1lilisin
Hello everyone.
As new admin of this group I thought I'd create a thread for upcoming Japanese translations. Japanese literature, especially by women, has hit a feverish boom lately and it's hard to keep track of all the new releases. This thread does not require that only I post in it so please feel free to post upcoming translations you stumble upon.
This initial post will have a list of the books coming out in translation in the current year.
2024:
1) Toh Enjoe : Harlequin Butterfly (tr. David Boyd)
2) Kumi Kimura : Someone to Watch Over You (tr. Asa Yoneda)
3) Kazushige Abe : Mysterious Setting (tr. Michael Emmerich)
Translated books from former years:
2023 - 2022 - 2021
As new admin of this group I thought I'd create a thread for upcoming Japanese translations. Japanese literature, especially by women, has hit a feverish boom lately and it's hard to keep track of all the new releases. This thread does not require that only I post in it so please feel free to post upcoming translations you stumble upon.
This initial post will have a list of the books coming out in translation in the current year.
2024:
1) Toh Enjoe : Harlequin Butterfly (tr. David Boyd)
2) Kumi Kimura : Someone to Watch Over You (tr. Asa Yoneda)
3) Kazushige Abe : Mysterious Setting (tr. Michael Emmerich)
Translated books from former years:
2023 - 2022 - 2021
2lilisin
For 2021:
This article mentions 5 novels to look out for in 2021. This list includes some very prominent authors so I'm sure it'll be an exciting list for many. Italics are for the blurb given by the website.
1) Natsuko Imamura: The Woman in the Purple Skirt (tr. Lucy North)
This tells the story of an unhealthy relationship between two women known only as the titular woman in the purple skirt and the woman in the orange cardigan. Our protagonist, who lives in a rundown apartment and is all but destitute, follows a daily ritual of eating a cream bun in the park. She is watched, and eventually approached by the woman in the orange cardigan, who helps her into a hotel job and continues to manipulate her from the shadows.
This one won the Akutagawa Prize in 2019 and is a book I've had my eye on. Although, I recently looked at in Japanese and it looks to be a very easy read so I think I'll stick to the original.
2) Mieko Kawakami : Heaven (tr. Sam Bett and David Boyd)
This follows the tortured life of a teenage boy who is bullied relentlessly for his lazy eye. He resigns himself to his abuse but also finds kinship in a fellow classmate, a girl, who is going through the same routine of vicious bullying. This is a novel that explores the effects of bullying, the justifications of it and how bullying pervades our everyday lives. Most importantly, the book asks: why?
I haven't read Breasts and Eggs yet but I recently purchased it in Japanese and am really looking forward to it. This also sounds great about a very common problem here in Japan, albeit once I haven't read yet about in literature form.
3) Haruki Murakami : First Person Singular: Stories (tr. Philip Gabriel)
This is a collection of eight stories very much aimed at longtime fans of Murakami’s work. Every story in this collection is a first-person narrative, told by classic Murakami protagonists, as well as by Murakami himself. This collection will feature all the staple tropes of Murakami: jazz music, magical realism, dreams, surrealism and more. It also blurs the lines between fiction and memoir, representing a new form of Murakami, an evolution of his iconic style.
I'm impressed with the speed at which this is coming out. I'm pretty sure it was on bookshelves here in Japan just last year! And so quickly after his last short story collection. Murakami is just too prolific to keep up with.
4) Mizuki Tsujimura : Lonely Castle in the Mirror (tr. Philip Gabriel)
This is a new Japanese novel that uses fantastic tropes and a fantasy setting as a loose backdrop to tell a compelling tale. This is a book about loneliness and what it takes to overcome it, forming connections as we go. The novel follows the lives of seven disconnected teenagers in modern-day Tokyo who are pulled into a fantastical land through their mirrors. The castle they arrive at is a truly magnificent and majestic place, but at its core is a puzzle they must solve. Freeing themselves means being granted a wish; failing to do so will result in their death.
5) Izumi Suzuki : Terminal Boredom (tr. Polly Barton, Sam Bett, David Boyd, Daniel Joseph, Aiko Masubuchi and Helen O’Horan)
These are punk and venomous speculative fiction tales for fans of Margaret Atwood and Charlie Brooker’s “Black Mirror.” They explore social issues; play with what is real and what is acceptable. Suzuki is a daring writer and these stories will show the English-language world what she is made of.
This article mentions 5 novels to look out for in 2021. This list includes some very prominent authors so I'm sure it'll be an exciting list for many. Italics are for the blurb given by the website.
1) Natsuko Imamura: The Woman in the Purple Skirt (tr. Lucy North)
This tells the story of an unhealthy relationship between two women known only as the titular woman in the purple skirt and the woman in the orange cardigan. Our protagonist, who lives in a rundown apartment and is all but destitute, follows a daily ritual of eating a cream bun in the park. She is watched, and eventually approached by the woman in the orange cardigan, who helps her into a hotel job and continues to manipulate her from the shadows.
This one won the Akutagawa Prize in 2019 and is a book I've had my eye on. Although, I recently looked at in Japanese and it looks to be a very easy read so I think I'll stick to the original.
2) Mieko Kawakami : Heaven (tr. Sam Bett and David Boyd)
This follows the tortured life of a teenage boy who is bullied relentlessly for his lazy eye. He resigns himself to his abuse but also finds kinship in a fellow classmate, a girl, who is going through the same routine of vicious bullying. This is a novel that explores the effects of bullying, the justifications of it and how bullying pervades our everyday lives. Most importantly, the book asks: why?
I haven't read Breasts and Eggs yet but I recently purchased it in Japanese and am really looking forward to it. This also sounds great about a very common problem here in Japan, albeit once I haven't read yet about in literature form.
3) Haruki Murakami : First Person Singular: Stories (tr. Philip Gabriel)
This is a collection of eight stories very much aimed at longtime fans of Murakami’s work. Every story in this collection is a first-person narrative, told by classic Murakami protagonists, as well as by Murakami himself. This collection will feature all the staple tropes of Murakami: jazz music, magical realism, dreams, surrealism and more. It also blurs the lines between fiction and memoir, representing a new form of Murakami, an evolution of his iconic style.
I'm impressed with the speed at which this is coming out. I'm pretty sure it was on bookshelves here in Japan just last year! And so quickly after his last short story collection. Murakami is just too prolific to keep up with.
4) Mizuki Tsujimura : Lonely Castle in the Mirror (tr. Philip Gabriel)
This is a new Japanese novel that uses fantastic tropes and a fantasy setting as a loose backdrop to tell a compelling tale. This is a book about loneliness and what it takes to overcome it, forming connections as we go. The novel follows the lives of seven disconnected teenagers in modern-day Tokyo who are pulled into a fantastical land through their mirrors. The castle they arrive at is a truly magnificent and majestic place, but at its core is a puzzle they must solve. Freeing themselves means being granted a wish; failing to do so will result in their death.
5) Izumi Suzuki : Terminal Boredom (tr. Polly Barton, Sam Bett, David Boyd, Daniel Joseph, Aiko Masubuchi and Helen O’Horan)
These are punk and venomous speculative fiction tales for fans of Margaret Atwood and Charlie Brooker’s “Black Mirror.” They explore social issues; play with what is real and what is acceptable. Suzuki is a daring writer and these stories will show the English-language world what she is made of.
3stretch
>1 lilisin: This is a great thread idea, something that is sure to add to my watch out for list! Heaven and Terminal Boredom sound like they'd be right up my alley.
Here's a couple I found coming out later this year:
So We Look to the Sky; Misumi Kubo
Sexually explicit and searingly honest, So We Look to the Sky is a novel told in five linked stories that begin with an affair between a student and a woman ten years his senior, who picks him up for cosplay sex at a comics convention. Their scandalous liaison, which the woman's husband makes public by posting secretly taped video online, frames all of the stories, but each explores a different aspect of the life passages and hardships ordinary people face. A teenager experimenting with sex and then, perhaps, experiencing love and loss; a young, anime-obsessed wife bullied by her mother-in-law to produce the child she and her husband cannot conceive; a high-school girl, spurned by the student, realizing that being cute and fertile is all others expect of her; the student's best friend, who lives in the projects and is left alone to support and care for his voracious senile grandmother; and the student's mother, a divorced single parent and midwife, who guides women bringing new life into this world and must rescue her son, crushed by the twin blows of public humiliation and loss, from giving up on his own.
Colorful; Eto Mori
A beloved and bestselling classic in Japan, this groundbreaking tale of a dead soul who gets a second chance is now available in English for the very first time.
“Congratulations, you’ve won the lottery!” shouts the angel Prapura to a formless soul. The soul hasn’t been kicked out of the cycle of rebirth just yet–he’s been given a second chance. He must recall the biggest mistake of his past life while on ‘homestay’ in the body of fourteen-year-old Makoto Kobayashi, who has just committed suicide. It looks like Makoto doesn’t have a single friend, and his family don’t seem to care about him at all. But as the soul begins to live Makoto’s life on his own terms, he grows closer to the family and the people around him, and sees their true colors more clearly, shedding light on Makoto’s misunderstandings.
Three Streets; Yoko Tawada
In Tawada’s ruminative collection of three fantastic tales (after The Emissary), a nameless, wandering narrator moves between contemporary Berlin and an imaginary realm of poets and ghosts. A trip to an organic food store with a ghostly child in “Kollwitz Strasse” sets the narrator to thinking about the sketches of Käthe Kollwitz, a German artist who drew heartrending pictures of “poverty that individuals can’t be held responsible for.” In “Majakowskiring,” the narrator walks through a quiet part of what was once East Berlin, thinking about a woman who’s “a typical West Berliner” and therefore couldn’t be bothered to visit that neighborhood, then enters a mysterious restaurant in which a photograph of the Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky comes to life. And in “Pushkin Allee,” the narrator envisions the lives and motivations of Red Army soldiers, workers, and a German child memorialized in a park. Though the stories share a concern with the politics and the disasters of the 20th century, it is Tawada’s astute, observational asides that will remain with readers: city life is “an amusement park of the senses... full of people you might have met.” Brief and surprising, these stories reinvent familiar landmarks and artworks, giving readers an imaginative and hopeful way to grapple with the history that’s written into the urban landscape.
Here's a couple I found coming out later this year:
So We Look to the Sky; Misumi Kubo
Sexually explicit and searingly honest, So We Look to the Sky is a novel told in five linked stories that begin with an affair between a student and a woman ten years his senior, who picks him up for cosplay sex at a comics convention. Their scandalous liaison, which the woman's husband makes public by posting secretly taped video online, frames all of the stories, but each explores a different aspect of the life passages and hardships ordinary people face. A teenager experimenting with sex and then, perhaps, experiencing love and loss; a young, anime-obsessed wife bullied by her mother-in-law to produce the child she and her husband cannot conceive; a high-school girl, spurned by the student, realizing that being cute and fertile is all others expect of her; the student's best friend, who lives in the projects and is left alone to support and care for his voracious senile grandmother; and the student's mother, a divorced single parent and midwife, who guides women bringing new life into this world and must rescue her son, crushed by the twin blows of public humiliation and loss, from giving up on his own.
Colorful; Eto Mori
A beloved and bestselling classic in Japan, this groundbreaking tale of a dead soul who gets a second chance is now available in English for the very first time.
“Congratulations, you’ve won the lottery!” shouts the angel Prapura to a formless soul. The soul hasn’t been kicked out of the cycle of rebirth just yet–he’s been given a second chance. He must recall the biggest mistake of his past life while on ‘homestay’ in the body of fourteen-year-old Makoto Kobayashi, who has just committed suicide. It looks like Makoto doesn’t have a single friend, and his family don’t seem to care about him at all. But as the soul begins to live Makoto’s life on his own terms, he grows closer to the family and the people around him, and sees their true colors more clearly, shedding light on Makoto’s misunderstandings.
Three Streets; Yoko Tawada
In Tawada’s ruminative collection of three fantastic tales (after The Emissary), a nameless, wandering narrator moves between contemporary Berlin and an imaginary realm of poets and ghosts. A trip to an organic food store with a ghostly child in “Kollwitz Strasse” sets the narrator to thinking about the sketches of Käthe Kollwitz, a German artist who drew heartrending pictures of “poverty that individuals can’t be held responsible for.” In “Majakowskiring,” the narrator walks through a quiet part of what was once East Berlin, thinking about a woman who’s “a typical West Berliner” and therefore couldn’t be bothered to visit that neighborhood, then enters a mysterious restaurant in which a photograph of the Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky comes to life. And in “Pushkin Allee,” the narrator envisions the lives and motivations of Red Army soldiers, workers, and a German child memorialized in a park. Though the stories share a concern with the politics and the disasters of the 20th century, it is Tawada’s astute, observational asides that will remain with readers: city life is “an amusement park of the senses... full of people you might have met.” Brief and surprising, these stories reinvent familiar landmarks and artworks, giving readers an imaginative and hopeful way to grapple with the history that’s written into the urban landscape.
4Kiwi_des_neiges
>2 lilisin: Hey this is super! I will be sure to check out these titles. Thanks!
5lilisin
Found two more novels for 2021.
Also, I added all these titles in the first post of this thread for easy "shopping".
1) An I-Novel by Minae Mizumura, Translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter (Columbia University Press, March 2)
A semi-autobiographical novel about a single day in the 1980s, first published in 1995. The narrator talks to her sister and considers her decision to move back to Japan from the U.S.
Minae Mizumura's An I-Novel is a semi-autobiographical work that takes place over the course of a single day in the 1980s. Minae is a Japanese expatriate graduate student who has lived in the United States for two decades but turned her back on the English language and American culture. After a phone call from her older sister reminds her that it is the twentieth anniversary of their familys arrival in New York, she spends the day reflecting in solitude and over the phone with her sister about their life in the United States, trying to break the news that she has decided to go back to Japan and become a writer in her mother tongue.
Published in 1995, this formally daring novel radically broke with Japanese literary tradition. It liberally incorporated English words and phrases, and the entire text was printed horizontally, to be read from left to right, rather than vertically and from right to left. In a luminous meditation on how a person becomes a writer, Mizumura transforms the I-novel, a Japanese confessional genre that toys with fictionalization. An I-Novel tells the story of two sisters while taking up urgent questions of identity, race, and language. Above all, it considers what it means to write in the era of the hegemony of English and what it means to be a writer of Japanese in particular. Juliet Winters Carpenter masterfully renders a novel that once appeared untranslatable into English.
I haven't yet read Mizumura but I do have her Inheritance from Mother on my pile of books to read. Hoping to get to it soon.
2) Astral Season, Beastly Season by Tahi Saihate (tr. Kalau Almony)
Astral Season, Beastly Season is the debut novel by Japanese writer Tahi Saihate. The story follows Morishita and Yamashiro, two high-school boys approaching the age in life when they must choose what kind of people they want to be. When their favourite J-pop idol kills and dismembers her boyfriend, Morishita and Yamashiro unite to convince the police that their idol’s act was in fact by them. This thrilling novel is a meditation on belonging, the objectification of young popstars, and teenage alienation.
This one actually seems quite interesting. I wonder if it's supposed to be an adult or teenage/coming-of-age type novel?
Also, I added all these titles in the first post of this thread for easy "shopping".
1) An I-Novel by Minae Mizumura, Translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter (Columbia University Press, March 2)
A semi-autobiographical novel about a single day in the 1980s, first published in 1995. The narrator talks to her sister and considers her decision to move back to Japan from the U.S.
