whose cognitive simplicity masks something like metaphysical permeability. Their paths gesture toward convergence, though not in any way that satisfies the ordinary appetite for causality. This is not negligence. It is design. Still, design does not always translate to engagement. I kept reading, yes. But often out of habit, or perhaps out of a faint hope that coherence would eventually coalesce from the fragments. It rarely did.
Kafka himself, for a protagonist, feels curiously sealed. He speaks with an interiority that seems pre-assembled, as though he has read too many books about alienated boys and decided to become one. That may well be the point. A constructed self, performing its own narrative. Yet even that awareness did not make him more interesting to me. He remains distant, almost airless, even in moments that should carry emotional charge. His flight from home is framed as a coming-of-age, but it is less a transformation than a prolonged suspension. Things happen around him, through him, sometimes to him, but seldom because of him in any psychologically persuasive way.
Nakata, on the other hand, is meant to charm, or at least to disarm. His conversations with cats should have delighted me. I love cats. I wanted to be delighted. Instead, those passages felt oddly inert, as though the whimsy were being insisted upon rather than discovered. And then there is that scene. The grotesque violence inflicted on the cats. It arrives with such lurid intensity that it fractures whatever fragile enchantment the novel had been attempting to build. I did not find it profound. I found it unbearable. Not in a way that deepens the work, but in a way that made me recoil from it. I nearly closed the book. I considered, briefly, not returning to it at all.
And yet I did return. Because Murakami can write. This is the maddening part. The prose is smooth, almost frictionless. Sentences carry you forward with a quiet insistence. Even when the content fails to grip, the texture of the writing persuades you to continue. There is a kind of narrative hypnosis at work. You keep turning the pages, not out of urgency, but out of rhythm. It is like listening to a piece of music that does not move you emotionally, yet is structured so elegantly that you cannot quite stop listening.
Speaking of music, the references scattered throughout the novel were among the few things that genuinely engaged me. Franz Schubert, Ludwig van Beethoven. These are not mere ornaments. They function as tonal anchors, moments where the novel briefly aligns with something outside itself, something I could latch onto. There is a certain pleasure in recognizing these names, in recalling the music, in letting it echo against the text. Perhaps that says more about me than about the book. An admission, maybe, that I was searching for footholds wherever I could find them.
Murakami’s narrative logic operates less like a chain and more like a constellation. Events do not follow one another so much as they resonate across distance. A raining of fish, a talking cat, a forest that feels less like a place than a threshold. These are not meant to be explained. They are meant to be accepted. Or, more precisely, they are meant to be lived through as one would live through a dream. The problem, for me, is that dreams are compelling when they carry an emotional truth that persists even after the details dissolve. Here, the details linger, but the emotional truth remains elusive.
Fatalism saturates the novel. Kafka’s prophecy, delivered by his father, hangs over everything with the weight of inevitability. You will kill your father. You will sleep with your mother. You will sleep with your sister. It is an inheritance of doom, a script that Kafka both resists and fulfills. Or believes he fulfills. The ambiguity is deliberate. Did he commit these acts, or did he merely dream them, imagine them, internalize them to the point where the distinction no longer matters? Murakami seems less interested in the factual answer than in the psychological condition of believing oneself bound by fate.
There is also the matter of the title, which invokes Franz Kafka and, with it, a very particular expectation. “Kafkaesque” is not merely a synonym for strange or surreal. It suggests a precise texture of experience: the claustrophobia of opaque systems, the slow suffocation of the individual under incomprehensible authority, a logic that is internally consistent yet fundamentally hostile to human understanding. It is dread sharpened by bureaucracy, anxiety given form through labyrinthine rules that cannot be mastered, only endured. Murakami’s novel, for all its dreamlike qualities, does not quite inhabit that space. Its surrealism is softer, more ambient, less punitive. The world of Kafka on the Shore does not trap its characters in the same merciless machinery; it lets them drift. Even its violence and its omens feel diffused, unmoored from the kind of existential pressure that makes something truly Kafkaesque. The title gestures toward that lineage, but the novel itself never fully delivers on it.
