Kawakami
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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 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 The Nakano Thrift Shop by Hiromi Kawakami
The quiet beauty of a store interior. The intentionality of the setting. The sincere dignity of a retail worker. The cyclical expanse of such a life, confined within shrinking walls, hemmed in by the minutiae of the commercial products of everyday life. Constant exposure to these mundane implements imbues them…
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Review of Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami
Mieko Kawakami’s novel Breasts and Eggs is a bold literary statement and another first person, modern, feminist novel from Japan. Staking a claim among literary celebrities like Banana Yoshimoto, Hiromi Kawakami, Natsuo Kirino, and Yoko Ogawa, it would almost appear that the future of Japanese Literature is female. It would…
L. S. Popovich 