Minae Mizumura's An I-Novel is a semi-autobiographical work that takes place over the course of a single day in the 1980s. Minae is a Japanese expatriate graduate student who has lived in the United States for two decades but turned her back on the English language and American culture. After a phone call from her older sister reminds her that it is the twentieth anniversary of their familys arrival in New York, she spends the day reflecting in solitude and over the phone with her sister about their life in the United States, trying to break the news that she has decided to go back to Japan and become a writer in her mother tongue.
Published in 1995, this formally daring novel radically broke with Japanese literary tradition. It liberally incorporated English words and phrases, and the entire text was printed horizontally, to be read from left to right, rather than vertically and from right to left. In a luminous meditation on how a person becomes a writer, Mizumura transforms the I-novel, a Japanese confessional genre that toys with fictionalization. An I-Novel tells the story of two sisters while taking up urgent questions of identity, race, and language. Above all, it considers what it means to write in the era of the hegemony of English and what it means to be a writer of Japanese in particular. Juliet Winters Carpenter masterfully renders a novel that once appeared untranslatable into English.
I haven't yet read Mizumura but I do have her Inheritance from Mother on my pile of books to read. Hoping to get to it soon.
2) Astral Season, Beastly Season by Tahi Saihate (tr. Kalau Almony)
Astral Season, Beastly Season is the debut novel by Japanese writer Tahi Saihate. The story follows Morishita and Yamashiro, two high-school boys approaching the age in life when they must choose what kind of people they want to be. When their favourite J-pop idol kills and dismembers her boyfriend, Morishita and Yamashiro unite to convince the police that their idol’s act was in fact by them. This thrilling novel is a meditation on belonging, the objectification of young popstars, and teenage alienation.
This one actually seems quite interesting. I wonder if it's supposed to be an adult or teenage/coming-of-age type novel?
6defaults
That looks pretty interesting. Saihate is an established poet - I haven't seen her poems but I saw a film based on them, Tokyo Night Sky Is Always the Deepest Shade of Blue, which won the Kinema Junpo Film of the Year a few years back.
7lilisin
Exciting news!
The famous mystery The Village of Eight Graves by Seishi Yokomizo is getting an English translation coming out November 30th. (tr. Bryan Karetnyk)
I've read this in French and let me tell you it is fantastic. I really, truly, highly, recommend this one. Definitely pick it up.
Nestled deep in the mist-shrouded mountains, The Village of Eight Graves takes its name from a bloody legend: in the Sixteenth Century eight samurais, who had taken refuge there along with a secret treasure, were murdered by the inhabitants, bringing a terrible curse down upon their village.
Centuries later a mysterious young man named Tatsuya arrives in town, bringing a spate of deadly poisonings in his wake. The inimitably scruffy and brilliant Kosuke Kindaichi investigates.
Source: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/675956/the-village-of-eight-graves-by-s...
The famous mystery The Village of Eight Graves by Seishi Yokomizo is getting an English translation coming out November 30th. (tr. Bryan Karetnyk)
I've read this in French and let me tell you it is fantastic. I really, truly, highly, recommend this one. Definitely pick it up.
Nestled deep in the mist-shrouded mountains, The Village of Eight Graves takes its name from a bloody legend: in the Sixteenth Century eight samurais, who had taken refuge there along with a secret treasure, were murdered by the inhabitants, bringing a terrible curse down upon their village.
Centuries later a mysterious young man named Tatsuya arrives in town, bringing a spate of deadly poisonings in his wake. The inimitably scruffy and brilliant Kosuke Kindaichi investigates.
Source: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/675956/the-village-of-eight-graves-by-s...
8Kiwi_des_neiges
Merci lilisin! It is hard to ignore a "really, truly, highly, definitely pick it up" recommendation! One of the perks to being able to read in French (well at least enough to get into a story, even if I don't understand every word), and living in Montréal is that I can make the most of books in both languages. I have already seen that we have this book at the library, so will check it out.
9stretch
A few for 2022:
1) Longing and other stories; Jun'ichirō Tanizaki
“Longing” recounts the fantastic journey of a precocious young boy through an eerie nighttime landscape. Replete with striking natural images and uncanny human encounters, it ends with a striking revelation. “Sorrows of a Heretic” follows a university student and aspiring novelist who lives in degrading poverty in a Tokyo tenement. Ambitious and tormented, the young man rebels against his family against a backdrop of sickness and death. “The Story of an Unhappy Mother” describes a vivacious but self-centered woman’s drastic transformation after a freak accident involving her son and daughter-in-law. Written in different genres, the three stories are united by a focus on mothers and sons and a concern for Japan’s traditional culture in the face of Westernization. 1
2) Scattered All Over the Earth; Yoko Tawada
Welcome to the not-too-distant future: Japan, having vanished from the face of the earth, is now remembered as “the land of sushi.” Hiruko, its former citizen and a climate refugee herself, has a job teaching immigrant children in Denmark with her invented language Panska (Pan-Scandinavian): “homemade language. no country to stay in. three countries I experienced. insufficient space in brain. so made new language. homemade language.”
As she searches for anyone who can still speak her mother tongue, Hiruko soon makes new friends. Her troupe travels to France, encountering an umami cooking competition; a dead whale; an ultra-nationalist named Breivik; unrequited love; Kakuzo robots; red herrings; uranium; an Andalusian matador. Episodic and mesmerizing scenes flash vividly along, and soon they’re all next off to Stockholm. 2
3) Diary of a Void; Emi Yagi
The novel follows 34-year-old Ms Shibata, who works for a company manufacturing cardboard tubes in Tokyo. Her job is relatively secure: she’s a full-time employee, and the company has a better reputation than her previous workplace, where she was subject to sexual harassment by clients and colleagues. But the job requires working overtime almost every day and as the only woman, there’s the unspoken expectation that she will handle all the menial chores. One day, exasperated and fed up, Ms Shibata announces that she can’t clear away her colleagues’ dirty cups, because she’s pregnant. She isn’t, but her news brings results: a sudden change in the way she’s treated. 3
1) Longing and other stories; Jun'ichirō Tanizaki
“Longing” recounts the fantastic journey of a precocious young boy through an eerie nighttime landscape. Replete with striking natural images and uncanny human encounters, it ends with a striking revelation. “Sorrows of a Heretic” follows a university student and aspiring novelist who lives in degrading poverty in a Tokyo tenement. Ambitious and tormented, the young man rebels against his family against a backdrop of sickness and death. “The Story of an Unhappy Mother” describes a vivacious but self-centered woman’s drastic transformation after a freak accident involving her son and daughter-in-law. Written in different genres, the three stories are united by a focus on mothers and sons and a concern for Japan’s traditional culture in the face of Westernization. 1
2) Scattered All Over the Earth; Yoko Tawada
Welcome to the not-too-distant future: Japan, having vanished from the face of the earth, is now remembered as “the land of sushi.” Hiruko, its former citizen and a climate refugee herself, has a job teaching immigrant children in Denmark with her invented language Panska (Pan-Scandinavian): “homemade language. no country to stay in. three countries I experienced. insufficient space in brain. so made new language. homemade language.”
As she searches for anyone who can still speak her mother tongue, Hiruko soon makes new friends. Her troupe travels to France, encountering an umami cooking competition; a dead whale; an ultra-nationalist named Breivik; unrequited love; Kakuzo robots; red herrings; uranium; an Andalusian matador. Episodic and mesmerizing scenes flash vividly along, and soon they’re all next off to Stockholm. 2
3) Diary of a Void; Emi Yagi
The novel follows 34-year-old Ms Shibata, who works for a company manufacturing cardboard tubes in Tokyo. Her job is relatively secure: she’s a full-time employee, and the company has a better reputation than her previous workplace, where she was subject to sexual harassment by clients and colleagues. But the job requires working overtime almost every day and as the only woman, there’s the unspoken expectation that she will handle all the menial chores. One day, exasperated and fed up, Ms Shibata announces that she can’t clear away her colleagues’ dirty cups, because she’s pregnant. She isn’t, but her news brings results: a sudden change in the way she’s treated. 3
10lilisin
>9 stretch:
I wasn't expecting 2022 results to be up so soon but I guess it's that time of year. Definitely intrigued by Tanizaki and Yagi as I already like Tanizaki's works and am curious to read the Yagi as this would be a new author for me.
The Tawada I feel like I'll end up reading it anyway but as her last book The Emissary was a bit ho-hum for me, I won't go into this with too high of expectations.
I wasn't expecting 2022 results to be up so soon but I guess it's that time of year. Definitely intrigued by Tanizaki and Yagi as I already like Tanizaki's works and am curious to read the Yagi as this would be a new author for me.
The Tawada I feel like I'll end up reading it anyway but as her last book The Emissary was a bit ho-hum for me, I won't go into this with too high of expectations.
11stretch
>10 lilisin: Crazy to think 2022 is around the corner! Yagi looks really interesting. Tanizaki is defintely someoneI want to get back to, right now contempary Japan has a stronger pull, but that transition period and early moden Japan is always appealing. Feeling the same about Tawada, this one sounds like a reverse of the Emissary, exotic look at Japan from the outside rather than from the inside. Her concepts are interesting for sure, but the Emissary was just a so-so read, I'll invebitibly read this, but it's not one that has moved to the top of my ever growing pile.
12lilisin
Here's a summary of all the 2021 books that came out in translation in English. Did anyone read these? What are your most recommended?
2021:
1) Natsuko Imamura: The Woman in the Purple Skirt (tr. Lucy North)
2) Mieko Kawakami : Heaven (tr. Sam Bett and David Boyd)
3) Haruki Murakami : First Person Singular: Stories (tr. Philip Gabriel)
4) Mizuki Tsujimura : Lonely Castle in the Mirror (tr. Philip Gabriel)
5) Izumi Suzuki : Terminal Boredom (tr. Polly Barton, Sam Bett, David Boyd, Daniel Joseph, Aiko Masubuchi and Helen O’Horan)
6) Misumi Kubo : So We Look to the Sky
7) Eto Mori : Colorful
8) Yoko Tawada : Three Streets
9) Minae Mizumura : An I-Novel (tr. Juliet Winters Carpenter)
10) Tahi Saihate : Astral Season, Beastly Season (tr. Kalau Almony)
11) Seishi Yokomizo : The Village of Eight Graves (tr. Bryan Karetnyk)
12) Shion Miura : The Easy Life in Kamusari
I have now replaced the 2021 list in post 1 with 2022 in preparation for new translations.
2021:
1) Natsuko Imamura: The Woman in the Purple Skirt (tr. Lucy North)
2) Mieko Kawakami : Heaven (tr. Sam Bett and David Boyd)
3) Haruki Murakami : First Person Singular: Stories (tr. Philip Gabriel)
4) Mizuki Tsujimura : Lonely Castle in the Mirror (tr. Philip Gabriel)
5) Izumi Suzuki : Terminal Boredom (tr. Polly Barton, Sam Bett, David Boyd, Daniel Joseph, Aiko Masubuchi and Helen O’Horan)
6) Misumi Kubo : So We Look to the Sky
7) Eto Mori : Colorful
8) Yoko Tawada : Three Streets
9) Minae Mizumura : An I-Novel (tr. Juliet Winters Carpenter)
10) Tahi Saihate : Astral Season, Beastly Season (tr. Kalau Almony)
11) Seishi Yokomizo : The Village of Eight Graves (tr. Bryan Karetnyk)
12) Shion Miura : The Easy Life in Kamusari
I have now replaced the 2021 list in post 1 with 2022 in preparation for new translations.
13stretch
I saw on an Amazon list that I Am Cat, is getting an English Manga edition. Even have read this several years ago, and finding it repetitive by nature of serialization, I think this might be a perfect book for a Manga treatment and I might need to pick this up.
14stretch
My Annihilation; Fuminori Nakamura
Turn this page, and you may forfeit your entire life.
With My Annihilation, Fuminori Nakamura, master of literary noir, has constructed a puzzle box of a narrative in the form of a confessional diary that implicates its reader in a heinous crime.
Delving relentlessly into the darkest corners of human consciousness, My Annihilation interrogates the unspeakable thoughts all humans share that can be monstrous when brought to life, revealing with disturbing honesty the psychological motives of a killer.
This one sounds dark. And may climb my Nakamura TBR. Comes out in Jan. 11.
Turn this page, and you may forfeit your entire life.
With My Annihilation, Fuminori Nakamura, master of literary noir, has constructed a puzzle box of a narrative in the form of a confessional diary that implicates its reader in a heinous crime.
Delving relentlessly into the darkest corners of human consciousness, My Annihilation interrogates the unspeakable thoughts all humans share that can be monstrous when brought to life, revealing with disturbing honesty the psychological motives of a killer.
This one sounds dark. And may climb my Nakamura TBR. Comes out in Jan. 11.
15stretch
Some More I found:
Beautiful Star by Yukio Mishima
Beautiful Star is a 1962 tale of family, love, nuclear war and UFOs, and was the novel Mishima considered to be his masterpiece.
Translated into English for the first time, this atmospheric black comedy tells the story of the Osugi family, who come to the sudden realization that each of them hails from a different planet: Father from Mars, mother from Jupiter, son from Mercury and daughter from Venus. This extra-terrestrial knowledge brings them closer together, and convinces them that they have a mission: to find others of their kind, and save humanity from the imminent threat of the atomic bomb...
4/28/22
The Thorn Puller by Hiromi Ito
The first novel to appear in English by award-winning author Hiromi Ito explores the absurdities, complexities, and challenges experienced by a woman caring for her two families: her husband and daughters in California and her aging parents in Japan. As the narrator shuttles back and forth between these two starkly different cultures, she creates a powerful and entertaining narrative about what it means to live and die in a globalized society.
8/26/22
Kamusari Tales Told at Nights by Shion Miura
It’s been a year since Yuki Hirano left home―or more precisely, was booted from it―to study forestry in the remote mountain village of Kamusari. Being a woodsman is not the future he imagined, but his name means “courage,” and Yuki hopes to live up to it. He’s adapting to his job and learning constantly. In between, he records local legends―tales pulsing with life, passion, and wondrous gods. Kamusari has other charms as well. One of them is Nao.
Yuki’s crush on the only other young single person in the village isn’t a secret. Yet how impressed can she be with someone at least five years younger who makes less money and doesn’t even own a car? More daunting, she’s in love with another man. Finally finding his place among the villagers, a feeling deepened by his crush, Yuki seems headed for a dream life of adventure and camaraderie―and Nao could be the missing piece of that dream.
Looks like book 2 of a series.
Fish Swimming in Dappled Sunlight by Riku Onda
Set in a Tokyo flat over the course of one night, Aki and Hiro spend one last night together before going their separate ways. Each believes the other to be a murderer and is determined to extract a confession before the night is over. Who has been killed and why? Which one is the killer? In an intense battle of wills over the course of a night, the true nature of the pair’s relationship and the chain of events leading up to this night are gradually revealed in this gripping psychological thriller that keeps the reader in suspense to the very end.
The thriller--buried in a literary whodunit--explores the mysteries of romantic love, memory and attaining self-knowledge. Like the best Japanese crime writing, it is an unflinching foray into the darker recesses of the soul, quietly suspenseful and elegantly constructed.
6/16/22
The Shining Sea by Koji Suzuki
A young woman who attempted suicide by drowning has lost her memory and ability to speak. Her lover, a young man, is on a pelagic tuna fishing boat. What happened between them?