There is something almost Greek about it. Not in structure, but in sensibility. The idea that one cannot escape what has been foretold, that every attempt at avoidance becomes a step toward realization. Yet unlike Greek tragedy, where the machinery of fate is stark and inexorable, here it is diffuse, almost vaporous. Omens appear, but they do not compel. They suggest. They whisper. The characters move as though guided by an unseen current, yet they also drift, hesitate, double back. Fate, in this novel, is not a straight line. It is a fog.
The sexual elements complicate this further. They are not incidental. They are central. Kafka’s encounters with Miss Saeki, with Sakura, are charged not just with desire but with the possibility, or the fear, of incestuous fulfillment. Miss Saeki, in particular, exists in a kind of temporal dislocation. She is both the woman she is and the girl she once was. Kafka’s attraction to her is entangled with memory, with projection, with the spectral presence of a past he never lived. Their relationship resists easy categorization. It is tender, in moments. It is also deeply unsettling.
The age difference cannot be ignored. A fifteen-year-old boy and an older woman. There is a cultural and literary context in which such dynamics are often treated with a certain permissiveness, especially when filtered through a male gaze. But reverse the genders. Imagine Miss Saeki as the minor, Kafka as the adult. The reception would be entirely different. The discomfort would not be aesthetic. It would be immediate, moral, perhaps even outraged. This asymmetry reveals something about how we process narratives of desire, about whose vulnerability is foregrounded and whose is obscured.
Murakami does not sensationalize these scenes. That is to his credit. They are written with a kind of restraint, a quietness that avoids cheapness. But restraint does not neutralize implication. If anything, it intensifies it. The lack of explicit judgment leaves you alone with the material, forced to navigate it without guidance. I did not find clarity there. Only a lingering unease.
And perhaps that is the point. Not clarity, but unease. Not resolution, but suspension. The novel refuses to settle into a single mode. It is part coming-of-age, part metaphysical inquiry, part surrealist exercise. It gestures toward meaning without ever quite delivering it. For some readers, this is precisely its strength. The openness, the interpretive freedom, the invitation to construct one’s own coherence. For me, it felt less like freedom and more like absence. An emptiness where something should have been.
Still, I cannot dismiss it outright. There are passages of real beauty here. Moments where the language, the imagery, the rhythm align in a way that feels almost luminous. A sentence will catch you off guard. A description will linger. Murakami knows how to create atmosphere, how to sustain a mood, how to keep you inside a particular emotional register even when the narrative itself feels diffuse.
So I am left in a peculiar position. Admiring the craft, resisting the content. Turning the pages, yet rarely feeling compelled by what I find on them. It is one of those books where you acknowledge the author’s control, his precision, his ability to orchestrate a complex structure, and yet you remain unmoved by the experience as a whole. A kind of aesthetic respect, divorced from genuine engagement.
Maybe that is enough for some. It was not quite enough for me.
And yet, I read it to the end.
That, perhaps, is its own kind of testament.
#bibliophilia #bookReview #books #fiction #HarukiMurakami #JapaneseLiterature #KafkaOnTheShore #literature #novels #reading -
Not Quite Kafkaesque – All Atmosphere, No Gravity, All Symbol, No Substance: On Reading Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore
March 25, 2026When Surrealism Forgets the Human Center
There is a peculiar kind of disappointment that arrives not with anger, but with a shrug. That was my experience reading Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami, coming right after Norwegian Wood, which, for all its melancholy excesses, at least held together as a recognizably human story. Here, the seams are not just visible. They are the point. Or perhaps they are meant to dissolve altogether. I am not convinced they do.
