Earthlings: A Novel - Copyright © 2018 by Sayaka Murata - translated by Ginny Takemori - 256 Pages

 Earthlings: A Novel - Copyright © 2018 by Sayaka Murata - translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori 2020

In February of 2021 I read Sayaka Murata's International best seller The Convenience Store Woman.

Here is part of my reaction:

The Convenience Story Woman has sold over a million copies in Japan.  It has a cult like following of devoted readers, myself now included, trying to unravel the meaning of the central character Keiko Furukura.  Keiko starting working at a Tokyo convenience store at 18, we meet her at age 36 still working in the same convenience store. A job in a convenience store is

 considered one for college students needing extra money, job hoppers, and people needing temporary work.  It is not a socially acceptable permanent position in contemporary Japanese society.

Kieko was a strange child.  Once other kids in her elementary school were fighting.  The teacher yelled stop but they would not so Keiko hit one on the head with a shovel.  When asked why she did that she said she was stopping the fight.  Of course her parents were distressed.

Keiko totally submerges are identity into being a “convenience store woman”, living only to fulfill that position.  Years went by, coworkers and managers came and went but Kieko stayed.  Nothing ever changes in her life, no boy friends, and her only close relationship is with her sister.  People ask her why she sticks in a low income dead end part time job, her sister tells her to say she has a health issue when people ask. We see the employees come and go, get a look at the work flow in the store.  People do wonder why she has never married, expected of Japanese women.  

Then a strange man begins to work at the store.  In a remarkable series of events he quits his job and moves in with Kieko, who supports him.  Her family and friends are happy she seems to have a relationship, maybe it will lead to marriage.  But no, it is a weird sexless relationship. The man repeatedly tells her she is so drab an unattractive he could not climax with her as needed to produce a child.  The man is verbally abusing and is clearly taking advantage of her.  Then Kieko after 18 years quits her job.  Even the store manager who relies on her loyalty congratulated her, thinking she was finally moving toward a normal life.

When I received notice that her latest work, Earthlings:A Novel, was on sale as a Kindle for $1.99 I hit "purchase now" at once.

Earthlings is book in some ways similar to The Convenience Store Woman. The central character and narrator, Natsuki,who we follow from 10 to 36, resists family and social pressure to marry and procreate. After terrible sexual abuse, vividly brought to nauseating reality, at age 10 by a highly thought of male teacher, she develops a lifetime aversion to sexual contact of any sort after being caught having sex with her cousin.

She comes to believe she is an alien from another planet, waiting for a spacecraft to pick her up.

Now we flash 22 years ahead. Things get even weirder.

I don't want to reveal any more of the plot but I kept me captivated and a bit horrified. I wondered how much of her strange beliefs were caused by her cold parents and her abuse.

I eagerly await another novel by Sayaka Murata.

Sayaka Murata (in Japanese, 村田 沙耶香) is one of the most exciting up-and-coming writers in Japan today.

She herself still works part time in a convenience store, which gave her the inspiration to write Convenience Store Woman (Konbini Ningen). She debuted in 2003 with Junyu (Breastfeeding), which won the Gunzo Prize for new writers. In 2009 she won the Noma Prize for New Writers with Gin iro no uta (Silver Song), and in 2013 the Mishima Yukio Prize for Shiro-oro no machi no, sono hone no taion no (Of Bones, of Body Heat, of Whitening City). Convenience Store Woman won the 2016 Akutagawa Award. Murata has two short stories published in English (both translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori): "Lover on the Breeze" (Ruptured Fiction(s) of the Earthquake, Waseda Bungaku, 2011) and "A Clean Marriage" (Granta 127: Japan, 2014)

I highly reccomend the video below 

Mel Ulm

"Ivy Gates" -by 岡本かの子門 KANOKO OKAMOTO - 1936. - published in Japanese Short Stories:Works by 14 Modern Masters: Kawabata, Akutagawa and More Translated by Lane Dunlop Foreword by Alan Tansman TUTTLE Publishing Tokyo Rutland, Vermont Singapore “Books to Span the East and West”

"Ivy Gates" - A Short Story by 岡本かの子門 KANOKO OKAMOTO -1936

Japanese Literature Challenge 16 January through March 2023

2023 is the 15th Year in which I have participated in The Japanese Literature Challenge hosted by Dolce Bellezza. In 2009 when I first participated I had yet to read any works originally written in Japanese. Now numerous Japanese writers are on my read all I can of their works list.. The post World War Two Japanese Novel is a world class cultural treasure.