Nobody knows their own destiny. But what if you discover you only have a low chance of being happy in life?
5/31/22
Three Assassins by Kotaro Isaka
Suzuki is just an ordinary man until his wife is murdered. When he discovers the criminal gang responsible he leaves behind his life as a maths teacher and joins them, looking for a chance to take his revenge. What he doesn't realise is that he's about to get drawn into a web of unusual professional assassins, each with their own agenda.
The Whale convinces his victims to take their own lives using just his words. The Cicada is a talkative and deadly knife expert. The elusive Pusher dispatches his targets in deadly traffic accidents.
Suzuki must take each of them on, in order to try to find justice and keep his innocence in a world of killers.
4/12/22
Woman Running in the Mountains by Yūko Tsushima
Alone at dawn, in the heat of midsummer, a young woman named Takiko departs on foot for the hospital to give birth to a baby boy. Her pregnancy, the result of a casual affair with a married man, is a source of sorrow and shame to her abusive parents. For Takiko, however, it is a cause for reverie. Her baby, she imagines, will be hers and hers alone, a challenge but also an instrument for her long-wished-for independence. Takiko’s first year as a mother is filled with the intense bodily pleasures and pains that come from caring for a newborn, learning how to accommodate him. At first Takiko seeks refuge in the company of other women, in the maternity hospital, in her son’s nursery, but as he grows, her life becomes less circumscribed, expanding outward into previously unknown neighborhoods in her city and then beyond, into the countryside, toward a mountain that captures her imagination and feeling for a wilder freedom.
2/1/22
Beautiful Star by Yukio Mishima
Beautiful Star is a 1962 tale of family, love, nuclear war and UFOs, and was the novel Mishima considered to be his masterpiece.
Translated into English for the first time, this atmospheric black comedy tells the story of the Osugi family, who come to the sudden realization that each of them hails from a different planet: Father from Mars, mother from Jupiter, son from Mercury and daughter from Venus. This extra-terrestrial knowledge brings them closer together, and convinces them that they have a mission: to find others of their kind, and save humanity from the imminent threat of the atomic bomb...
4/28/22
The Thorn Puller by Hiromi Ito
The first novel to appear in English by award-winning author Hiromi Ito explores the absurdities, complexities, and challenges experienced by a woman caring for her two families: her husband and daughters in California and her aging parents in Japan. As the narrator shuttles back and forth between these two starkly different cultures, she creates a powerful and entertaining narrative about what it means to live and die in a globalized society.
8/26/22
Kamusari Tales Told at Nights by Shion Miura
It’s been a year since Yuki Hirano left home―or more precisely, was booted from it―to study forestry in the remote mountain village of Kamusari. Being a woodsman is not the future he imagined, but his name means “courage,” and Yuki hopes to live up to it. He’s adapting to his job and learning constantly. In between, he records local legends―tales pulsing with life, passion, and wondrous gods. Kamusari has other charms as well. One of them is Nao.
Yuki’s crush on the only other young single person in the village isn’t a secret. Yet how impressed can she be with someone at least five years younger who makes less money and doesn’t even own a car? More daunting, she’s in love with another man. Finally finding his place among the villagers, a feeling deepened by his crush, Yuki seems headed for a dream life of adventure and camaraderie―and Nao could be the missing piece of that dream.
Looks like book 2 of a series.
Fish Swimming in Dappled Sunlight by Riku Onda
Set in a Tokyo flat over the course of one night, Aki and Hiro spend one last night together before going their separate ways. Each believes the other to be a murderer and is determined to extract a confession before the night is over. Who has been killed and why? Which one is the killer? In an intense battle of wills over the course of a night, the true nature of the pair’s relationship and the chain of events leading up to this night are gradually revealed in this gripping psychological thriller that keeps the reader in suspense to the very end.
The thriller--buried in a literary whodunit--explores the mysteries of romantic love, memory and attaining self-knowledge. Like the best Japanese crime writing, it is an unflinching foray into the darker recesses of the soul, quietly suspenseful and elegantly constructed.
6/16/22
The Shining Sea by Koji Suzuki
A young woman who attempted suicide by drowning has lost her memory and ability to speak. Her lover, a young man, is on a pelagic tuna fishing boat. What happened between them?
Nobody knows their own destiny. But what if you discover you only have a low chance of being happy in life?
5/31/22
Three Assassins by Kotaro Isaka
Suzuki is just an ordinary man until his wife is murdered. When he discovers the criminal gang responsible he leaves behind his life as a maths teacher and joins them, looking for a chance to take his revenge. What he doesn't realise is that he's about to get drawn into a web of unusual professional assassins, each with their own agenda.
The Whale convinces his victims to take their own lives using just his words. The Cicada is a talkative and deadly knife expert. The elusive Pusher dispatches his targets in deadly traffic accidents.
Suzuki must take each of them on, in order to try to find justice and keep his innocence in a world of killers.
4/12/22
Woman Running in the Mountains by Yūko Tsushima
Alone at dawn, in the heat of midsummer, a young woman named Takiko departs on foot for the hospital to give birth to a baby boy. Her pregnancy, the result of a casual affair with a married man, is a source of sorrow and shame to her abusive parents. For Takiko, however, it is a cause for reverie. Her baby, she imagines, will be hers and hers alone, a challenge but also an instrument for her long-wished-for independence. Takiko’s first year as a mother is filled with the intense bodily pleasures and pains that come from caring for a newborn, learning how to accommodate him. At first Takiko seeks refuge in the company of other women, in the maternity hospital, in her son’s nursery, but as he grows, her life becomes less circumscribed, expanding outward into previously unknown neighborhoods in her city and then beyond, into the countryside, toward a mountain that captures her imagination and feeling for a wilder freedom.
2/1/22
16lilisin
>15 stretch:
I've added them to the list in post 1, thank you!
Frankly I'm not sure how many of these appeal to me but I'll definitely be reading the Tsushima as I've very much enjoyed her first two books. I think she writes wonderfully about the plight of single mothers.
I wonder if the Shion Miura book is a sequel to The Great Passage? I haven't read that one though so wouldn't be able to say for certain.
As for the Hiromi Ito, I find I have little interest for books about Japanese abroad. I wonder what that particularity in my reading is about?
I've added them to the list in post 1, thank you!
Frankly I'm not sure how many of these appeal to me but I'll definitely be reading the Tsushima as I've very much enjoyed her first two books. I think she writes wonderfully about the plight of single mothers.
I wonder if the Shion Miura book is a sequel to The Great Passage? I haven't read that one though so wouldn't be able to say for certain.
As for the Hiromi Ito, I find I have little interest for books about Japanese abroad. I wonder what that particularity in my reading is about?
17stretch
>16 lilisin: Kamusari Tales Told at Night is a sequeal to The Easy Life in Kamusari which apparently came out this month. According to Amazon. They kind of sound too close to the Great Passage for me to get to in a hurry.
So far there are couple on the list that I'll read eventually but nothing that I'll get to right of way.
So far there are couple on the list that I'll read eventually but nothing that I'll get to right of way.
18lilisin
>17 stretch:
I'll add The Easy Life in Kamusari to the 2021 list.
I've also added a link in the 1st post that takes you directly to the 2021 list in this thread so newcomers to the thread can easily access the link.
I'll add The Easy Life in Kamusari to the 2021 list.
I've also added a link in the 1st post that takes you directly to the 2021 list in this thread so newcomers to the thread can easily access the link.
19lilisin
Updated list with tentative publication dates. (I've also added all of these titles in the first post.)
1) Junichiro Tanizaki : Longing and other stories
Translated by Anthony Chambers and Paul McCarthy (January 2022)
2) Yoko Tawada : Scattered All Over the Earth
Translated by Margaret Mitsutani (March 2022)
3) Emi Yagi : Diary of a Void
Translated by David Boyd and Lucy North (August 2022)
4) Beautiful Star by Yukio Mishima
Translated by Stephen Dodd (April 2022)
5) The Thorn Puller by Hiromi Ito
Translated by Jeffrey Angles (August 2022)
6) Kamusari Tales Told at Nights by Shion Miura
Translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter (May 2022)
7) Fish Swimming in Dappled Sunlight by Riku Onda
Translated by Alison Watts (February 2022)
8) The Shining Sea by Koji Suzuki
(May 2022)
9) Three Assassins by Kotaro Isaka
Translated by Sam Malissa (April 2022)
10) Woman Running in the Mountains by Yūko Tsushima
Translated by Geraldine Harcourt (February 2022)
11) Fuminori Nakamura : My Annihilation
Translated by Sam Bett (January 2022)
12) Genpei Akasegawa : I Guess All We Have Is Freedom
Translated by Matthew Fargo (February 2022)
13) Masatsugu Ono : At the Edge of the Woods
Translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter (April 2022)
14) Chesil : The Color of the Sky Is the Shape of the Heart
Translated by Takami Nieda (April 2022)
15) Mieko Kawakami : All the Lovers in the Night
Translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd (May 2022)
16) Li Kotomi : Solo Dance
Translated by Arthur Reiji Morris (May 2022)
17) Seicho Matsumoto : Tokyo Express
(May 2022)
18) Seishi Yokomizo : Gokumon Island
Translated by Louise Heal Kawai (June 2022)
19) Erika Kobayashi : Trinity, Trinity, Trinity
Translated by Brian Bergstrom (June 2022)
20) Osamu Dazai : Early Light
Translated by Donald Keene and Ralph McCarthy (July 2022)
21) Sayaka Murata : Life Ceremony: Stories
Translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori (July 2022)
22) Tomohiko Morimi : The Tatami Galaxy
Translated by Emily Balistrieri (fall 2022)
1) Junichiro Tanizaki : Longing and other stories
Translated by Anthony Chambers and Paul McCarthy (January 2022)
2) Yoko Tawada : Scattered All Over the Earth
Translated by Margaret Mitsutani (March 2022)
3) Emi Yagi : Diary of a Void
Translated by David Boyd and Lucy North (August 2022)
4) Beautiful Star by Yukio Mishima
Translated by Stephen Dodd (April 2022)
5) The Thorn Puller by Hiromi Ito
Translated by Jeffrey Angles (August 2022)
6) Kamusari Tales Told at Nights by Shion Miura
Translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter (May 2022)
7) Fish Swimming in Dappled Sunlight by Riku Onda
Translated by Alison Watts (February 2022)
8) The Shining Sea by Koji Suzuki
(May 2022)
9) Three Assassins by Kotaro Isaka
Translated by Sam Malissa (April 2022)
10) Woman Running in the Mountains by Yūko Tsushima
Translated by Geraldine Harcourt (February 2022)
11) Fuminori Nakamura : My Annihilation
Translated by Sam Bett (January 2022)
12) Genpei Akasegawa : I Guess All We Have Is Freedom
Translated by Matthew Fargo (February 2022)
13) Masatsugu Ono : At the Edge of the Woods
Translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter (April 2022)
14) Chesil : The Color of the Sky Is the Shape of the Heart
Translated by Takami Nieda (April 2022)
15) Mieko Kawakami : All the Lovers in the Night
Translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd (May 2022)
16) Li Kotomi : Solo Dance
Translated by Arthur Reiji Morris (May 2022)
17) Seicho Matsumoto : Tokyo Express
(May 2022)
18) Seishi Yokomizo : Gokumon Island
Translated by Louise Heal Kawai (June 2022)
19) Erika Kobayashi : Trinity, Trinity, Trinity
Translated by Brian Bergstrom (June 2022)
20) Osamu Dazai : Early Light
Translated by Donald Keene and Ralph McCarthy (July 2022)
21) Sayaka Murata : Life Ceremony: Stories
Translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori (July 2022)
22) Tomohiko Morimi : The Tatami Galaxy
Translated by Emily Balistrieri (fall 2022)
20lilisin
21) Sayaka Murata : Life Ceremony: Stories
Translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori (July 2022)
Murata mixes an unusual cocktail of humor and horror to portray both the loners and outcasts as well as turning the norms and traditions of society on their head to better question them. Whether the stories take place in modern-day Japan, the future, or an alternate reality is left to the reader’s interpretation, as the characters often seem strange in their normality in a frighteningly abnormal world.
Source
15) Mieko Kawakami : All the Lovers in the Night
Translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd (May 2022)
Shy, lonely and introverted Fuyuko lives alone and fills her days with her job as a freelance proofreader. About to turn thirty-five, she cannot imagine ever having any emotional or successful relationship in her life as it currently stands. She is regularly haunted by encounters of the past.
But Fuyuko loves the light and goes out on the night of her birthday, Christmas Eve, to count the lights.
Her only friend, Hijiri, offers some light in her life, but it is a chance encounter with another man, Mr. Mitsutsuka, a physics teacher, who offers her access from another dimension to light.
Source
12) Genpei Akasegawa : I Guess All We Have Is Freedom
Translated by Matthew Fargo (February 2022)
In these stories, ostensibly quiet tales of a single dad in 1970s Tokyo, a doorknob practices radical politics, a peeled tomato smarts in pain, raw oysters tick like time bombs and gravestones provide a critique of capitalism.
Source
13) Masatsugu Ono : At the Edge of the Woods
Translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter (April 2022)
When his wife returns to her parents house to have their second child, an unnamed narrator and his son are left to manage by themselves. Instead of absence, what the father and son begin to notice is a strange noise opening up between them, reverberating through their home, their television set, and the books they read at night. The wood outside their home hums with it, too: leaves fall from branches which are already naked, trees wriggle when walked past, and the hills on the horizon rise and fall in a building rhythm.
Source
14) Chesil : The Color of the Sky Is the Shape of the Heart
Translated by Takami Nieda (April 2022)
Now in translation for the first time, the award-winning debut that broke literary ground in Japan explores diaspora, prejudice, and the complexities of a teen girl’s experience growing up as a Zainichi Korean, reminiscent of Min Jin Lee’s classic Pachinko and Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street.
Seventeen-year-old Ginny Park is about to get expelled from high school—again. Stephanie, the picture book author who took Ginny into her Oregon home after she was kicked out of school in Hawaii, isn’t upset; she only wants to know why. But Ginny has always been in-between. She can’t bring herself to open up to anyone about her past, or about what prompted her to flee her native Japan. Then, Ginny finds a mysterious scrawl among Stephanie’s scraps of paper and storybook drawings that changes everything: The sky is about to fall. Where do you go?
Ginny sets off on the road in search of an answer, with only her journal as a confidante. In witty and brutally honest vignettes, and interspersed with old letters from her expatriated family in North Korea, Ginny recounts her adolescence growing up Zainichi, an ethnic Korean born in Japan, and the incident that forced her to leave years prior. Inspired by her own childhood, author Chesil creates a portrait of a girl who has been fighting alone against barriers of prejudice, nationality, and injustice all her life—and one searching for a place to belong.
Source
Translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori (July 2022)
Murata mixes an unusual cocktail of humor and horror to portray both the loners and outcasts as well as turning the norms and traditions of society on their head to better question them. Whether the stories take place in modern-day Japan, the future, or an alternate reality is left to the reader’s interpretation, as the characters often seem strange in their normality in a frighteningly abnormal world.
Source
15) Mieko Kawakami : All the Lovers in the Night
Translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd (May 2022)
Shy, lonely and introverted Fuyuko lives alone and fills her days with her job as a freelance proofreader. About to turn thirty-five, she cannot imagine ever having any emotional or successful relationship in her life as it currently stands. She is regularly haunted by encounters of the past.