The novel disperses itself almost immediately into two narrative streams. One follows Kafka Tamura, fifteen, self-exiled, self-mythologizing, carrying an Oedipal prophecy like a private curse. The other trails Nakata, an old man whose cognitive simplicity masks something like metaphysical permeability. Their paths gesture toward convergence, though not in any way that satisfies the ordinary appetite for causality. This is not negligence. It is design. Still, design does not always translate to engagement. I kept reading, yes. But often out of habit, or perhaps out of a faint hope that coherence would eventually coalesce from the fragments. It rarely did.
Kafka himself, for a protagonist, feels curiously sealed. He speaks with an interiority that seems pre-assembled, as though he has read too many books about alienated boys and decided to become one. That may well be the point. A constructed self, performing its own narrative. Yet even that awareness did not make him more interesting to me. He remains distant, almost airless, even in moments that should carry emotional charge. His flight from home is framed as a coming-of-age, but it is less a transformation than a prolonged suspension. Things happen around him, through him, sometimes to him, but seldom because of him in any psychologically persuasive way.
Nakata, on the other hand, is meant to charm, or at least to disarm. His conversations with cats should have delighted me. I love cats. I wanted to be delighted. Instead, those passages felt oddly inert, as though the whimsy were being insisted upon rather than discovered. And then there is that scene. The grotesque violence inflicted on the cats. It arrives with such lurid intensity that it fractures whatever fragile enchantment the novel had been attempting to build. I did not find it profound. I found it unbearable. Not in a way that deepens the work, but in a way that made me recoil from it. I nearly closed the book. I considered, briefly, not returning to it at all.
And yet I did return. Because Murakami can write. This is the maddening part. The prose is smooth, almost frictionless. Sentences carry you forward with a quiet insistence. Even when the content fails to grip, the texture of the writing persuades you to continue. There is a kind of narrative hypnosis at work. You keep turning the pages, not out of urgency, but out of rhythm. It is like listening to a piece of music that does not move you emotionally, yet is structured so elegantly that you cannot quite stop listening.
Speaking of music, the references scattered throughout the novel were among the few things that genuinely engaged me. Franz Schubert, Ludwig van Beethoven. These are not mere ornaments. They function as tonal anchors, moments where the novel briefly aligns with something outside itself, something I could latch onto. There is a certain pleasure in recognizing these names, in recalling the music, in letting it echo against the text. Perhaps that says more about me than about the book. An admission, maybe, that I was searching for footholds wherever I could find them.
Murakami’s narrative logic operates less like a chain and more like a constellation. Events do not follow one another so much as they resonate across distance. A raining of fish, a talking cat, a forest that feels less like a place than a threshold. These are not meant to be explained. They are meant to be accepted. Or, more precisely, they are meant to be lived through as one would live through a dream. The problem, for me, is that dreams are compelling when they carry an emotional truth that persists even after the details dissolve. Here, the details linger, but the emotional truth remains elusive.
Fatalism saturates the novel. Kafka’s prophecy, delivered by his father, hangs over everything with the weight of inevitability. You will kill your father. You will sleep with your mother. You will sleep with your sister. It is an inheritance of doom, a script that Kafka both resists and fulfills. Or believes he fulfills. The ambiguity is deliberate. Did he commit these acts, or did he merely dream them, imagine them, internalize them to the point where the distinction no longer matters? Murakami seems less interested in the factual answer than in the psychological condition of believing oneself bound by fate.
There is also the matter of the title, which invokes Franz Kafka and, with it, a very particular expectation. “Kafkaesque” is not merely a synonym for strange or surreal. It suggests a precise texture of experience: the claustrophobia of opaque systems, the slow suffocation of the individual under incomprehensible authority, a logic that is internally consistent yet fundamentally hostile to human understanding. It is dread sharpened by bureaucracy, anxiety given form through labyrinthine rules that cannot be mastered, only endured. Murakami’s novel, for all its dreamlike qualities, does not quite inhabit that space. Its surrealism is softer, more ambient, less punitive. The world of Kafka on the Shore does not trap its characters in the same merciless machinery; it lets them drift. Even its violence and its omens feel diffused, unmoored from the kind of existential pressure that makes something truly Kafkaesque. The title gestures toward that lineage, but the novel itself never fully delivers on it.