Both new and experienced readers will find numerous suggestions on the website. To participate you need only post on one work and list your review on the event website (listed above). New book bloggers will find participation a good way to meet others and expand those following their blog

In January for The Japanese Literature Challenge I posted upon 

 At the End of the Matinee by Keiichiro Hirano -2016- 306 pages- translated from the Japanese by Juliet Winters Carpenter

In February I posted on Tokyo Ueno Station- A Novel by Yu Miri -2014- translated from the Japanese by Morgan Giles - 2019 - 189 Pages

Yesterday I was kindly given a review copy of a very valuable collection of Japanese authored short stories.

Japanese Short Stories:Works by 14 Modern Masters: Kawabata, Akutagawa and More Translated by Lane Dunlop Foreword by Alan Tansman TUTTLE Publishing Tokyo Rutland, Vermont Singapore “Books to Span the East and West”

There are 12 stories in the collection. All the authors are deceased, three were women. There are very informative biographies of each writer, taken together they provide an overview of the development of the short story in Japan.

Ivy Gates" - A Short Story by 岡本かの子門 KANOKO OKAMOTO is narrated by an upper class woman in a house with numerous servants. The story opens with a stunning account of the beauty of the ivy growing on the Gates of her house. The most important character is a house maid.

"It was as if the quick-tempered Maki, by being able to calculate with her eye the spread of the growth of the tips, had for the first time discovered in herself a love for nature. Although an honest person, Maki was set in her ways to the point of inflexibility.Because of this, her two marriages had ended in divorce. Obliged to work as a maidservant in the house of strangers many years, this aging woman, who somewhere in herself possessed a hard shell of ego, had at least had the gentle side of her drawn out by these ivy tips. It pleased me. Past fifty and on the outs with all her relatives, childless, Maki herself had come to feel subconsciously the hardness of her lot. Hadn’t the natural development of her emotions and the necessity to find something to love in her later years appeared to some extent even in this matter of the ivy?"

The emotional core of the story centers on how Maki bonds with a neighbourhood girl she once loved and overcame her loneliness.

Kanoko Okamoto was born on March 1, 1889, in the Akasaka district of Tokyo, now Minato-ku. Both her father, who had been a purveyor to the Tokugawa shogunate, and her mother, descended from a famous old family of Kanagawa Prefecture and skilled in the ballad drama known as tokiwazu, were persons of artistic taste. “Ivy Gates” belongs to a group of stories about ordinary Tokyo people written during the last years of Okamoto’s life. It preserves the atmosphere of the Meiji and Taisho eras that lingered on in the low-lying shita machi district east of the Sumida River and the hilly district to the west until the late thirties. Her writing was much admired by Yasunari Kawabata, and more recently has served as an inspiration for the artist Mayumi Oda. Her major work is the long novel Shojoruten (The Vicissitudes of Life). On January 31, 1939, on a trip to the Ginza with a young friend, Kanoko Okamoto was stricken by a cerebral hemorrhage as she got off the bus. She died eighteen days later.

Mel Ulm

 

1. 
   

Tokyo Ueno Station- A Novel by Yu Miri -2014- translated from the Japanese by Morgan Giles - 2019 - 189 Pages

 

Japanese Literature Challenge 16 January through March 2023

2023 is the 15th Year in which I have participated in The Japanese Literature Challenge hosted by Dolce Bellezza. In 2009 when I first participated I had yet to read any works originally written in Japanese. Now numerous Japanese writers are on my read all I can of their works list.. The post World War Two Japanese Novel is a world class cultural treasure.

