Asian Literature
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Review of All The Lovers In The Night by Mieko Kawakami
A slowly paced romance. The sheepish first-person narrator lives a solitary, repetitive existence, two-steps away from becoming a hikikomori. Her relationships are explored in several unremarkable scenes containing a lot of small talk and quaint dialogue. The author has a tendency to conduct most scenes at restaurants, with two characters…
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Review of The White Book by Han Kang
Han Kang describes white things well. But it would’ve been more intriguing if the pages were black and the text was white. You can achieve this by getting an ebook and turning your kindle to Dark Mode.I would not call these interconnected stories, but rather, observations orbiting a theme. An…
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Review of The Beggar Student by Osamu Dazai
Dazai stays in character with this autobiographical short novel about a sad author attempting to reconnect with his lost youth by hanging out with (or harassing) schoolboys. By sharing in their game, he attempts to recapture the sense of adventure and perhaps the inspiration he has lost in his dissolute…
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Review of Vanishing World by Sayaka Murata
Strange and unsettling lightly speculative fiction from a provocative author. Like with her previously Englished novels and story collections, Murata returns with a surprising novel of pointed social commentary. Though this one was too heavy-handed for my taste, it included enough nuance to captivate me most of the way through.…
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Review of Set My Heart on Fire by Izumi Suzuki
A great, sleazy Japanese novel in the tradition of Ryu Murakami and Shuichi Yoshida. I would love to read all of her books. I read and loved her two previous short story collections. So far, her most interesting book in English is Terminal Boredom. She broke from traditional Japanese realism…
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Review of Whale by Cheon Myeong-Kwan
The supremacy of storytelling. A fantastic and magic realist tale about a giant, a movie theater and a lot of other things. The author managed to conjure a surreal setting, painting sympathetic characters I will never forget and tying seemingly disparate events together through unbelievable, but clever, coincidences. The writing…
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Review of Bliss Montage by Ling Ma
This surreal collection of short stories put me in mind of Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls, Smart Ovens for Lonely People, and Life Ceremony. It uses the same recipe of injecting everyday tone with bizarro aesthetics. This is upmarket bizarro. Genre fiction pretending to be literary fiction. A popular…
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Review of People from My Neighborhood by Hiromi Kawakami
Hiromi Kawakami collects here a dreamlike conglomeration of semi-related characters and events from her part of town, if the title and interior clues are to be believed. The random nature of the images and events lend the collection an experimental feel. The writing is smooth and simple and unadorned. Her…
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Review of Soul Mountain by Gao Xingjian
I needed this. More unrestrained than Kawabata. Less brutal than Mo Yan. The voice is folkloric, the storytelling all over the place but always entertaining. With beautiful language, Gao depicts a China in transition, whose government and people are full of contradictions, but also resonant with long-standing traditions, suffused with…
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Review of Heaven by Mieko Kawakami
I am cautiously optimistic regarding Mieko Kawakami’s literary future. She is a rising star of popular Japanese fiction, but I see her writing style suffering from common traits plaguing the English translations we are getting within the past several years. It is a kind of commercial dumbing down of the…
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Review of Hokusai Manga by Katsushika Hokusai
Breathtaking. One of the most ensorcelling art books I’ve found by one of my all-time favorite artists. You are familiar with Hokusai’s woodblock prints. His art has become synonymous with Eastern art. A legend. This edition is small in size, but impressive in content. His depiction of creatures, landscapes, plants,…
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Review of Murakami T: The T-Shirts I Love by Haruki Murakami
I began by pretending this was a short novel about a t-shirt and vinyl-record-obsessed old guy, who happened to also be an obscenely successful novelist and it worked for the most part in the sense that I enjoyed reading these table scraps of autobiographical reminiscences from the most influential Japanese…
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Review of North Station by Bae Suah
Bae Suah in experimental mode. The 7 stories in North Station display many aspects of this author’s formidable powers. Unlike the novels of hers I’ve read, this collection depicts similar characters in a greater variety of situations, while not relying on dramatic plotting. They are very slow, and will not…
L. S. Popovich 