There is something almost Greek about it. Not in structure, but in sensibility. The idea that one cannot escape what has been foretold, that every attempt at avoidance becomes a step toward realization. Yet unlike Greek tragedy, where the machinery of fate is stark and inexorable, here it is diffuse, almost vaporous. Omens appear, but they do not compel. They suggest. They whisper. The characters move as though guided by an unseen current, yet they also drift, hesitate, double back. Fate, in this novel, is not a straight line. It is a fog.
The sexual elements complicate this further. They are not incidental. They are central. Kafka’s encounters with Miss Saeki, with Sakura, are charged not just with desire but with the possibility, or the fear, of incestuous fulfillment. Miss Saeki, in particular, exists in a kind of temporal dislocation. She is both the woman she is and the girl she once was. Kafka’s attraction to her is entangled with memory, with projection, with the spectral presence of a past he never lived. Their relationship resists easy categorization. It is tender, in moments. It is also deeply unsettling.
The age difference cannot be ignored. A fifteen-year-old boy and an older woman. There is a cultural and literary context in which such dynamics are often treated with a certain permissiveness, especially when filtered through a male gaze. But reverse the genders. Imagine Miss Saeki as the minor, Kafka as the adult. The reception would be entirely different. The discomfort would not be aesthetic. It would be immediate, moral, perhaps even outraged. This asymmetry reveals something about how we process narratives of desire, about whose vulnerability is foregrounded and whose is obscured.
Murakami does not sensationalize these scenes. That is to his credit. They are written with a kind of restraint, a quietness that avoids cheapness. But restraint does not neutralize implication. If anything, it intensifies it. The lack of explicit judgment leaves you alone with the material, forced to navigate it without guidance. I did not find clarity there. Only a lingering unease.
And perhaps that is the point. Not clarity, but unease. Not resolution, but suspension. The novel refuses to settle into a single mode. It is part coming-of-age, part metaphysical inquiry, part surrealist exercise. It gestures toward meaning without ever quite delivering it. For some readers, this is precisely its strength. The openness, the interpretive freedom, the invitation to construct one’s own coherence. For me, it felt less like freedom and more like absence. An emptiness where something should have been.
Still, I cannot dismiss it outright. There are passages of real beauty here. Moments where the language, the imagery, the rhythm align in a way that feels almost luminous. A sentence will catch you off guard. A description will linger. Murakami knows how to create atmosphere, how to sustain a mood, how to keep you inside a particular emotional register even when the narrative itself feels diffuse.
So I am left in a peculiar position. Admiring the craft, resisting the content. Turning the pages, yet rarely feeling compelled by what I find on them. It is one of those books where you acknowledge the author’s control, his precision, his ability to orchestrate a complex structure, and yet you remain unmoved by the experience as a whole. A kind of aesthetic respect, divorced from genuine engagement.
Maybe that is enough for some. It was not quite enough for me.
And yet, I read it to the end.
That, perhaps, is its own kind of testament.
#bibliophilia #bookReview #books #fiction #HarukiMurakami #JapaneseLiterature #KafkaOnTheShore #literature #novels #reading -
Not Quite Kafkaesque – All Atmosphere, No Gravity, All Symbol, No Substance: On Reading Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore
March 25, 2026When Surrealism Forgets the Human Center
There is a peculiar kind of disappointment that arrives not with anger, but with a shrug. That was my experience reading Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami, coming right after Norwegian Wood, which, for all its melancholy excesses, at least held together as a recognizably human story. Here, the seams are not just visible. They are the point. Or perhaps they are meant to dissolve altogether. I am not convinced they do.