But Fuyuko loves the light and goes out on the night of her birthday, Christmas Eve, to count the lights.
Her only friend, Hijiri, offers some light in her life, but it is a chance encounter with another man, Mr. Mitsutsuka, a physics teacher, who offers her access from another dimension to light.
Source
12) Genpei Akasegawa : I Guess All We Have Is Freedom
Translated by Matthew Fargo (February 2022)
In these stories, ostensibly quiet tales of a single dad in 1970s Tokyo, a doorknob practices radical politics, a peeled tomato smarts in pain, raw oysters tick like time bombs and gravestones provide a critique of capitalism.
Source
13) Masatsugu Ono : At the Edge of the Woods
Translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter (April 2022)
When his wife returns to her parents house to have their second child, an unnamed narrator and his son are left to manage by themselves. Instead of absence, what the father and son begin to notice is a strange noise opening up between them, reverberating through their home, their television set, and the books they read at night. The wood outside their home hums with it, too: leaves fall from branches which are already naked, trees wriggle when walked past, and the hills on the horizon rise and fall in a building rhythm.
Source
14) Chesil : The Color of the Sky Is the Shape of the Heart
Translated by Takami Nieda (April 2022)
Now in translation for the first time, the award-winning debut that broke literary ground in Japan explores diaspora, prejudice, and the complexities of a teen girl’s experience growing up as a Zainichi Korean, reminiscent of Min Jin Lee’s classic Pachinko and Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street.
Seventeen-year-old Ginny Park is about to get expelled from high school—again. Stephanie, the picture book author who took Ginny into her Oregon home after she was kicked out of school in Hawaii, isn’t upset; she only wants to know why. But Ginny has always been in-between. She can’t bring herself to open up to anyone about her past, or about what prompted her to flee her native Japan. Then, Ginny finds a mysterious scrawl among Stephanie’s scraps of paper and storybook drawings that changes everything: The sky is about to fall. Where do you go?
Ginny sets off on the road in search of an answer, with only her journal as a confidante. In witty and brutally honest vignettes, and interspersed with old letters from her expatriated family in North Korea, Ginny recounts her adolescence growing up Zainichi, an ethnic Korean born in Japan, and the incident that forced her to leave years prior. Inspired by her own childhood, author Chesil creates a portrait of a girl who has been fighting alone against barriers of prejudice, nationality, and injustice all her life—and one searching for a place to belong.
Source
21lilisin
16) Li Kotomi : Solo Dance
Translated by Arthur Reiji Morris (May 2022)
Chō Norie, twenty-seven and originally from Taiwan, is working an office job in Tokyo. While her colleagues worry about the economy, life-insurance policies, marriage, and children, she is forced to keep her unconventional life hidden—including her sexuality and the violent attack that prompted her move to Japan. There is also her unusual fascination with death: she knows from personal experience how devastating death can be, but for her it is also creative fuel. Solo Dance depicts the painful coming of age of a gay person in Taiwan and corporate Japan. This striking debut is an intimate and powerful account of a search for hope after trauma.
Source
17) Seicho Matsumoto : Tokyo Express
(May 2022)
In a rocky cove in the bay of Hakata, the bodies of a young and beautiful couple are discovered. Stood in the coast's wind and cold, the police see nothing to investigate: the flush of the couple's cheeks speaks clearly of cyanide, of a lovers' suicide. But in the eyes of two men, Torigai Jutaro, an old and shabby detective, and Kiichi Mihara, a young gun from Tokyo, something is not quite right. Together, they will begin to pick at the knot of a unique and calculated crime...
Source
18) Seishi Yokomizo : Gokumon Island
Translated by Louise Heal Kawai (June 2022)
A fiendish, classic locked room murder mystery, from one of Japan’s greatest crime writers
Loosely inspired by Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, the brilliant Gokumon Island is perhaps the most highly regarded of all the great Seishi Yokomizo’s classic Japanese mysteries.
Detective Kosuke Kindaichi arrives on the remote Gokumon Island bearing tragic news–the son of one of the island’s most important families has died, on a troop transport ship bringing him back home after the Second World War. But Kindaichi has not come merely as a messenger–with his last words, the dying man warned that his three step-sisters’ lives would now be in danger. The scruffy detective is determined to get to the bottom of this mysterious prophesy, and to protect the three women if he can.
As Kindaichi attempts to unravel the island’s secrets, a series of gruesome murders begins. He investigates, but soon finds himself in mortal danger from both the unknown killer and the clannish locals, who resent this outsider meddling in their affairs.
Source
19) Erika Kobayashi : Trinity, Trinity, Trinity
Translated by Brian Bergstrom (June 2022)
A literary thriller about the effects of nuclear power on the mind, body, and recorded history of three generations of Japanese women.
Nine years after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant disaster, Japan is preparing for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. An unnamed narrator wakes up in a cold, sterile room, unable to recall her past. Across the country, the elderly begin to hear voices emanating from black stones, compelling them to behave in strange and unpredictable ways. The voices are a symptom of a disease called “Trinity.”
As details about the disease come to light, we encounter a thread of linked histories—Prometheus stealing fire from the gods, the discovery of radiation, the nuclear arms race, the subsequent birth of nuclear energy, and the disaster in Fukushima. The threads linking these events begins to unravel in the lead-up to a terrorist attack at the Japan National Olympic Stadium.
A work of speculative fiction reckoning with the ramifications of the past and continued effects of nuclear power, Trinity, Trinity, Trinity follows the lives of three generations of women connected by a history of violence.
Source
20) Osamu Dazai : Early Light
Translated by Donald Keene and Ralph McCarthy (July 2022)
Early Light offers three very different aspects of Osamu Dazai's genius: the title story relates his misadventures as a drinker and a family man in the terrible fire bombings of Tokyo at the end of WWII. Having lost their own home, he and his wife flee with a new baby boy and their little girl to relatives in Kofu, only to be bombed out anew. "Everything's gone," the father explains to his daughter: "Mr. Rabbit, our shoes, the Ogigari house, the Chino house, they all burned up," "Yeah, they all burned up," she said, still smiling.
"One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji," another autobiographical tale, is much more comic: Dazai finds himself unable to escape the famous views, the beauty once immortalized by Hokusai and now reduced to a cliche. In the end, young girls torment him by pressing him into taking their photo before the famous peak: "Goodbye," he hisses through his teeth, "Mount Fuji. Thanks for everything. Click."
And the final story is "Villon's Wife," a small masterpiece, which relates the awakening to power of a drunkard's wife. She transforms herself into a woman not to be defeated by anything, not by her husband being a thief, a megalomaniacal writer, and a wastrel. Single-handedly, she saves the day by concluding that "There's nothing wrong with being a monster, is there? As long as we can stay alive."
Source
Translated by Arthur Reiji Morris (May 2022)
Chō Norie, twenty-seven and originally from Taiwan, is working an office job in Tokyo. While her colleagues worry about the economy, life-insurance policies, marriage, and children, she is forced to keep her unconventional life hidden—including her sexuality and the violent attack that prompted her move to Japan. There is also her unusual fascination with death: she knows from personal experience how devastating death can be, but for her it is also creative fuel. Solo Dance depicts the painful coming of age of a gay person in Taiwan and corporate Japan. This striking debut is an intimate and powerful account of a search for hope after trauma.
Source
17) Seicho Matsumoto : Tokyo Express
(May 2022)
In a rocky cove in the bay of Hakata, the bodies of a young and beautiful couple are discovered. Stood in the coast's wind and cold, the police see nothing to investigate: the flush of the couple's cheeks speaks clearly of cyanide, of a lovers' suicide. But in the eyes of two men, Torigai Jutaro, an old and shabby detective, and Kiichi Mihara, a young gun from Tokyo, something is not quite right. Together, they will begin to pick at the knot of a unique and calculated crime...
Source
18) Seishi Yokomizo : Gokumon Island
Translated by Louise Heal Kawai (June 2022)
A fiendish, classic locked room murder mystery, from one of Japan’s greatest crime writers
Loosely inspired by Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, the brilliant Gokumon Island is perhaps the most highly regarded of all the great Seishi Yokomizo’s classic Japanese mysteries.
Detective Kosuke Kindaichi arrives on the remote Gokumon Island bearing tragic news–the son of one of the island’s most important families has died, on a troop transport ship bringing him back home after the Second World War. But Kindaichi has not come merely as a messenger–with his last words, the dying man warned that his three step-sisters’ lives would now be in danger. The scruffy detective is determined to get to the bottom of this mysterious prophesy, and to protect the three women if he can.
As Kindaichi attempts to unravel the island’s secrets, a series of gruesome murders begins. He investigates, but soon finds himself in mortal danger from both the unknown killer and the clannish locals, who resent this outsider meddling in their affairs.
Source
19) Erika Kobayashi : Trinity, Trinity, Trinity
Translated by Brian Bergstrom (June 2022)
A literary thriller about the effects of nuclear power on the mind, body, and recorded history of three generations of Japanese women.
Nine years after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant disaster, Japan is preparing for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. An unnamed narrator wakes up in a cold, sterile room, unable to recall her past. Across the country, the elderly begin to hear voices emanating from black stones, compelling them to behave in strange and unpredictable ways. The voices are a symptom of a disease called “Trinity.”
As details about the disease come to light, we encounter a thread of linked histories—Prometheus stealing fire from the gods, the discovery of radiation, the nuclear arms race, the subsequent birth of nuclear energy, and the disaster in Fukushima. The threads linking these events begins to unravel in the lead-up to a terrorist attack at the Japan National Olympic Stadium.
A work of speculative fiction reckoning with the ramifications of the past and continued effects of nuclear power, Trinity, Trinity, Trinity follows the lives of three generations of women connected by a history of violence.
Source
20) Osamu Dazai : Early Light
Translated by Donald Keene and Ralph McCarthy (July 2022)
Early Light offers three very different aspects of Osamu Dazai's genius: the title story relates his misadventures as a drinker and a family man in the terrible fire bombings of Tokyo at the end of WWII. Having lost their own home, he and his wife flee with a new baby boy and their little girl to relatives in Kofu, only to be bombed out anew. "Everything's gone," the father explains to his daughter: "Mr. Rabbit, our shoes, the Ogigari house, the Chino house, they all burned up," "Yeah, they all burned up," she said, still smiling.
"One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji," another autobiographical tale, is much more comic: Dazai finds himself unable to escape the famous views, the beauty once immortalized by Hokusai and now reduced to a cliche. In the end, young girls torment him by pressing him into taking their photo before the famous peak: "Goodbye," he hisses through his teeth, "Mount Fuji. Thanks for everything. Click."
And the final story is "Villon's Wife," a small masterpiece, which relates the awakening to power of a drunkard's wife. She transforms herself into a woman not to be defeated by anything, not by her husband being a thief, a megalomaniacal writer, and a wastrel. Single-handedly, she saves the day by concluding that "There's nothing wrong with being a monster, is there? As long as we can stay alive."
Source
22stretch
Got another one:
Kaoru Takamura: Lady Joker, Volume 2
Translated by Allison Markin Powell and Marie Iida (August 2022)
This second half of Lady Joker, by Kaoru Takamura, the Grand Dame of Japanese crime fiction, concludes the breathtaking saga introduced in Volume I.
Inspired by the real-life Glico-Morinaga kidnapping, an unsolved case which terrorized Japan for two years, Lady Joker reimagines the circumstances of this watershed episode in modern Japanese history and brings into riveting focus the lives and motivations of the victims, the perpetrators, the heroes and the villains. As the shady networks linking corporations to syndicates are brought to light, the stakes rise, and some of the professionals we have watched try to fight their way through this crisis will lose everything—some even their lives. Will the culprits ever be brought to justice? More importantly—what is justice?
source
Kaoru Takamura: Lady Joker, Volume 2
Translated by Allison Markin Powell and Marie Iida (August 2022)
This second half of Lady Joker, by Kaoru Takamura, the Grand Dame of Japanese crime fiction, concludes the breathtaking saga introduced in Volume I.
Inspired by the real-life Glico-Morinaga kidnapping, an unsolved case which terrorized Japan for two years, Lady Joker reimagines the circumstances of this watershed episode in modern Japanese history and brings into riveting focus the lives and motivations of the victims, the perpetrators, the heroes and the villains. As the shady networks linking corporations to syndicates are brought to light, the stakes rise, and some of the professionals we have watched try to fight their way through this crisis will lose everything—some even their lives. Will the culprits ever be brought to justice? More importantly—what is justice?
source
23stretch
24) Toshikazu Kawaguchi: Before Your Memory Fades
(September 2022)
The third novel in the international bestselling Before the Coffee Gets Cold series, following four new customers in a cafe where customers can travel back in time.
On the hillside of Mount Hakodate in northern Japan, Cafe Donna Donna is fabled for its dazzling views of Hakodate port. But that’s not all. Like the charming Tokyo cafe Funiculi Funicula, Cafe Donna Donna offers its customers the extraordinary experience of travelling through time.
Source
This is becoming quite the series!
25) Hiroko Oyamada: Weasels in the Attic
Translate by David Boyd (October 2022)
In three interconnected scenes, Hiroko Oyamada revisits the same set of characters at different junctures in their lives. In the back room of a pet store full of rare and exotic fish, old friends discuss dried shrimp and a strange new relationship. A couple who recently moved into a rustic home in the mountains discovers an unsettling solution to their weasel infestation. And a dinner party during a blizzard leads to a night in a room filled with aquariums and unpleasant dreams. Like Oyamada’s previous novels, Weasels in the Attic sets its sights on the overlooked aspects of contemporary Japanese society, and does so with a surreal sensibility that is entirely her own.
Source
A very pleseant surprise! Was not expecting for Oyamada to keep getting translated at such a fast rate. A definite pre-order,
(September 2022)
The third novel in the international bestselling Before the Coffee Gets Cold series, following four new customers in a cafe where customers can travel back in time.
On the hillside of Mount Hakodate in northern Japan, Cafe Donna Donna is fabled for its dazzling views of Hakodate port. But that’s not all. Like the charming Tokyo cafe Funiculi Funicula, Cafe Donna Donna offers its customers the extraordinary experience of travelling through time.
Source
This is becoming quite the series!
25) Hiroko Oyamada: Weasels in the Attic
Translate by David Boyd (October 2022)
In three interconnected scenes, Hiroko Oyamada revisits the same set of characters at different junctures in their lives. In the back room of a pet store full of rare and exotic fish, old friends discuss dried shrimp and a strange new relationship. A couple who recently moved into a rustic home in the mountains discovers an unsettling solution to their weasel infestation. And a dinner party during a blizzard leads to a night in a room filled with aquariums and unpleasant dreams. Like Oyamada’s previous novels, Weasels in the Attic sets its sights on the overlooked aspects of contemporary Japanese society, and does so with a surreal sensibility that is entirely her own.
Source
A very pleseant surprise! Was not expecting for Oyamada to keep getting translated at such a fast rate. A definite pre-order,
24lilisin
>23 stretch:
Definitely two surprises! I still haven't read Before the Coffee Gets Cold in Japanese because it's so popular they still haven't released it in paperback! I could buy a used copy but I do prefer the tiny paperbacks.