Both new and experienced readers will find numerous suggestions on the website. To participate you need only post on one work and list your review on the event website (listed above). New book bloggers will find participation a good way to meet others and expand those following their blog

In January for The Japanese Literature Challenge I posted upon 

 At the End of the Matinee by Keiichiro Hirano -2016- 306 pages- translated from the Japanese by Juliet Winters Carpenter

Tokyo Ueno Station- A Novel by Yu Miri -2014- translated from the Japanese by Morgan Giles - 2019 - 189 Pages

Kazu, the narrator, has recently passed away, his life was one of hard physical labor filled with great pain brought on by the passing of his parents, his son at 21 and his granddaughter at 23. His daughter and her child drowned in the 2011 tsumani

"I thought that once I was dead, I would be reunited with the dead," he reflects. "I thought something would be resolved by death ... But then I realized that I was back in the park. I was not going anywhere, I had not understood anything, I was still stunned by the same numberless doubts, only I was now outside life looking in, as someone who has lost the capacity to exist, now ceaselessly thinking, ceaselessly feeling --"

In a series of flashbacks we learn of his past. He worked on the construction of the venue for the Tokyo Olympics. Then he became homeless when his job ended. He lived in a homeless camp for a while but the government wanted them moved out before the games began.

We are given a powerful account of what it was like to be at the bottom of Tokyo society 

YU MIRI is a writer of plays, prose fiction, and essays, with over twenty books to her name. She received Japan’s most prestigious literary award, the Akutagawa Prize. After the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Fukushima, she began to visit the affected area, hosting a radio show to listen to survivors’ stories. She relocated to Fukushima in 2015 and has opened a bookstore and theater space to continue her cultural work in collaboration with those affected by the disaster. 

I hope to post on a few short stories by Japanese authors this month.

Mel Ulm

At the End of the Matinee by Keiichiro Hirano -2016- 306 pages- translated from Japanese by Juliet Winters Carpenter- 2021

 At the End of the Matinee by Keiichiro Hirano -2016- 306 pages- translated from the Japanese by Juliet Winters Carpenter- 2021

Japanese Literature Challenge 16 January through March 2023

2023 is the 15th Year in which I have participated in The Japanese Literature Challenge hosted by Dolce Bellezza. In 2009 when I first participated I had yet to read any works originally written in Japanese. Now numerous Japanese writers are on my read all I can of their works list.. The post World War Two Japanese Novel is a world class cultural treasure.

Both new and experienced readers will find numerous suggestions on the website. To participate you need only post on one work and list your review on the event website (listed above). New book bloggers will find participation a good way to meet others and expand those following their blog.

At the End of the Matinee centers around a long drawn out romance between a very highly regarded Japanese classical guitarist and a journalist.Makino is a classic guitarist who as of late has become somehow feeling his best work is in the past. His partner is Yoko, a journalist daughter of a Japanese mother and a Croatian father, who happens to be a renowned film director. The two are introduced after one of Makino’s performances through a friend of Yoko and immediately hit it off. Yoko is however engaged to an American man we never learn much about.

Makino is in Japan or on tours for much of the time that take him all over the world. Yoko, who is based in France, is for a period reporting from Iraq— the two begin an email correspondence. Their connection to and feelings for one another are Yoko, who is dealing with PTSD from her experiences in Iraq. Makino is also going through a musical crisis of sorts, he feels like he is no longer a musical prodigy and that he does not compare to up-and-coming young musicians. 

The plot has segments in Iraq, Paris, New York City, and Tokyo. I got little sense of place however.

In part the novel is a meditation on the power of beauty in art, whether in Bach or Death In Venice by Thomas Mann.

I found myself a bit bored with the characters. I guess overall I am glad I read this book, others say his novel A Man is much better.

Keiichiro Hirano(Author) from https://en.k-hirano.com/

Keiichiro Hirano wrote has written more than 15 novels since his debut work “The Eclipse” for which he won the prestigious Akutagawa Prize at the record age of 23. His deeply psychological fiction deals with profound and universal themes like self-love, relationships and acceptance, and spans from short stories and historical novels to essays, love stories, and literary sci-fi. As a cultural envoy to Paris appointed by Japan’s Ministry of Cultural Affairs, he traveled all over Europe giving lectures and many of his books have been translated and are widely read in France, China, Korea, Taiwan, Italy, and Egypt. In his widely viewed TED talk, he discusses what it means to really love oneself, arguing that it’s not easy to holistically love ourselves without knowing all our “selves”, good and bad, but we can discover the “self” we like with the help of the person we love. Based on this theme, his novel “At the End of the Matinee” was a runaway bestseller in Japan and released as a movie in November 2019. “A MAN” is the first of his novels to be translated into English. His second title in English “At the End of the Matinee” was released in April 2021.