The novel disperses itself almost immediately into two narrative streams. One follows Kafka Tamura, fifteen, self-exiled, self-mythologizing, carrying an Oedipal prophecy like a private curse. The other trails Nakata, an old man whose cognitive simplicity masks something like metaphysical permeability. Their paths gesture toward convergence, though not in any way that satisfies the ordinary appetite for causality. This is not negligence. It is design. Still, design does not always translate to engagement. I kept reading, yes. But often out of habit, or perhaps out of a faint hope that coherence would eventually coalesce from the fragments. It rarely did.
Kafka himself, for a protagonist, feels curiously sealed. He speaks with an interiority that seems pre-assembled, as though he has read too many books about alienated boys and decided to become one. That may well be the point. A constructed self, performing its own narrative. Yet even that awareness did not make him more interesting to me. He remains distant, almost airless, even in moments that should carry emotional charge. His flight from home is framed as a coming-of-age, but it is less a transformation than a prolonged suspension. Things happen around him, through him, sometimes to him, but seldom because of him in any psychologically persuasive way.
Nakata, on the other hand, is meant to charm, or at least to disarm. His conversations with cats should have delighted me. I love cats. I wanted to be delighted. Instead, those passages felt oddly inert, as though the whimsy were being insisted upon rather than discovered. And then there is that scene. The grotesque violence inflicted on the cats. It arrives with such lurid intensity that it fractures whatever fragile enchantment the novel had been attempting to build. I did not find it profound. I found it unbearable. Not in a way that deepens the work, but in a way that made me recoil from it. I nearly closed the book. I considered, briefly, not returning to it at all.
And yet I did return. Because Murakami can write. This is the maddening part. The prose is smooth, almost frictionless. Sentences carry you forward with a quiet insistence. Even when the content fails to grip, the texture of the writing persuades you to continue. There is a kind of narrative hypnosis at work. You keep turning the pages, not out of urgency, but out of rhythm. It is like listening to a piece of music that does not move you emotionally, yet is structured so elegantly that you cannot quite stop listening.
Speaking of music, the references scattered throughout the novel were among the few things that genuinely engaged me. Franz Schubert, Ludwig van Beethoven. These are not mere ornaments. They function as tonal anchors, moments where the novel briefly aligns with something outside itself, something I could latch onto. There is a certain pleasure in recognizing these names, in recalling the music, in letting it echo against the text. Perhaps that says more about me than about the book. An admission, maybe, that I was searching for footholds wherever I could find them.
Murakami’s narrative logic operates less like a chain and more like a constellation. Events do not follow one another so much as they resonate across distance. A raining of fish, a talking cat, a forest that feels less like a place than a threshold. These are not meant to be explained. They are meant to be accepted. Or, more precisely, they are meant to be lived through as one would live through a dream. The problem, for me, is that dreams are compelling when they carry an emotional truth that persists even after the details dissolve. Here, the details linger, but the emotional truth remains elusive.
Fatalism saturates the novel. Kafka’s prophecy, delivered by his father, hangs over everything with the weight of inevitability. You will kill your father. You will sleep with your mother. You will sleep with your sister. It is an inheritance of doom, a script that Kafka both resists and fulfills. Or believes he fulfills. The ambiguity is deliberate. Did he commit these acts, or did he merely dream them, imagine them, internalize them to the point where the distinction no longer matters? Murakami seems less interested in the factual answer than in the psychological condition of believing oneself bound by fate.
There is also the matter of the title, which invokes Franz Kafka and, with it, a very particular expectation. “Kafkaesque” is not merely a synonym for strange or surreal. It suggests a precise texture of experience: the claustrophobia of opaque systems, the slow suffocation of the individual under incomprehensible authority, a logic that is internally consistent yet fundamentally hostile to human understanding. It is dread sharpened by bureaucracy, anxiety given form through labyrinthine rules that cannot be mastered, only endured. Murakami’s novel, for all its dreamlike qualities, does not quite inhabit that space. Its surrealism is softer, more ambient, less punitive. The world of Kafka on the Shore does not trap its characters in the same merciless machinery; it lets them drift. Even its violence and its omens feel diffused, unmoored from the kind of existential pressure that makes something truly Kafkaesque. The title gestures toward that lineage, but the novel itself never fully delivers on it.