So happy Oyamada has gotten so popular as well although admittedly I didn't much appreciate the weasels in the attic short story which I read in the original as it comes after The Hole in the Japanese paperback. I wonder what the other two stories will end up as.
Definitely two surprises! I still haven't read Before the Coffee Gets Cold in Japanese because it's so popular they still haven't released it in paperback! I could buy a used copy but I do prefer the tiny paperbacks.
So happy Oyamada has gotten so popular as well although admittedly I didn't much appreciate the weasels in the attic short story which I read in the original as it comes after The Hole in the Japanese paperback. I wonder what the other two stories will end up as.
25stretch
>24 lilisin: I hadn't realized Before the Coffee Gets Cold is popular. That's outstanding, a good sign that maybe even more books will get a look.
Oyamada is one of my new favorite authors, even it's a dud in comparison to her other works I still will do my part just to keep the pipeline open. And because she's one of the few authors I just want to have everything they write.
Oyamada is one of my new favorite authors, even it's a dud in comparison to her other works I still will do my part just to keep the pipeline open. And because she's one of the few authors I just want to have everything they write.
27stretch
Heard about this one on the radio somehow, couldn't exactly find out all that much on this one, nothing from Deep Vellum Press, but it does sound interesting.
Otohiko Kaga: Marshland
Translated by Albert Novick (May 2023)
Otohiko Kaga’s Marshland is an epic novel on a Tolstoyan scale, running from the pre-World War II period to the turbulence of 1960s Japan. At forty-nine, Atsuo Yukimori is a humble auto mechanic living an almost penitentially quiet life in Tokyo, where his coworkers know something of his military record but nothing of his postwar past as a petty criminal. Out of curiosity he accompanies his nephew to a demonstration at a nearby university, and is gradually drawn into a friendship, then a romance, with Wakako Ikéhata, the brilliant but mentally unstable daughter of a university professor. As some of the student radical groups turn to violence and terrorism, Atsuo and Wakako find themselves framed for the lethal bombing of a Tokyo train.
During their long imprisonment the novel becomes a Kafkaesque procedural, revealing the corrupt intricacies of the police and judicial system of Japan. At the end of their hard pilgrimage to exoneration, Atsuo and Wakako are finally able to return to his original hometown, Nemuro, on the eastern-most peninsula of Hokkaido island. Here is the marshland of the title, a remote and virtually unspoiled region of Japan where Kaga sets a large number of extraordinarily beautiful pastoral scenes.
Otohiko Kaga: Marshland
Translated by Albert Novick (May 2023)
Otohiko Kaga’s Marshland is an epic novel on a Tolstoyan scale, running from the pre-World War II period to the turbulence of 1960s Japan. At forty-nine, Atsuo Yukimori is a humble auto mechanic living an almost penitentially quiet life in Tokyo, where his coworkers know something of his military record but nothing of his postwar past as a petty criminal. Out of curiosity he accompanies his nephew to a demonstration at a nearby university, and is gradually drawn into a friendship, then a romance, with Wakako Ikéhata, the brilliant but mentally unstable daughter of a university professor. As some of the student radical groups turn to violence and terrorism, Atsuo and Wakako find themselves framed for the lethal bombing of a Tokyo train.
During their long imprisonment the novel becomes a Kafkaesque procedural, revealing the corrupt intricacies of the police and judicial system of Japan. At the end of their hard pilgrimage to exoneration, Atsuo and Wakako are finally able to return to his original hometown, Nemuro, on the eastern-most peninsula of Hokkaido island. Here is the marshland of the title, a remote and virtually unspoiled region of Japan where Kaga sets a large number of extraordinarily beautiful pastoral scenes.
28lilisin
>27 stretch:
I've heard nothing about this either and googling it gives nothing. How odd.
---
I'm here to add the following book, The Tattoo Murder by Akimitsu Takagi to the 2022 list. This book has actually been published once before by Soho Press in 2003 as The Tattoo Murder Case but this new publication is done by Pushkin Press and is the first time the book is published in the UK apparently. I confirmed with them over Twitter that it is the same translation.
The press release is on their website here.
I read the book in 2020 and it's a fine enough mystery but I didn't find it exceptional by any means. I wouldn't not recommend it though if someone expressed the desire to read it.
I've heard nothing about this either and googling it gives nothing. How odd.
---
I'm here to add the following book, The Tattoo Murder by Akimitsu Takagi to the 2022 list. This book has actually been published once before by Soho Press in 2003 as The Tattoo Murder Case but this new publication is done by Pushkin Press and is the first time the book is published in the UK apparently. I confirmed with them over Twitter that it is the same translation.
The press release is on their website here.
I read the book in 2020 and it's a fine enough mystery but I didn't find it exceptional by any means. I wouldn't not recommend it though if someone expressed the desire to read it.
29lilisin
And as we approach the end of the year and get read for 2023 translation anouncements, here is a summary of all the 2022 books that came out in translation in English. Did anyone read these? What are your most recommended?
2022:
1) Junichiro Tanizaki : Longing and other stories (tr. Anthony Chambers and Paul McCarthy)
2) Yoko Tawada : Scattered All Over the Earth (tr. Margaret Mitsutani)
3) Emi Yagi : Diary of a Void (tr. David Boyd and Lucy North)
4) Beautiful Star by Yukio Mishima (tr. Stephen Dodd)
5) Hiromi Ito : The Thorn Puller (tr. Jeffrey Angles)
6) Shion Miura : Kamusari Tales Told at Nights (tr. Juliet Winters Carpenter)
7) Riku Onda : Fish Swimming in Dappled Sunlight (tr. Alison Watts)
8) Koji Suzuki : The Shining Sea
9) Kotaro Isaka : Three Assassins (tr. Sam Malissa)
10) Yūko Tsushima : Woman Running in the Mountains (tr. Geraldine Harcourt)
11) Fuminori Nakamura : My Annihilation (tr. Sam Bett)
12) Genpei Akasegawa : I Guess All We Have Is Freedom (tr. Matthew Fargo)
13) Masatsugu Ono : At the Edge of the Woods (tr. Juliet Winters Carpenter)
14) Chesil : The Color of the Sky Is the Shape of the Heart (tr. Takami Nieda)
15) Mieko Kawakami : All the Lovers in the Night (tr. Sam Bett and David Boyd)
16) Li Kotomi : Solo Dance (tr. Arthur Reiji Morris)
17) Seicho Matsumoto : Tokyo Express
18) Seishi Yokomizo : Gokumon Island (tr. Louise Heal Kawai)
19) Erika Kobayashi : Trinity, Trinity, Trinity (tr. Brian Bergstrom)
20) Osamu Dazai : Early Light (tr. Donald Keene and Ralph McCarthy)
21) Sayaka Murata : Life Ceremony: Stories (tr. Ginny Tapley Takemori)
22) Tomohiko Morimi : The Tatami Galaxy (tr. Emily Balistrieri)
23) Kaoru Takamura: Lady Joker, Volume 2
24) Toshikazu Kawaguchi: Before Your Memory Fades
25) Hiroko Oyamada: Weasels in the Attic
26) Akimitsu Takagi : The Tattoo Murder (UK publication)
27) Rin Usami : Idol, Burning (tr. Asa Yoneda)
2022:
1) Junichiro Tanizaki : Longing and other stories (tr. Anthony Chambers and Paul McCarthy)
2) Yoko Tawada : Scattered All Over the Earth (tr. Margaret Mitsutani)
3) Emi Yagi : Diary of a Void (tr. David Boyd and Lucy North)
4) Beautiful Star by Yukio Mishima (tr. Stephen Dodd)
5) Hiromi Ito : The Thorn Puller (tr. Jeffrey Angles)
6) Shion Miura : Kamusari Tales Told at Nights (tr. Juliet Winters Carpenter)
7) Riku Onda : Fish Swimming in Dappled Sunlight (tr. Alison Watts)
8) Koji Suzuki : The Shining Sea
9) Kotaro Isaka : Three Assassins (tr. Sam Malissa)
10) Yūko Tsushima : Woman Running in the Mountains (tr. Geraldine Harcourt)
11) Fuminori Nakamura : My Annihilation (tr. Sam Bett)
12) Genpei Akasegawa : I Guess All We Have Is Freedom (tr. Matthew Fargo)
13) Masatsugu Ono : At the Edge of the Woods (tr. Juliet Winters Carpenter)
14) Chesil : The Color of the Sky Is the Shape of the Heart (tr. Takami Nieda)
15) Mieko Kawakami : All the Lovers in the Night (tr. Sam Bett and David Boyd)
16) Li Kotomi : Solo Dance (tr. Arthur Reiji Morris)
17) Seicho Matsumoto : Tokyo Express
18) Seishi Yokomizo : Gokumon Island (tr. Louise Heal Kawai)
19) Erika Kobayashi : Trinity, Trinity, Trinity (tr. Brian Bergstrom)
20) Osamu Dazai : Early Light (tr. Donald Keene and Ralph McCarthy)
21) Sayaka Murata : Life Ceremony: Stories (tr. Ginny Tapley Takemori)
22) Tomohiko Morimi : The Tatami Galaxy (tr. Emily Balistrieri)
23) Kaoru Takamura: Lady Joker, Volume 2
24) Toshikazu Kawaguchi: Before Your Memory Fades
25) Hiroko Oyamada: Weasels in the Attic
26) Akimitsu Takagi : The Tattoo Murder (UK publication)
27) Rin Usami : Idol, Burning (tr. Asa Yoneda)
30lilisin
Hot off the press! I caught a tweet from Pushkin Press regarding their upcoming Japanese translations. Read below!
*drumroll* Coming from Pushkin Press next year:
The Mill House Murders, Nails and Eyes, Nipponia Nippon, This is Akiko, The Meiji Guiilotine, The Siren's Lament, a KAFKA MANGA, a children's picturebook AND a new Seishi Yokomizo tr. by
@Jim_D_Rion : The Devil's Flute Murders!
They are publishing Nails and Eyes! This is a book I highly rated when I read it in January as it was a super interesting mix of horror and everyday Japanese social problems. It was such a unique read and I joked that I should translate it but I've been beat apparently as it's coming out in 2023!
*drumroll* Coming from Pushkin Press next year:
The Mill House Murders, Nails and Eyes, Nipponia Nippon, This is Akiko, The Meiji Guiilotine, The Siren's Lament, a KAFKA MANGA, a children's picturebook AND a new Seishi Yokomizo tr. by
@Jim_D_Rion : The Devil's Flute Murders!
They are publishing Nails and Eyes! This is a book I highly rated when I read it in January as it was a super interesting mix of horror and everyday Japanese social problems. It was such a unique read and I joked that I should translate it but I've been beat apparently as it's coming out in 2023!
31JaxonMcArthur
This user has been removed as spam.
32lilisin
A 2022 translated book almost slipped by! This was the Akutagawa Prize winning book in 2020 that explores social media and fan culture. It's something I've explored reading in Japanese many times so I'm excited that it's now available in English. Although I don't know if I dislike the US or UK cover more.
27) Rin Usami : Idol, Burning (tr. Asa Yoneda)
Came out November 2022
The novel that lit the Japanese publishing world on fire: From a breathtaking up-and-coming writer, a twenty-first century Catcher in the Rye that brilliantly explores toxic fandom, social media, and alienated adolescence.
Akari is a high school student obsessed with “oshi” Masaki Ueno, a member of the popular J-Pop group Maza Maza. She writes a blog devoted to him, and spends hours addictively scrolling for information about him and his life. Desperate to analyze and understand him, Akari hopes to eventually see the world through his eyes. It is a devotion that borders on the religious: Masaki is her savior, her backbone, someone she believes she cannot survive without—even though she’s never actually met him.
When rumors surface that her idol assaulted a female fan, social media explodes. Akari immediately begins sifting through everything she can find about the scandal, and shares every detail to her blog—including Masaki’s denials and pleas to his fans—drawing numerous readers eager for her updates.
But the organized, knowledgeable persona Akari presents online is totally different from the socially awkward, unfocused teenager she is in real life. As Masaki's situation spirals, his troubles threaten to tear apart her life too. Instead of finding a way to break free to save herself, Akari becomes even more fanatical about Masaki, still believing her idol is the only person who understands her.
A blistering novel of fame, disconnection, obsession, and disillusion by a young writer not much older than the novel’s heroine, Idol, Burning shines a white-hot spotlight on fandom and “stan” culture, the money-making schemes of the pop idol industry, the seductive power of social media, and the powerful emotional void that opens when an idol falls from grace, only to become a real—and very flawed—person.
Source: Harper Collins
27) Rin Usami : Idol, Burning (tr. Asa Yoneda)
Came out November 2022
The novel that lit the Japanese publishing world on fire: From a breathtaking up-and-coming writer, a twenty-first century Catcher in the Rye that brilliantly explores toxic fandom, social media, and alienated adolescence.
Akari is a high school student obsessed with “oshi” Masaki Ueno, a member of the popular J-Pop group Maza Maza. She writes a blog devoted to him, and spends hours addictively scrolling for information about him and his life. Desperate to analyze and understand him, Akari hopes to eventually see the world through his eyes. It is a devotion that borders on the religious: Masaki is her savior, her backbone, someone she believes she cannot survive without—even though she’s never actually met him.
When rumors surface that her idol assaulted a female fan, social media explodes. Akari immediately begins sifting through everything she can find about the scandal, and shares every detail to her blog—including Masaki’s denials and pleas to his fans—drawing numerous readers eager for her updates.
But the organized, knowledgeable persona Akari presents online is totally different from the socially awkward, unfocused teenager she is in real life. As Masaki's situation spirals, his troubles threaten to tear apart her life too. Instead of finding a way to break free to save herself, Akari becomes even more fanatical about Masaki, still believing her idol is the only person who understands her.
A blistering novel of fame, disconnection, obsession, and disillusion by a young writer not much older than the novel’s heroine, Idol, Burning shines a white-hot spotlight on fandom and “stan” culture, the money-making schemes of the pop idol industry, the seductive power of social media, and the powerful emotional void that opens when an idol falls from grace, only to become a real—and very flawed—person.
Source: Harper Collins
33lilisin
And now for some upcoming 2023 translations!
1) Satoshi Yagisawa : Days at the Morisaki Bookshop (tr. Eric Ozawa)
25-year-old Takako has lived a relatively easy life. Born and raised on the southern island of Kyushu, she went to a good university and got a graduate job at a company in Tokyo where she met her charming boyfriend, Kashikoi. However, when Kashikoi casually announces that he’s been cheating on her and is planning to marry somebody else, Takako’s life is suddenly in freefall. She loses her job and with it all of her friends and acquaintances. She ends up in a deep depression but just as her despair seems to have reached a new low, she receives a call from her distant uncle.
Source
2) Seishi Yokomizo : The Devil’s Flute Murders (tr. Jim Rion)
The beloved scruffy sleuth Kosuke Kindaichi investigates a series of gruesome murders within the feuding family of a brooding, troubled composer, whose most famous work chills the blood of all who hear it.
Readers will be totally engrossed by one of Yokomizo’s most clever guessing games, in which everyone has something to hide…
Source
3) Yu Miri : The End of August (tr. Morgan Giles)
In 1930s Japanese-occupied Korea, Lee Woo-cheol was a running prodigy and a contender for the upcoming Tokyo Olympics. But he would have had to run under the Japanese flag.