[Awards]

・120th Akutagawa Prize for The Eclipse（Nisshoku）(1998)

・59th Education, Science and Technology Ministers Art Encouragement Prize for New Writers for Breach（Kekkai） (2008)

・19th Prix Deux Magots Bunkamura for Dawn (2009)

・ the Watanabe Junichi Literary Prize for At the End of the Matinee（2017）

・ the Yomiuri Prize for Literature for A MAN（2019

Mel Ulm

Strange Weather in Tokyo by Hiromi Kawakami - - 2011- translated from Japanese by Allison Markin Powell

Strange Weather in Tokyo by Hiromi Kawakami - 2011

Strange Weather in Tokyo centers on the very slowly developing relationship between a single woman in her late thirties,Tsukiko and one of her former high school teachers, Sensei,at least thirty years her senior. They run into each other in a bar by accident.  They have frequent unarranged meet ups at the bar, which serves great food along with Saki and beer. She assumes he is a widower.

As time passes a shared love of food, proximity and their history brings them into a more intimate relationship.

This is a very subtly developed story line.  Each character keeps things in reserve.

“Kawakami Hiromi (川上弘美 Kawakami Hiromi) born April 1, 1958, is a Japanese writer known for her off-beat fiction.

Born in Tokyo, Kawakami graduated from Ochanomizu Women's College in 1980. She made her debut as "Yamada Hiromi" in NW-SF No. 16, edited by Yamano Koichi and Yamada Kazuko, in 1980 with the story So-shimoku ("Diptera"), and also helped edit some early issues of NW-SF in the 1970s. She reinvented herself as a writer and wrote her first book, a collection of short stories entitled God (Kamisama) published in 1994. Her novel The Teacher's Briefcase (Sensei no kaban) is a love story between a woman in her thirties and a man in his sixties. She is also known as a literary critic and a provocative essayist.” - from Goodreads 

 

Penance by Kanae Minato - 2012 - translated from Japanese by Philip Gabriel - 2017

Penance by Kanae Minato - 2012- translated from Japanese by Philip Gabriel - 2017

Earlier this month I read Confessions, the Award winning crime novel by Kanae Minato.   Both novels center on the murder of a very young girl, age four in Confessions and 13 or so in Penance.  Each is told from multiple points of view. Both go deeply into how the murder impacts others.

Five girls, about 12, are very close.  They are all from protective families that warn them about strangers.  One day they are shopping. A man says he is having trouble unlocking a dressing room door and, with a promise of ice cream for all, induces one of the girls to go with him to the dressing room.  He murders and rapes her. The description of her body are very graphic to let us feel how disturbed the girls were when they found her body.  We see the reactions of the girls, trying to find adults.  The police quiz them but they can offer no descriptions of the man. We follow the girls for 15 years, see how the trauma impacted them. One murders her husband.  One does not get first period until she was 25.

The mother of the murdered girl is from a wealthy family.  She tells the girls shortly after the murder she will take revenge on them unless they do penance for her death.

Murders are relative to other places uncommon in Japan.  We get a look at parenting styles.  We go to a police station. 

Penance was a fast read, always a shocking event coming.  

Kanae MINATO (湊 かなえ, born 1973) is a Japanese writer of crime fiction and thrillers.

She started writing in her thirties. Her first novel Confessions (告白, Kokuhaku) became a bestseller and won the Japanese Booksellers Award. The movie Confession directed by Tetsuya Nakashima was nominated to 2011 Academy Award. 

She has been described in Japan as "the queen of iyamisu"(eww mystery), a subgenre of mystery fiction which deals with grisly episodes and the dark side of human nature. From Goodreads 

 

Confessions by Kanae Minato - 2008 - translated from Japanese by Stephen Synder - 2014

 

 

Confessions by Kanae Minato - 2008 - translated from Japanese by Stephen Synder - 2014

Winner of the ALA's 2015 Alex Award for the Best Adult Books That Appeal to Teen Audiences

- Nominated for the 2014 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel

- One of Booklist's Best Crime Novels of the Year

I have not read much in way of Japanese crime novels.  Confessions by Kanae Minato sounded interesting in the Amazon descriptions and has won numerous awards so I decided to give it a try.