There is something almost Greek about it. Not in structure, but in sensibility. The idea that one cannot escape what has been foretold, that every attempt at avoidance becomes a step toward realization. Yet unlike Greek tragedy, where the machinery of fate is stark and inexorable, here it is diffuse, almost vaporous. Omens appear, but they do not compel. They suggest. They whisper. The characters move as though guided by an unseen current, yet they also drift, hesitate, double back. Fate, in this novel, is not a straight line. It is a fog.
The sexual elements complicate this further. They are not incidental. They are central. Kafka’s encounters with Miss Saeki, with Sakura, are charged not just with desire but with the possibility, or the fear, of incestuous fulfillment. Miss Saeki, in particular, exists in a kind of temporal dislocation. She is both the woman she is and the girl she once was. Kafka’s attraction to her is entangled with memory, with projection, with the spectral presence of a past he never lived. Their relationship resists easy categorization. It is tender, in moments. It is also deeply unsettling.
The age difference cannot be ignored. A fifteen-year-old boy and an older woman. There is a cultural and literary context in which such dynamics are often treated with a certain permissiveness, especially when filtered through a male gaze. But reverse the genders. Imagine Miss Saeki as the minor, Kafka as the adult. The reception would be entirely different. The discomfort would not be aesthetic. It would be immediate, moral, perhaps even outraged. This asymmetry reveals something about how we process narratives of desire, about whose vulnerability is foregrounded and whose is obscured.
Murakami does not sensationalize these scenes. That is to his credit. They are written with a kind of restraint, a quietness that avoids cheapness. But restraint does not neutralize implication. If anything, it intensifies it. The lack of explicit judgment leaves you alone with the material, forced to navigate it without guidance. I did not find clarity there. Only a lingering unease.
And perhaps that is the point. Not clarity, but unease. Not resolution, but suspension. The novel refuses to settle into a single mode. It is part coming-of-age, part metaphysical inquiry, part surrealist exercise. It gestures toward meaning without ever quite delivering it. For some readers, this is precisely its strength. The openness, the interpretive freedom, the invitation to construct one’s own coherence. For me, it felt less like freedom and more like absence. An emptiness where something should have been.
Still, I cannot dismiss it outright. There are passages of real beauty here. Moments where the language, the imagery, the rhythm align in a way that feels almost luminous. A sentence will catch you off guard. A description will linger. Murakami knows how to create atmosphere, how to sustain a mood, how to keep you inside a particular emotional register even when the narrative itself feels diffuse.
So I am left in a peculiar position. Admiring the craft, resisting the content. Turning the pages, yet rarely feeling compelled by what I find on them. It is one of those books where you acknowledge the author’s control, his precision, his ability to orchestrate a complex structure, and yet you remain unmoved by the experience as a whole. A kind of aesthetic respect, divorced from genuine engagement.
Maybe that is enough for some. It was not quite enough for me.
And yet, I read it to the end.
That, perhaps, is its own kind of testament.
#bibliophilia #bookReview #books #fiction #HarukiMurakami #JapaneseLiterature #KafkaOnTheShore #literature #novels #reading -
In “Sisters in Yellow,” Mieko Kawakami brings to life a group of exuberant young hustlers in the underbelly of 1990s Tokyo. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2026/03/17/books/mieko-kawakami-sisters-in-yellow/?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=mastodon #culture #books #miekokawakami #japaneseliterature #translation
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The Lake does not deal with that, but some of its main characters were in such a cult as children and teenagers. The protagonist is in a relationship with one of them, and much of the novel deals with the mental health issues arising from that childhood trauma.