Nearly a century later, his granddaughter is living in Japan and training to run a marathon herself. She summons Korean shamans to hold an intense, transcendent ritual to connect with Lee Woo-cheol. When his ghost appears, alongside those of his brother Lee Woo-Gun, and their young neighbor, who was forced to become a comfort woman to Japanese soldiers stationed in China during World War II, she must uncover their stories to free their souls. What she discovers is at the heart of this sweeping, majestic novel about a family that endured death, love, betrayal, war, political upheaval, and ghosts, both vengeful and wistful.
Source
4) Osamu Dazai : The Flowers of Buffoonery (tr. Sam Bett)
The Flowers of Buffoonery opens in a seaside sanitarium where Yozo Oba—the narrator of No Longer Human at a younger age—is being kept after a failed suicide attempt. While he is convalescing, his friends and family visit him, and other patients and nurses drift in and out of his room. Against this dispiriting backdrop, everyone tries to maintain a lighthearted, even clownish atmosphere: playing cards, smoking cigarettes, vying for attention, cracking jokes, and trying to make each other laugh.
While No Longer Human delves into the darkest corners of human consciousness, The Flowers of Buffoonery pokes fun at these same emotions: the follies and hardships of youth, of love, and of self-hatred and depression. A glimpse into the lives of a group of outsiders in prewar Japan, The Flowers of Buffoonery is a darkly humorous and fresh addition to Osamu Dazai’s masterful and intoxicating oeuvre.
Source
1) Satoshi Yagisawa : Days at the Morisaki Bookshop (tr. Eric Ozawa)
25-year-old Takako has lived a relatively easy life. Born and raised on the southern island of Kyushu, she went to a good university and got a graduate job at a company in Tokyo where she met her charming boyfriend, Kashikoi. However, when Kashikoi casually announces that he’s been cheating on her and is planning to marry somebody else, Takako’s life is suddenly in freefall. She loses her job and with it all of her friends and acquaintances. She ends up in a deep depression but just as her despair seems to have reached a new low, she receives a call from her distant uncle.
Source
2) Seishi Yokomizo : The Devil’s Flute Murders (tr. Jim Rion)
The beloved scruffy sleuth Kosuke Kindaichi investigates a series of gruesome murders within the feuding family of a brooding, troubled composer, whose most famous work chills the blood of all who hear it.
Readers will be totally engrossed by one of Yokomizo’s most clever guessing games, in which everyone has something to hide…
Source
3) Yu Miri : The End of August (tr. Morgan Giles)
In 1930s Japanese-occupied Korea, Lee Woo-cheol was a running prodigy and a contender for the upcoming Tokyo Olympics. But he would have had to run under the Japanese flag.
Nearly a century later, his granddaughter is living in Japan and training to run a marathon herself. She summons Korean shamans to hold an intense, transcendent ritual to connect with Lee Woo-cheol. When his ghost appears, alongside those of his brother Lee Woo-Gun, and their young neighbor, who was forced to become a comfort woman to Japanese soldiers stationed in China during World War II, she must uncover their stories to free their souls. What she discovers is at the heart of this sweeping, majestic novel about a family that endured death, love, betrayal, war, political upheaval, and ghosts, both vengeful and wistful.
Source
4) Osamu Dazai : The Flowers of Buffoonery (tr. Sam Bett)
The Flowers of Buffoonery opens in a seaside sanitarium where Yozo Oba—the narrator of No Longer Human at a younger age—is being kept after a failed suicide attempt. While he is convalescing, his friends and family visit him, and other patients and nurses drift in and out of his room. Against this dispiriting backdrop, everyone tries to maintain a lighthearted, even clownish atmosphere: playing cards, smoking cigarettes, vying for attention, cracking jokes, and trying to make each other laugh.
While No Longer Human delves into the darkest corners of human consciousness, The Flowers of Buffoonery pokes fun at these same emotions: the follies and hardships of youth, of love, and of self-hatred and depression. A glimpse into the lives of a group of outsiders in prewar Japan, The Flowers of Buffoonery is a darkly humorous and fresh addition to Osamu Dazai’s masterful and intoxicating oeuvre.
Source
34lilisin
5) Ayase Maru : The Forest Brims Over (tr. Hadyn Trowell)
A woman turns herself into a forest after long being co-opted to serve as the subject of her husband’s novels—this surrealist fable challenges traditional gender attitudes and exploitation in the literary world
Nowatari Rui has long been the subject of her husband’s novels, depicted as a pure woman who takes great pleasure in sex. With her privacy and identity continually stripped away, she has come to be seen by society first and foremost as the inspiration for her husband’s art. When a decade’s worth of frustrations reaches its boiling point, Rui consumes a bowl of seeds, and buds and roots begin to sprout all over her body. Instead of taking her to a hospital, her husband keeps her in an aquaterrarium, set to compose a new novel based on this unsettling experience. But Rui grows at a rapid pace and soon breaks away from her husband by turning into a forest—and in time, she takes over the entire city.
Source
6) Riku Ondo : Honeybees and Distant Thunder (tr. Philip Gabriel)
In a small coastal town just a stone's throw from Tokyo, a prestigious piano competition is underway. Over the course of two feverish weeks, three students will experience some of the most joyous—and painful—moments of their lives. Though they don't know it yet, each will profoundly and unpredictably change the others, for ever.
Aya was a child prodigy who abruptly gave up performing after the death of her mother, and is now trying for a comeback; Masaru, a childhood friend of Aya who came to the piano through her insistence that he learn to play, is now reunited with her after many years, and is equally invested in both his and her success; Akashi, who is older and married, works in a music store and is the “old man” of the competitors, hoping for a final chance at success; and Jin, a sixteen-year-old prodigy, the free spirited son of a beekeeper who travels constantly, and has no formal training (and doesn’t even own a piano) yet whose mesmerizing insight into music has brought him to the attention of one of the world’s most celebrated pianists, the late Maestro Von Hoffman.
Each of them will break the rules, awe their fans and push themselves to the brink. But at what cost?
Source
7) Izumi Suzuki : Hit Parade of Tears (tr. Daniel Joseph, Sam Bett, and David Boyd)
A new collection of stories from the cult author of Terminal Boredom
Izumi Suzuki had ideas about doing things differently, ideas that paid little attention to the laws of physics, or the laws of the land. In this new collection, her skewed imagination distorts and enhances some of the classic concepts of science fiction and fantasy.
A philandering husband receives a bestial punishment from a wife with her own secrets to keep; a music lover finds herself in a timeline both familiar and as wrong as can be; idle high school students find adventure in another dimension but aren’t all that impressed; a misfit band of space pirates discover a mysterious baby among the stars; Emma, the Bovary-like character from one of Suzuki’s stories in Terminal Boredom, lands herself in a bizarre romantic pickle.
Wryly anarchic and deeply imaginative, Suzuki was a writer like no other. These eleven stories offer readers the opportunity to delve deeper in this singular writer’s work.
Source
8) Genpai Akasegawa : I Guess All We Have Is Freedom (tr. Matthew Fargo)
In these stories, ostensibly quiet tales of a single dad in 1970s Tokyo, a doorknob practices radical politics, a peeled tomato smarts in pain, raw oysters tick like time bombs and gravestones provide a critique of capitalism. After reading I Guess All We Have Is Freedom, you will never be able to look at a sliding door, a rubber band or a plastic gutter the same way again. In spite of their suburban settings, the stories here are more radical than the most cosmopolitan contemporary art. Or as the protagonist puts it: “The whole art thing is a little played out at this point. Nowadays, it’s all about buying gutters. Going out to buy a gutter on a sunny day.”
Source
A woman turns herself into a forest after long being co-opted to serve as the subject of her husband’s novels—this surrealist fable challenges traditional gender attitudes and exploitation in the literary world
Nowatari Rui has long been the subject of her husband’s novels, depicted as a pure woman who takes great pleasure in sex. With her privacy and identity continually stripped away, she has come to be seen by society first and foremost as the inspiration for her husband’s art. When a decade’s worth of frustrations reaches its boiling point, Rui consumes a bowl of seeds, and buds and roots begin to sprout all over her body. Instead of taking her to a hospital, her husband keeps her in an aquaterrarium, set to compose a new novel based on this unsettling experience. But Rui grows at a rapid pace and soon breaks away from her husband by turning into a forest—and in time, she takes over the entire city.
Source
6) Riku Ondo : Honeybees and Distant Thunder (tr. Philip Gabriel)
In a small coastal town just a stone's throw from Tokyo, a prestigious piano competition is underway. Over the course of two feverish weeks, three students will experience some of the most joyous—and painful—moments of their lives. Though they don't know it yet, each will profoundly and unpredictably change the others, for ever.
Aya was a child prodigy who abruptly gave up performing after the death of her mother, and is now trying for a comeback; Masaru, a childhood friend of Aya who came to the piano through her insistence that he learn to play, is now reunited with her after many years, and is equally invested in both his and her success; Akashi, who is older and married, works in a music store and is the “old man” of the competitors, hoping for a final chance at success; and Jin, a sixteen-year-old prodigy, the free spirited son of a beekeeper who travels constantly, and has no formal training (and doesn’t even own a piano) yet whose mesmerizing insight into music has brought him to the attention of one of the world’s most celebrated pianists, the late Maestro Von Hoffman.
Each of them will break the rules, awe their fans and push themselves to the brink. But at what cost?
Source
7) Izumi Suzuki : Hit Parade of Tears (tr. Daniel Joseph, Sam Bett, and David Boyd)
A new collection of stories from the cult author of Terminal Boredom
Izumi Suzuki had ideas about doing things differently, ideas that paid little attention to the laws of physics, or the laws of the land. In this new collection, her skewed imagination distorts and enhances some of the classic concepts of science fiction and fantasy.
A philandering husband receives a bestial punishment from a wife with her own secrets to keep; a music lover finds herself in a timeline both familiar and as wrong as can be; idle high school students find adventure in another dimension but aren’t all that impressed; a misfit band of space pirates discover a mysterious baby among the stars; Emma, the Bovary-like character from one of Suzuki’s stories in Terminal Boredom, lands herself in a bizarre romantic pickle.
Wryly anarchic and deeply imaginative, Suzuki was a writer like no other. These eleven stories offer readers the opportunity to delve deeper in this singular writer’s work.
Source
8) Genpai Akasegawa : I Guess All We Have Is Freedom (tr. Matthew Fargo)
In these stories, ostensibly quiet tales of a single dad in 1970s Tokyo, a doorknob practices radical politics, a peeled tomato smarts in pain, raw oysters tick like time bombs and gravestones provide a critique of capitalism. After reading I Guess All We Have Is Freedom, you will never be able to look at a sliding door, a rubber band or a plastic gutter the same way again. In spite of their suburban settings, the stories here are more radical than the most cosmopolitan contemporary art. Or as the protagonist puts it: “The whole art thing is a little played out at this point. Nowadays, it’s all about buying gutters. Going out to buy a gutter on a sunny day.”
Source
35lilisin
9) Maki Kashimada : Love at Six Thousand Degrees (tr. Hadyn Trowell)
Winner of the Mishima Yukio Prize
An ordinary housewife finds herself haunted by visions of a mushroom cloud and abruptly leaves her husband and son to travel alone to the city of Nagasaki, where she soon begins an affair with a young half-Russian, half-Japanese man.
Inspired by Marguerite Duras’s screenplay for “Hiroshima, Mon Amour,".
Source
10) Otohiko Kaga : Marshland (tr. Albert Novick)
Otohiko Kaga’s Marshland is an epic novel on a Tolstoyan scale, running from the pre-World War II period to the turbulence of 1960s Japan. At forty-nine, Atsuo Yukimori is a humble auto mechanic living an almost penitentially quiet life in Tokyo, where his coworkers know something of his military record but nothing of his postwar past as a petty criminal. Out of curiosity he accompanies his nephew to a demonstration at a nearby university, and is gradually drawn into a friendship, then a romance, with Wakako Ikéhata, the brilliant but mentally unstable daughter of a university professor. As some of the student radical groups turn to violence and terrorism, Atsuo and Wakako find themselves framed for the lethal bombing of a Tokyo train.
During their long imprisonment the novel becomes a Kafkaesque procedural, revealing the corrupt intricacies of the police and judicial system of Japan. At the end of their hard pilgrimage to exoneration, Atsuo and Wakako are finally able to return to his original hometown, Nemuro, on the eastern-most peninsula of Hokkaido island. Here is the marshland of the title, a remote and virtually unspoiled region of Japan where Kaga sets a large number of extraordinarily beautiful pastoral scenes.
Source
11) Mieko Kanai : Mild Vertigo (tr. Polly Barton)
The apparently unremarkable Natsumi lives in a modern Tokyo apartment with her husband and two sons: she does the laundry, goes to the supermarket, visits friends, and gossips with neighbors. Tracing her conversations and interactions with her family and friends as they blend seamlessly into her own infernally buzzing internal monologue, Mild Vertigo explores the dizzying reality of being unable to locate oneself in the endless stream of minutiae that forms a lonely life confined to a middle-class home, where both everything and nothing happens.
Source
12) Ayatsuji Yukito : The Mill House Murders (tr. Ho-Ling Wong)
A hugely enjoyable, page-turning classic Japanese mystery with an ingenious conclusion from the author of The Decagon House Murders, translated into English for the first time
Don’t miss this beautifully constructed, highly entertaining and atmospheric murder mystery–its propulsive plot makes for a compelling, page-turning read.
As they do every year, a small group of acquaintances pay a visit to the remote, castle-like Water Mill House, home to the reclusive Fujinuma Kiichi, son of a famous artist, who has lived his life behind a rubber mask ever since a disfiguring car accident.
This year, however, the visit is disrupted by an impossible disappearance, the theft of a painting and a series of baffling murders.
The brilliant Kiyoshi Shimada arrives to investigate. But will he get to the truth, and will you too be able to solve the mystery of the Mill House Murders?
Source
Winner of the Mishima Yukio Prize
An ordinary housewife finds herself haunted by visions of a mushroom cloud and abruptly leaves her husband and son to travel alone to the city of Nagasaki, where she soon begins an affair with a young half-Russian, half-Japanese man.
Inspired by Marguerite Duras’s screenplay for “Hiroshima, Mon Amour,".
Source
10) Otohiko Kaga : Marshland (tr. Albert Novick)
Otohiko Kaga’s Marshland is an epic novel on a Tolstoyan scale, running from the pre-World War II period to the turbulence of 1960s Japan. At forty-nine, Atsuo Yukimori is a humble auto mechanic living an almost penitentially quiet life in Tokyo, where his coworkers know something of his military record but nothing of his postwar past as a petty criminal. Out of curiosity he accompanies his nephew to a demonstration at a nearby university, and is gradually drawn into a friendship, then a romance, with Wakako Ikéhata, the brilliant but mentally unstable daughter of a university professor. As some of the student radical groups turn to violence and terrorism, Atsuo and Wakako find themselves framed for the lethal bombing of a Tokyo train.
During their long imprisonment the novel becomes a Kafkaesque procedural, revealing the corrupt intricacies of the police and judicial system of Japan. At the end of their hard pilgrimage to exoneration, Atsuo and Wakako are finally able to return to his original hometown, Nemuro, on the eastern-most peninsula of Hokkaido island. Here is the marshland of the title, a remote and virtually unspoiled region of Japan where Kaga sets a large number of extraordinarily beautiful pastoral scenes.