The story is told from several perspectives.  The central question is who murdered the four year old daughter of a teacher and what was the motivation for the murder.  The opening chapted centers on the mother giving a speech to her high School students in which she resigns, telling them she knows which of her students murdered her daughter.  Her reasons for not turning them in are simple.  The laws in Japan are very lax on juveniles, even killers get out of Youth confinement with no record by 21.  She has devised a diabolical Revenge. One which puts all The students in danger,

There are also chapters from the point of view of the killer in which he explains his reasons, as well as another student tricked into helping him who thought it was a prank.

I found The characters well developed, i learned 

a bit about School in Japan.  The cruelty of one of the boys is chilling.  We learn enough about the famlies of the boys to try to figure out why they thought it would be fun to kill a four year old girl.

Kanae MINATO (湊 かなえ, born 1973) is a Japanese writer of crime fiction and thriller.

She started writing in her thirties. Her first novel Confessions (告白, Kokuhaku) became a bestseller and won the Japanese Booksellers Award. The movie Confession directed by Tetsuya Nakashima was nominated to 2011 Academy Award.

She has been described in Japan as "the queen of iyamisu"(eww mystery), a subgenre of mystery fiction which deals with grisly episodes and the dark side of human nature. From Goodreads 

Sweet Bean Paste by Tetsuya Akikawa a.k.a Durian Sukegawa - 2013, translated from Japanese by Alison Watts - 2017

 

Sweet Bean Paste by Tetsuya Akikawa 2013, translated from Japanese by Alison Watts - 2017

Tetsuya Akikawa is the pen name of Durian Sukegawa under which Sweet Bean Paste was originally published .

An International best seller

Sweet Bean Paste is very moving, almost heartbreaking at times.

It is set in a confectionary shop in Tokyo, specializing in dorayaki,a very popular pancake with a filling of sweet bean paste.

 The shop is run by Sontaro.  He has a troubled past, he spent two years in prison through his involvement in never quite spelled out shady activities of the shop owner.  He has abandoned his dreams of wanting to be a writer and drinks too much.  He works in the shop to pay back money he owes to the widow of the late owner and to live. He is maybe forty.

He buys his bean paste from vendors, then stuffs the pancakes with the paste.

He does not have any passion for his work. As far as we know, he has no friends, no living family..  He lives in a Spartan apartment.  We do learn a lot about the pastry business.  The owner’s widow goes over the books with him occasionally.

One day a quite elderly woman comes in the shop in response to the “Help Wanted” sign he had put in the window.  He really mostly wanted someone to talk with during the day.  The woman, Tokue, asks for the job.  Sontoaro notices her hands are deformed and feels she Will  have a hard time.  He also thinks she may scare away his customers.  She tells him she had been making bean paste for fifty years and offers to work for a very low wage as she totally  wants the job.  She loves making bean paste.it turns out her paste is simply fabulous.  Business goes way up.  They slowly become close.  Then just before midpoint, a tragic secret is revealed about Tokue’s past.

We learn that at around 14 she was diagnosed as having Hansen’s disease, once called Leporsy.  In those days, victims were confined to sanatariums, not allowed any outside contacts. Then maybe thirty years ago a cure was developed but Tokue knew nothing but living there by now.  She married another victim, they had no children and now she is a widow.  Sontaro is afraid his customers may be turned away if they learn her history.  He decides to hide it. They both gradually become friends with a teenage girl patron. We learn slowly about the history of Sontoro, the  girl and Tokue, they form a Family almost.  Each loving the other as no one else does.  

I really do not want to tell to much of the plot.  There are very sad and very up lifting moments.

I was very moved by this book.  

Durian Sukegawa studied oriental philosophy at Waseda University, before going on to work as a reporter in Berlin and Cambodia in the early 1990s. He has written a number of books and essays, TV programmes and films. He lives in Tokyo. Google Books

Born: June 17, 1962 (age 58 years), Tokyo, Japan

Nationality: Japanese

Books: Sweet Bean Paste