#haveRead #JapaneseLiterature #novel -
RE: https://mastodon.social/@elikp_william/116208190936470092
"Translator Eli KP William is equal to Hoshino’s lyricism... and his passion for the project shines through in a fluid and considered prose that hardly feels like a translation at all."
Very kind words. Makes me want to translate another book.
#japaneseliterature #japanese #literature #memoir #essay #travelwriting #translation
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The Asian Review of Books reviews my latest translation, The Traveling Tree by Michio Hoshino.
https://asianreviewofbooks.com/the-travelling-tree-by-michio-hoshino/
#japaneseliterature #japanese #literature #essay #memoir #travelwriting #translation
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One of the many nice sentences from Banana Yoshimoto's "The Lake" (みずうみ)
"It was an amazing thing, that power to never miss something like a really slender spider's thread that would only occasionally catch the light and glitter, and just keep on reeling it in with a single-minded focus." (my translation)
"It was like she was reeling in a tiny, tiny thread, slender as a cobweb, which only occasionally caught the light, and she would never miss it when it did—that’s how focused she was. It was love, and willpower." (official -- and better ^_^ -- translation by Michael Emmerich.
It's still nicer in Japanese though.
ほんとうに細い蜘蛛の糸みたいなものがたまに光を受けてきらめくのを決して見逃げず、ただそれをひたすらに集中してたぐっていくようなその力は、すさまじいものだった。
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I never realised (partly because of their name), but CD Japan cdjapan.co.jp is actually pretty good for physical books in Japanese .
Today I bought three Japanese paperbacks and it came to just over £16, and that's including delivery to the UK! The cheapest and slowest mode of delivery (air mail), but if you're not in a hurry... -
I'm delighted to announce the American release of my latest translation: The Travelling Tree (旅をする木) by Michio Hoshino!!! Published by Gaia (Hachette) in the UK this fall and now in the USA today!
https://www.amazon.com/Travelling-Tree-Michio-Hoshino/dp/1856755908
#japaneseliterature #travel #essay #memoir #translation
#USA #release #booksky -
I'm delighted to announce the American release of my latest translation: The Travelling Tree (旅をする木) by Michio Hoshino!!! Published by Gaia (Hachette) in the UK this fall and now in the USA today! #japaneseliterature #travel #essay #memoir #translation #USA #release #booksky
The Traveling Tree: Lessons fr... -
In Emi Yagi’s surreal novel, statues can speak, so the story unfolds in a museum on Mondays when a girl is paid to be a conversation partner in Latin for a statue of Venus. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2026/01/26/books/emi-yagi-book-museum/?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=mastodon #culture #books #emiyagi #yukitejima #japaneseliterature #translation
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A brief review of what I read in the past year.
遣唐使 Kentoushi -- Yōko Tawada (多和田葉子)
It is quite a good novel tackling important themes (environmental issues, disability, gender) but the humour is not quite my kind and I found the Japanese very hard.彼岸花が咲く島 Higanbana ga saku shima -- Li Kotomi (李琴峰)
This is a wonderful novel, an instant favourite. I wrote about it in more detail: https://quickandtastycooking.org.uk/articles/higanbana/みずうみ Mizuumi -- Banana Yoshimoto 吉本ばなな (still reading)
I've liked Banana Yoshimoto ever since I read Kitchen (in translation; it is still one of my favourite novels, both the Japanese and the English version; I wrote about it long ago: https://quickandtastycooking.org.uk/articles/kitchen/). I am reading Mizuumi (The Lake) in Japanese but it has been translated, and I quite like its slow development and the nuanced feelings of the protagonist.The Steep Approach to Garbadale -- Iain Banks
Iain Banks was one of my favourite writers, in particular his scifi, but his "serious" novels are very good as well. This one has the most sympathetic ned character I've ever encountered in a Scottish novel. The protagonist is very likeable as well, as is the academic mathematician.Invisible Helix -- Keigo Higashino