Source
11) Mieko Kanai : Mild Vertigo (tr. Polly Barton)
The apparently unremarkable Natsumi lives in a modern Tokyo apartment with her husband and two sons: she does the laundry, goes to the supermarket, visits friends, and gossips with neighbors. Tracing her conversations and interactions with her family and friends as they blend seamlessly into her own infernally buzzing internal monologue, Mild Vertigo explores the dizzying reality of being unable to locate oneself in the endless stream of minutiae that forms a lonely life confined to a middle-class home, where both everything and nothing happens.
Source
12) Ayatsuji Yukito : The Mill House Murders (tr. Ho-Ling Wong)
A hugely enjoyable, page-turning classic Japanese mystery with an ingenious conclusion from the author of The Decagon House Murders, translated into English for the first time
Don’t miss this beautifully constructed, highly entertaining and atmospheric murder mystery–its propulsive plot makes for a compelling, page-turning read.
As they do every year, a small group of acquaintances pay a visit to the remote, castle-like Water Mill House, home to the reclusive Fujinuma Kiichi, son of a famous artist, who has lived his life behind a rubber mask ever since a disfiguring car accident.
This year, however, the visit is disrupted by an impossible disappearance, the theft of a painting and a series of baffling murders.
The brilliant Kiyoshi Shimada arrives to investigate. But will he get to the truth, and will you too be able to solve the mystery of the Mill House Murders?
Source
36lilisin
13) Hideo Yokoyama : The North Light (tr. Louise Heal Kawai)
Minoru Aose is an architect whose greatest achievement is to have designed the Yoshino house, a prizewinning and much discussed private residence built in the shadow of Mount Asama. Aose has never been able to replicate this triumph and his career seems to have hit a barrier, while his marriage has failed. He is shocked to learn that the Yoshino House is empty apart from a single chair, stood facing the north light of nearby Mount Asama.
How can he live with the rejection of the work he had put his heart and soul into, the dream house he would have loved to own himself? Aose determines that he must discover the truth behind this cruel and inexplicable dismissal of the Yoshino house and in doing so will find out a truth that goes back to the core of who he is.
Plotted with the subtlety of his bestselling masterpiece Six Four, The North Light is Yokoyama at his elusive, tantalising and surprising best.
Source
14) Ao Omae : The People Who Talk to Stuffed Animals Are Nice (tr. Emily Balistrieri)
Composed of the title novella and three short stories, People Who Talk to Stuffed Animals Are Nice sensitively explores gender, friendship, romance, love, human interaction and its absence, and how a misogynistic society limits women and men.
In the title story, Nanamori and Mugito, two university students appalled by society’s gendered roles, rebel. Refusing to interact with other people they use stuffed toys for emotional support. Unlike Nanamori and Mugito, their fellow plushie society member Shiraki does not talk to plushies. Pragmatic, she accepts the status quo that boys sometimes make nasty jokes; she believes their behavior resembles the real world.
Source
15) Yasunari Kawabata : The Rainbow (tr. Hadyn Trowell)
With the Second World War only a few years in the past, and Japan still reeling from its effects, two sisters—born to the same father but different mothers—struggle to make sense of the new world in which they are coming of age. Asako, the younger, has become obsessed with locating a third sibling, while also experiencing love for the first time. While Momoko, their father’s first child—haunted by the loss of her kamikaze boyfriend and their final, disturbing days together—seeks comfort in a series of unhealthy romances. And both sisters find themselves unable to outrun the legacies of their late mothers. A thoughtful, probing novel about the enduring traumas of war, the unbreakable bonds of family, and the inescapability of the past, The Rainbow is a searing, melancholy work from one of Japan’s greatest writers.
Source
16) Fuminori Nakamura : The Rope Artist (tr. by Sam Bett)
Two detectives. Two identical women. One dead body—rapidly becoming two, then three, then four. All knotted up in Japan’s underground BDSM scene and kinbaku, a form of rope bondage which bears a complex cultural history of spirituality, torture, cleansing, and sacrifice. As Togashi, a junior member of the police force, investigates the murder of a kinbaku instructor, he finds himself unable to resist his own private transgressive desires. In contrast, Togashi’s colleague Hayama is morally upright to a fault, with a stalwart commitment to the truth. A Sherlock Holmesian detective with nearly superhuman powers of deduction, Hayama notices a dangerous measure of darkness within Togashi and embarks on his own parallel investigation, which soon spirals out of control.
Source
Minoru Aose is an architect whose greatest achievement is to have designed the Yoshino house, a prizewinning and much discussed private residence built in the shadow of Mount Asama. Aose has never been able to replicate this triumph and his career seems to have hit a barrier, while his marriage has failed. He is shocked to learn that the Yoshino House is empty apart from a single chair, stood facing the north light of nearby Mount Asama.
How can he live with the rejection of the work he had put his heart and soul into, the dream house he would have loved to own himself? Aose determines that he must discover the truth behind this cruel and inexplicable dismissal of the Yoshino house and in doing so will find out a truth that goes back to the core of who he is.
Plotted with the subtlety of his bestselling masterpiece Six Four, The North Light is Yokoyama at his elusive, tantalising and surprising best.
Source
14) Ao Omae : The People Who Talk to Stuffed Animals Are Nice (tr. Emily Balistrieri)
Composed of the title novella and three short stories, People Who Talk to Stuffed Animals Are Nice sensitively explores gender, friendship, romance, love, human interaction and its absence, and how a misogynistic society limits women and men.
In the title story, Nanamori and Mugito, two university students appalled by society’s gendered roles, rebel. Refusing to interact with other people they use stuffed toys for emotional support. Unlike Nanamori and Mugito, their fellow plushie society member Shiraki does not talk to plushies. Pragmatic, she accepts the status quo that boys sometimes make nasty jokes; she believes their behavior resembles the real world.
Source
15) Yasunari Kawabata : The Rainbow (tr. Hadyn Trowell)
With the Second World War only a few years in the past, and Japan still reeling from its effects, two sisters—born to the same father but different mothers—struggle to make sense of the new world in which they are coming of age. Asako, the younger, has become obsessed with locating a third sibling, while also experiencing love for the first time. While Momoko, their father’s first child—haunted by the loss of her kamikaze boyfriend and their final, disturbing days together—seeks comfort in a series of unhealthy romances. And both sisters find themselves unable to outrun the legacies of their late mothers. A thoughtful, probing novel about the enduring traumas of war, the unbreakable bonds of family, and the inescapability of the past, The Rainbow is a searing, melancholy work from one of Japan’s greatest writers.
Source
16) Fuminori Nakamura : The Rope Artist (tr. by Sam Bett)
Two detectives. Two identical women. One dead body—rapidly becoming two, then three, then four. All knotted up in Japan’s underground BDSM scene and kinbaku, a form of rope bondage which bears a complex cultural history of spirituality, torture, cleansing, and sacrifice. As Togashi, a junior member of the police force, investigates the murder of a kinbaku instructor, he finds himself unable to resist his own private transgressive desires. In contrast, Togashi’s colleague Hayama is morally upright to a fault, with a stalwart commitment to the truth. A Sherlock Holmesian detective with nearly superhuman powers of deduction, Hayama notices a dangerous measure of darkness within Togashi and embarks on his own parallel investigation, which soon spirals out of control.
Source
37lilisin
17) Erika Kobayashi : Sunrise: Radiant Stories (tr. Brian Bergstrom)
Sunrise is a collection of interconnected stories continuing Erika Kobayashi’s examination of the effects of nuclear power on generations of women. Connecting changes to everyday life to the development of the atomic bomb, Sunrise shows us how the discovery of radioactive power has shaped our history and continues to shape our future.
In the opening, eponymous story “Sunrise,” Yoko, born just days after Nagasaki was decimated, mirrors her life to the development of nuclear power in Japan. In “Precious Stones,” four daughters take their elderly mother to the restorative waters of a radium spring, exchanging tales of immortality. In “Hello My Baby, Hello My Honey,” a woman goes into labor during the final days of WWII. And finally, “The Forest of Wild Birds” shows Erika visiting the site of the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Plant disaster, touring grounds that were once covered in green.
Source
18) Michiko Aoyama : What You Are Looking for Is In the Library (tr. Sam Bett)
Source
Sunrise is a collection of interconnected stories continuing Erika Kobayashi’s examination of the effects of nuclear power on generations of women. Connecting changes to everyday life to the development of the atomic bomb, Sunrise shows us how the discovery of radioactive power has shaped our history and continues to shape our future.
In the opening, eponymous story “Sunrise,” Yoko, born just days after Nagasaki was decimated, mirrors her life to the development of nuclear power in Japan. In “Precious Stones,” four daughters take their elderly mother to the restorative waters of a radium spring, exchanging tales of immortality. In “Hello My Baby, Hello My Honey,” a woman goes into labor during the final days of WWII. And finally, “The Forest of Wild Birds” shows Erika visiting the site of the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Plant disaster, touring grounds that were once covered in green.
Source
18) Michiko Aoyama : What You Are Looking for Is In the Library (tr. Sam Bett)
Source
38stretch
Wow so many interesting sounding books coming in 2023. I'll need to comb through these posts quite a bit to see what sparks the buy button.
I haven't immediately bought or read from these lists much yet, but the back list they create is a tremendous resource.
I haven't immediately bought or read from these lists much yet, but the back list they create is a tremendous resource.
39lilisin
>38 stretch:
Same for me actually. I haven't really been buying anything from these lists and if I have, I read them either in the original Japanese or French translation. Looking through the lists this is what I have read.
2021
(Jpn) Natsuko Imamura: The Woman in the Purple Skirt
(Jpn) Eto Mori : Colorful
(French) Seishi Yokomizo : The Village of Eight Graves
2022
(English) Yūko Tsushima : Woman Running in the Mountains
(French) Seicho Matsumoto : Tokyo Express
(Japanese) Hiroko Oyamada: Weasels in the Attic
(English - original 2003 release) Akimitsu Takagi : The Tattoo Murder
2023
(Jpn) Kaori Fujino : Nails and Eyes
So out of 62 books (wow!) I've only read 7 books and only one of those was in English and that was the original 2003 release, not the new 2022 release. So out of the 62 books recently available in English translation I've only purchased one! That doesn't mean there aren't some books I wouldn't mind owning, but I certainly haven't felt an immediate need to purchase anything (other than the Yuko Tsushima).
Same for me actually. I haven't really been buying anything from these lists and if I have, I read them either in the original Japanese or French translation. Looking through the lists this is what I have read.
2021
(Jpn) Natsuko Imamura: The Woman in the Purple Skirt
(Jpn) Eto Mori : Colorful
(French) Seishi Yokomizo : The Village of Eight Graves
2022
(English) Yūko Tsushima : Woman Running in the Mountains
(French) Seicho Matsumoto : Tokyo Express
(Japanese) Hiroko Oyamada: Weasels in the Attic
(English - original 2003 release) Akimitsu Takagi : The Tattoo Murder
2023
(Jpn) Kaori Fujino : Nails and Eyes
So out of 62 books (wow!) I've only read 7 books and only one of those was in English and that was the original 2003 release, not the new 2022 release. So out of the 62 books recently available in English translation I've only purchased one! That doesn't mean there aren't some books I wouldn't mind owning, but I certainly haven't felt an immediate need to purchase anything (other than the Yuko Tsushima).
40lilisin
We finally have information for these final translated works, included my most recommended read, Nails and Eyes, which for some reason, is being published by Penguin Randomhouse and not Pushkin Press despite PP tweeting they were publishing the book. Not sure what that is about but in any case Nails and Eyes is my big recommendation of the year.
Also, I know nothing about Nipponia Nippon but that blurb sounds amazing. At a short 96 pages, I might need to pick this one up!
19) Kaori Fujino : Nails and Eyes (tr. Kendall Heitzman)
An unforgettably creepy child narrator weaves uncanny tales about her new stepmother in this feminist horror novella + short story collection that introduces a unique new voice in Japanese literature. A young girl loses her mother, and her father blindly invites his secret lover into the family home to care for her. As she obsessively tries to curate a pristine life, this new interloper remains indifferent to the girl, who seems to record her every move – and she realises only too late all that she has failed to see. With masterful narrative control, Nails and Eyes—appearing in English for the first time—builds to a conclusion of disturbing power. Paired with two additional stories of unsettled minds and creeping tension, it introduces a daring new voice in Japanese literature.
Source
20) Kazushige Abe : Nipponia Nippon (tr. Kerim Yasar)
An off-kilter darkly ironic novella about a boy’s strange obsession with the Japanese crested ibis, from a Japanese literary star. Seventeen-year-old Haruo spends all his waking hours online, fixated on the endangered Japanese crested ibis, Nipponia Nippon. Alone in his Tokyo apartment, living off his parents’ indulgence, he descends into a fantasy world where he alone shares a bond with the last of these noble birds, their lives caged in the national conservation centre. Haruo’s destiny becomes clear. He will free the birds-alive or dead-from an undeserving civilization. As Haruo’s emotional state grows increasingly erratic, he searches the internet for weapons and prepares for the night of reckoning.
Source
21) Futaro Yamada : The Meiji Guillotine Murders
A classic Japanese mystery – a pair of sleuths investigate a series of bloody murders in 19th century Tokyo. Japan, 1869. A time of reform and rebellion. Detectives Kazuki and Kawaji are assigned to investigate a series of seemingly impossible murders. Together with the help of a mysterious shrine maiden, can they solve each gruesome death and piece together the dark connection between them? Taking us deep into the heart of 19th century Tokyo, The Meiji Guillotine Murders is a fiendish murder mystery from one of Japan’s greatest crime writers.
Source
22) Junichiro Tanizaki : The Siren's Lament: Essential Stories (tr. Bryan Karetnyk)
A new selection and translation of short stories by a hugely prominent classic Japanese writer, filled with eroticism and fantasy. The sage Confucius travels to a kingdom ruled by a struggling duke, whose pursuit of virtue is threatened by his consort’s desire for pleasure. A naïve servant elopes with his master’s daughter, only to be plunged headlong into a world of murder and corruption. Exhausted by a lifestyle of never-ending debauchery, a young prince finds himself in possession of a dazzling, beguiling mermaid. These three short stories, in a gorgeous new translation by Bryan Karetnyk, distil the essence of Jun’ichiro Tanizaki’s shorter fiction: the co-mingling of Japanese and Chinese mythologies, the chillingly dark side of desire and the paper-thin line between the sublime and the depraved.
Source
Also, I know nothing about Nipponia Nippon but that blurb sounds amazing. At a short 96 pages, I might need to pick this one up!
19) Kaori Fujino : Nails and Eyes (tr. Kendall Heitzman)
An unforgettably creepy child narrator weaves uncanny tales about her new stepmother in this feminist horror novella + short story collection that introduces a unique new voice in Japanese literature. A young girl loses her mother, and her father blindly invites his secret lover into the family home to care for her. As she obsessively tries to curate a pristine life, this new interloper remains indifferent to the girl, who seems to record her every move – and she realises only too late all that she has failed to see. With masterful narrative control, Nails and Eyes—appearing in English for the first time—builds to a conclusion of disturbing power. Paired with two additional stories of unsettled minds and creeping tension, it introduces a daring new voice in Japanese literature.
