Nothing ruins a work of art like an explanation. This haunting faintly-connected string of glimpses of distant futures of mankind is hamstrung and stripped of all its mystery by a particularly heavy-handed one. I can imagine an up-and-coming author being coerced into including such a thing, but not a multi-prizewinning one like Kawakami.

If you pretend that penultimate chapter isn't there, it's pretty good and even worth a second flip-through.

This complete translation is apparently the work of an enthusiast amateur poet collaborating with a Japanese translator. A comparison with a selection translated by Hiroaki Sato that I have at hand suggests that the quality is mostly fine. Sato's renditions tend to be more energetic and clear-cut, for better or worse.

Footnotes are sporadic and curiously lopsided, ranging from botanical notes and biographical remarks to sudden interpretative explanations of entire poems. Maybe those were the translator's favorites?

The edition is bilingual with the original text in one line followed by its romaji transcription and translation in five lines each. I spotted some typos (and inconsistent word spacing) in the transcription; my understanding of Classical Japanese is too rudimentary to be sure the original is Oll Korrect. Gotta be careful using this as CJ study material.

Quality issues notwithstanding, getting to read all of the poems in their original order reveals a constant play of motifs and echoes that vanishes in a selection, and for that alone this edition is worthy reading.

Melancholy and nocturnal mood pieces told in a highly elliptical fashion. Single flashing moments of great emotion are surrounded by shadow as if everything else were just beyond the reach of memory. I agree with all the older reviews here with the exception that I actually love it to bits. What a disquieting, haunting volume. If you know of any other works like this, please drop me a comment!

A big disappointment after the Nausicaä book. This is mostly just a synopsis of the film using stills and backgrounds from it. There's a one-page blurb by the director about what kind of a movie he wanted to make, but not a word on the creative process or on how he thought it all turned out. There's a nice but unannotated production diary by someone named Tanaka.

Cash grab merchandise, basically.

Slow-moving, strictly constrained, minimal and atmospheric. The nearest comparison I can make is to Robert Bresson's films... the book's bare focus on process is rather similar to his Un condamné à mort s'est échappé. Hands down the best novel I've read in 2017, but not to everyone's taste.

Baffling—and funny as hell if you're patient with all the dialogue. Once I got into the feel of the story, which was about midway through, it turned from a confusing slog into gloriously snowballing absurdity. If you're struggling through the beginning, as I sure was, have some you'll-know-what and try to hang on at least until the P.I.O. comes up; that chapter marks, probably not by chance, the exact midpoint of the book, and the second half presents more continuity than the first.

Really, this book is fun. It looks back to Tristram Shandy and forward to William Gaddis, and hitting the increasingly wacky twists in the second half I was more than once reminded of Graham Chapman's principle for sketch development, "How can we make this madder?".

This book is the bee's knees if you're interested in French vocal music. I've been working on some Poulenc just now; the translations here have opened my eyes to how cryptic and deceptive French colloquialisms as used in modern poetry can be. If you're not a native speaker and you need to decipher, say, some Apollinaire to sing, you aren't going to make it with a Collins Abridged. The composer biographies/evaluations are chatty, slightly eccentric, fun to read and wear their subjectivity on their sleeves. Songs about cats are meticulously underlined.