I have read two other works by Keigo Higashino, The Devotion of Suspect X and Malice. The former is famous, the latter is my favourite. By comparison, I feel Invisible Helix is let down by the translation, so much so that I consider re-reading it in Japanese. It's a murder mystery but it deals with issues of identity and family.Rereads
The devotion of Suspect X -- Keigo Higashino
I reread this to compare the translation.Matter -- Iain M Banks
You could read this book purely for the argument of why we are not living in a simulation.Neuromancer -- William Gibson
I don't know why but I have reread this one many times. I have no affinity with Case or Molly, and yet I relate to them, and I love the texture of the world they move in. -
Let me ask you something unusual:
Have you ever changed your nationality?This time, I’d like to talk about Kazuo Ishiguro,
the Japanese-born British novelist.If you're curious, feel free to take a peek 😌
https://introvert-path.com/en/embracing-e/reading-habit/20251012-1/#NobelPrizeInLiterature #BritishLiterature #JapaneseLiterature
#Bookish #Bookworm #Booklovers #Reading -
Leanne Ogasawara’s brilliant review of Ruth Ozeki's equally brilliant Tale of the Time Being (and Dogen's Uji [有時] Time-being and Being-Time)
#Japan #JapaneseLiterature #literature
https://dreaminginjapanese.substack.com/p/ruth-ozekis-tale-of-the-time-being -
In 2025, Japanese literature took a turn for the weird
This year’s Japanese literature in English translation was yet again ruled by a clowder of cozy cat fiction and the occasional crime story. But 2025 wasn’t without some surprises. Two ghos…
#Japan #JP #JapanNews #2025inreview #AkutagawaPrize #Fiction #Japanese #japaneseliterature #Japanesenews #news #OsamuDazai #sayakamurata #translatedliterature #Uketsu
https://www.alojapan.com/1427638/in-2025-japanese-literature-took-a-turn-for-the-weird/ -
In 2025, Japanese literature took a turn for the weird
This year’s Japanese literature in English translation was yet again ruled by a clowder of cozy cat fiction and the occasional crime story. But 2025 wasn’t without some surprises. Two ghos…
#Japan #JP #JapanNews #2025inreview #AkutagawaPrize #Fiction #Japanese #japaneseliterature #Japanesenews #news #OsamuDazai #sayakamurata #translatedliterature #Uketsu
https://www.alojapan.com/1427638/in-2025-japanese-literature-took-a-turn-for-the-weird/ -
https://www.alojapan.com/1427638/in-2025-japanese-literature-took-a-turn-for-the-weird/ In 2025, Japanese literature took a turn for the weird #2025InReview #AkutagawaPrize #Fiction #Japan #JapanNews #Japanese #JapaneseLiterature #JapaneseNews #news #OsamuDazai #SayakaMurata #TranslatedLiterature #Uketsu This year’s Japanese literature in English translation was yet again ruled by a clowder of cozy cat fiction and the occasional crime story. But 2025 wasn’t without some surprises. Two ghostly figures — novelist Osamu Dazai, who
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https://www.alojapan.com/1427638/in-2025-japanese-literature-took-a-turn-for-the-weird/ In 2025, Japanese literature took a turn for the weird #2025InReview #AkutagawaPrize #Fiction #Japan #JapanNews #Japanese #JapaneseLiterature #JapaneseNews #news #OsamuDazai #SayakaMurata #TranslatedLiterature #Uketsu This year’s Japanese literature in English translation was yet again ruled by a clowder of cozy cat fiction and the occasional crime story. But 2025 wasn’t without some surprises. Two ghostly figures — novelist Osamu Dazai, who
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The popular cozy and quirky fiction showed no signs of decline, but there were two big surprises from two ghostly figures — Uketsu and Osamu Dazai. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2025/12/14/books/japanese-literature-2025/?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=mastodon #culture #books #japaneseliterature #2025inreview #translatedliterature #fiction #uketsu #osamudazai #sayakamurata #akutagawaprize