Source
20) Kazushige Abe : Nipponia Nippon (tr. Kerim Yasar)
An off-kilter darkly ironic novella about a boy’s strange obsession with the Japanese crested ibis, from a Japanese literary star. Seventeen-year-old Haruo spends all his waking hours online, fixated on the endangered Japanese crested ibis, Nipponia Nippon. Alone in his Tokyo apartment, living off his parents’ indulgence, he descends into a fantasy world where he alone shares a bond with the last of these noble birds, their lives caged in the national conservation centre. Haruo’s destiny becomes clear. He will free the birds-alive or dead-from an undeserving civilization. As Haruo’s emotional state grows increasingly erratic, he searches the internet for weapons and prepares for the night of reckoning.
Source
21) Futaro Yamada : The Meiji Guillotine Murders
A classic Japanese mystery – a pair of sleuths investigate a series of bloody murders in 19th century Tokyo. Japan, 1869. A time of reform and rebellion. Detectives Kazuki and Kawaji are assigned to investigate a series of seemingly impossible murders. Together with the help of a mysterious shrine maiden, can they solve each gruesome death and piece together the dark connection between them? Taking us deep into the heart of 19th century Tokyo, The Meiji Guillotine Murders is a fiendish murder mystery from one of Japan’s greatest crime writers.
Source
22) Junichiro Tanizaki : The Siren's Lament: Essential Stories (tr. Bryan Karetnyk)
A new selection and translation of short stories by a hugely prominent classic Japanese writer, filled with eroticism and fantasy. The sage Confucius travels to a kingdom ruled by a struggling duke, whose pursuit of virtue is threatened by his consort’s desire for pleasure. A naïve servant elopes with his master’s daughter, only to be plunged headlong into a world of murder and corruption. Exhausted by a lifestyle of never-ending debauchery, a young prince finds himself in possession of a dazzling, beguiling mermaid. These three short stories, in a gorgeous new translation by Bryan Karetnyk, distil the essence of Jun’ichiro Tanizaki’s shorter fiction: the co-mingling of Japanese and Chinese mythologies, the chillingly dark side of desire and the paper-thin line between the sublime and the depraved.
Source
41stretch
>40 lilisin: That is odd, Nails and Eyes was even in their NewsLetter, guess Penguin bought out the rights? Publishing is strange, can't wait to get though this September, hoping to get out the not finishing anything slump.
That Abe description is enticing indeed. For how short it is how can you pass it up?
Japanese mystery seem like a big trend in translation, got a few of the bigger ones to read, plenty to read after.
That Abe description is enticing indeed. For how short it is how can you pass it up?
Japanese mystery seem like a big trend in translation, got a few of the bigger ones to read, plenty to read after.
43stretch
Puskin Publishing is already putting out works for Sping of 2024, who now sees what actually gets published by them or wehn, seems like things shift with them quite a bit:
- Harlequin Butterfly; Toh Enjoe (tr. David Boyd):
Published: February 2024
Successful entrepreneur A. A. Abrams is pursuing the enigmatic writer ‘Tomoyuki Tomoyuki’, who is never in one place for long. Very little is known about this wandering author. There’s his interest in spices and embroidery, as well as his knack for languages-he writes expertly in the tongue of wherever he happens to set foot. Abrams sinks endless resources into finding Tomoyuki, but this elusive writer seems to be both everywhere and nowhere, always taking off moments before being pinned down. Ingenious and dazzling, Harlequin Butterfly unfolds one puzzle after another, taking us on a mind-bending journey into the imagination.
- Someone to Watch Over You; Kumi Kimura (tr. Asa Yoneda)
Published: February 2024
It’s early 2020, and with the world in chaos as coronavirus spreads, two lonely people, both seeking to break with their pasts, meet and start sharing a home.
One is a former security guard who was captured on video knocking down a protester who died soon afterward; the other, a former teacher accused of driving a student to suicide. In an oppressive atmosphere of tension and fear, the pair avoid direct contact and communicate through notes and their shared presences, close yet distant. Their odd connection, with neither affection nor trust, brings them a kind of privacy and safety they both need – but at what cost?
- Mysterious Setting; Kazushige Abe (tr. Miichael Emmerich)
Published: March 2024
Shiori knows at heart that she’s a troubadour. She may be completely tone-deaf, but she won’t let that stop her living a life dedicated to music. Even when her dominant older sister, Nozomi, forces Shiori to accept that her wild singing provokes only revulsion, she decides to forge a career as a lyricist instead. At eighteen, she moves to Tokyo to pursue her dream. Isolated and struggling in this unfamiliar city, Shiori seeks connection online, where her trusting outlook leaves her vulnerable to exploitation – with potentially explosive results.
- Harlequin Butterfly; Toh Enjoe (tr. David Boyd):
Published: February 2024
Successful entrepreneur A. A. Abrams is pursuing the enigmatic writer ‘Tomoyuki Tomoyuki’, who is never in one place for long. Very little is known about this wandering author. There’s his interest in spices and embroidery, as well as his knack for languages-he writes expertly in the tongue of wherever he happens to set foot. Abrams sinks endless resources into finding Tomoyuki, but this elusive writer seems to be both everywhere and nowhere, always taking off moments before being pinned down. Ingenious and dazzling, Harlequin Butterfly unfolds one puzzle after another, taking us on a mind-bending journey into the imagination.
- Someone to Watch Over You; Kumi Kimura (tr. Asa Yoneda)
Published: February 2024
It’s early 2020, and with the world in chaos as coronavirus spreads, two lonely people, both seeking to break with their pasts, meet and start sharing a home.
One is a former security guard who was captured on video knocking down a protester who died soon afterward; the other, a former teacher accused of driving a student to suicide. In an oppressive atmosphere of tension and fear, the pair avoid direct contact and communicate through notes and their shared presences, close yet distant. Their odd connection, with neither affection nor trust, brings them a kind of privacy and safety they both need – but at what cost?
- Mysterious Setting; Kazushige Abe (tr. Miichael Emmerich)
Published: March 2024
Shiori knows at heart that she’s a troubadour. She may be completely tone-deaf, but she won’t let that stop her living a life dedicated to music. Even when her dominant older sister, Nozomi, forces Shiori to accept that her wild singing provokes only revulsion, she decides to forge a career as a lyricist instead. At eighteen, she moves to Tokyo to pursue her dream. Isolated and struggling in this unfamiliar city, Shiori seeks connection online, where her trusting outlook leaves her vulnerable to exploitation – with potentially explosive results.
44lilisin
>43 stretch:
Thank you for getting us started on the 2024 translations list! That means it's time for me to set things up for the new year.
So here is a summary of all(*) the 2023 books that came out in translation in English. Did anyone read these? What are your most recommended?
2023:
1) Satoshi Yagisawa : Days at the Morisaki Bookshop (tr. Eric Ozawa)
2) Seishi Yokomizo : The Devil’s Flute Murders (tr. Jim Rion)
3) Yu Miri : The End of August (tr. Morgan Giles)
4) Osamu Dazai : The Flowers of Buffoonery (tr. Sam Bett)
5) Ayase Maru : The Forest Brims Over (tr. Hadyn Trowell)
6) Riku Ondo : Honeybees and Distant Thunder (tr. Philip Gabriel)
7) Izumi Suzuki : Hit Parade of Tears (tr. Daniel Joseph, Sam Bett, and David Boyd)
8) Genpai Akasegawa : I Guess All We Have Is Freedom (tr. Matthew Fargo)
9) Maki Kashimada : Love at Six Thousand Degrees (tr. Hadyn Trowell)
10) Otohiko Kaga : Marshland (tr. Albert Novick)
11) Mieko Kanai : Mild Vertigo (tr. Polly Barton)
12) Ayatsuji Yukito : The Mill House Murders (tr. Ho-Ling Wong)
13) Hideo Yokoyama : The North Light (tr. Louise Heal Kawai)
14) Ao Omae : The People Who Talk to Stuffed Animals Are Nice (tr. Emily Balistrieri)
15) Yasunari Kawabata : The Rainbow (tr. Hadyn Trowell)
16) Fuminori Nakamura : The Rope Artist (tr. by Sam Bett)
17) Erika Kobayashi : Sunrise: Radiant Stories (tr. Brian Bergstrom)
18) Michiko Aoyama : What You Are Looking for Is In the Library (tr. Sam Bett)
19) Kaori Fujino : Nails and Eyes (tr. Kendall Heitzman)
20) Kazushige Abe : Nipponia Nippon (tr. Kerim Yasar)
21) Futaro Yamada : The Meiji Guillotine Murders
22) Junichiro Tanizaki : The Siren's Lament: Essential Stories (tr. Bryan Karetnyk)
* Children's books, light novels and young adult-esque titles are most likely to be left off the list
Thank you for getting us started on the 2024 translations list! That means it's time for me to set things up for the new year.
So here is a summary of all(*) the 2023 books that came out in translation in English. Did anyone read these? What are your most recommended?
2023:
1) Satoshi Yagisawa : Days at the Morisaki Bookshop (tr. Eric Ozawa)
2) Seishi Yokomizo : The Devil’s Flute Murders (tr. Jim Rion)
3) Yu Miri : The End of August (tr. Morgan Giles)
4) Osamu Dazai : The Flowers of Buffoonery (tr. Sam Bett)
5) Ayase Maru : The Forest Brims Over (tr. Hadyn Trowell)
6) Riku Ondo : Honeybees and Distant Thunder (tr. Philip Gabriel)
7) Izumi Suzuki : Hit Parade of Tears (tr. Daniel Joseph, Sam Bett, and David Boyd)
8) Genpai Akasegawa : I Guess All We Have Is Freedom (tr. Matthew Fargo)
9) Maki Kashimada : Love at Six Thousand Degrees (tr. Hadyn Trowell)
10) Otohiko Kaga : Marshland (tr. Albert Novick)
11) Mieko Kanai : Mild Vertigo (tr. Polly Barton)
12) Ayatsuji Yukito : The Mill House Murders (tr. Ho-Ling Wong)
13) Hideo Yokoyama : The North Light (tr. Louise Heal Kawai)
14) Ao Omae : The People Who Talk to Stuffed Animals Are Nice (tr. Emily Balistrieri)
15) Yasunari Kawabata : The Rainbow (tr. Hadyn Trowell)
16) Fuminori Nakamura : The Rope Artist (tr. by Sam Bett)
17) Erika Kobayashi : Sunrise: Radiant Stories (tr. Brian Bergstrom)
18) Michiko Aoyama : What You Are Looking for Is In the Library (tr. Sam Bett)
19) Kaori Fujino : Nails and Eyes (tr. Kendall Heitzman)
20) Kazushige Abe : Nipponia Nippon (tr. Kerim Yasar)
21) Futaro Yamada : The Meiji Guillotine Murders
22) Junichiro Tanizaki : The Siren's Lament: Essential Stories (tr. Bryan Karetnyk)
* Children's books, light novels and young adult-esque titles are most likely to be left off the list
45stretch
Some mystery and crime novels coming in 2024.
- The Meiji Guillotine Murders; Futaro Yamada (tr. Bryan Karetnyk):
Published: June 2024
A captivating locked room murder mystery perfect for fans of Stuart Turton and Janice Hallett
Japan, 1869. A time of reform and rebellion. Detectives Kazuki and Kawaji are assigned to investigate a series of seemingly impossible murders. Together with the help of a mysterious shrine maiden, can they solve each gruesome death and piece together the dark connection between them? Taking us deep into the heart of 19th century Tokyo, The Meiji Guillotine Murders is a fiendish murder mystery from one of Japan's greatest crime writers.
- Butter: A Novel of Food and Murder; Asako Yuzuki (tr. Polly Barton)
Published: April 2024
Gourmet cook Manako Kajii sits in the Tokyo Detention House convicted of the serial murders of lonely businessmen, whom she is said to have seduced with her delicious home cooking. The case has captured the nation's imagination, but Kajii refuses to speak with the press, entertaining no visitors. That is until journalist Rika Machida writes a letter asking for her recipe for beef stew, and Kajii can't resist writing back.
Rika, the only woman in her news office, works late each night, rarely cooking more than ramen. As the visits unfold between her and the steely Kajii, they are closer to a master class in food than journalistic research. Rika hopes this gastronomic exchange will help her soften Kajii, but it seems that Rika might be the one changing. With each meal she eats, something is awakening in her body. Do she and Kajii have more in common than she once thought?
Inspired by the real case of a convicted con woman and serial killer--the "Konkatsu Killer"--Asako Yuzuki's Butter is a vivid, unsettling exploration of misogyny, obsession, romance, and the transgressive pleasures of food in Japan.
- The Little Sparrow Murders; Seishi Yokomizo (tr. Bryan Karetnyk)
Published: September 2024
As several bodies are discovered staged in bizarre poses echoing the lyrics of a children's song, the quirky, endearing detective must string together the clues to solve this fiendish puzzle. The scruffy detective Kosuke Kindaichi returns to solve another fiendish murder mystery. An old friend of Kindaichi's invites the detective to visit the remote mountain village of Onikobe, the site of a twenty-year-old unsolved murder case. But no sooner has Kindaichi in the village than a new series of murders strikes - several bodies are discovered staged in bizarre poses, and it soon becomes clear that the victims are being killed using methods that eerily echo the lyrics of an old local children's song.
- The Meiji Guillotine Murders; Futaro Yamada (tr. Bryan Karetnyk):
Published: June 2024
A captivating locked room murder mystery perfect for fans of Stuart Turton and Janice Hallett
Japan, 1869. A time of reform and rebellion. Detectives Kazuki and Kawaji are assigned to investigate a series of seemingly impossible murders. Together with the help of a mysterious shrine maiden, can they solve each gruesome death and piece together the dark connection between them? Taking us deep into the heart of 19th century Tokyo, The Meiji Guillotine Murders is a fiendish murder mystery from one of Japan's greatest crime writers.
- Butter: A Novel of Food and Murder; Asako Yuzuki (tr. Polly Barton)
Published: April 2024
Gourmet cook Manako Kajii sits in the Tokyo Detention House convicted of the serial murders of lonely businessmen, whom she is said to have seduced with her delicious home cooking. The case has captured the nation's imagination, but Kajii refuses to speak with the press, entertaining no visitors. That is until journalist Rika Machida writes a letter asking for her recipe for beef stew, and Kajii can't resist writing back.
Rika, the only woman in her news office, works late each night, rarely cooking more than ramen. As the visits unfold between her and the steely Kajii, they are closer to a master class in food than journalistic research. Rika hopes this gastronomic exchange will help her soften Kajii, but it seems that Rika might be the one changing. With each meal she eats, something is awakening in her body. Do she and Kajii have more in common than she once thought?
Inspired by the real case of a convicted con woman and serial killer--the "Konkatsu Killer"--Asako Yuzuki's Butter is a vivid, unsettling exploration of misogyny, obsession, romance, and the transgressive pleasures of food in Japan.
- The Little Sparrow Murders; Seishi Yokomizo (tr. Bryan Karetnyk)
Published: September 2024
As several bodies are discovered staged in bizarre poses echoing the lyrics of a children's song, the quirky, endearing detective must string together the clues to solve this fiendish puzzle. The scruffy detective Kosuke Kindaichi returns to solve another fiendish murder mystery. An old friend of Kindaichi's invites the detective to visit the remote mountain village of Onikobe, the site of a twenty-year-old unsolved murder case. But no sooner has Kindaichi in the village than a new series of murders strikes - several bodies are discovered staged in bizarre poses, and it soon becomes clear that the victims are being killed using methods that eerily echo the lyrics of an old local children's song.
46Pendrainllwyn
>45 stretch: Brilliant. Will be on the look out for all of those. Thanks for the heads up.
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