Tag: Kashimada Maki

This month I’ve been reading some of the books acquired in Romania as one might expect, but also remained quite firmly ensconced within East Asia. This has taken the form of books written by authors from that region (Toward Eternity by Anton Hur from Korea), or books set in that region (Four Seasons in Japan by Nick Bradley and Goodnight Tokyo by Yoshida Atsuhiro) or, my favourite category, subversive books by Japanese women authors (I’ll write more about them shortly) and am currently about to start reading a (potentially subversive?) book by a feminist Korean woman author entitled Another Person.

My appetite for reviewing, however, has been greatly reduced, not just because of my travels or the many tasks I’ve had to do since getting back from my brief holidays. So I thought I’d do some mini-reviews in chronological order of reading, while these books are still relatively fresh in my mind.

Kashimada Maki: Love at Six Thousand Degrees, transl. Haydn Trowell, Europa Editions, 2023

This is the kind of book that I can’t quite make out upon the first reading, except that it leaves me puzzled and in a swirl of complex emotions (much like the main protagonist) and makes me want to reread it. Set mostly in Nagasaki, and, as the author explains, inspired by the film Hiroshima Mon Amour, it is at the most superficial level about a love (or should that be lust?) affair between a housewife who has run away from her family and a young Russo-Japanese man (the Russian connection feels random but becomes more meaningful later on). On a deeper level, it is about trauma and accepting one’s wounds and bad memories, rather than trying to push them away. I think readers will either love it or hate it, there seems no middle ground in the opinions on Goodreads. I am more in the ‘love it’ camp, and in fact found it more intriguing than previous works by Kashimada. Despite its brevity, this is a very rich, layered book, although I found the translation at times a little confusing – perhaps deliberately so.

Nick Bradley: Four Seasons in Japan, Doubleday, 2023

This book (or at least the publishers and cover designers) have clearly jumped on the bandwagon of ‘cat on the cover of a title proclaiming quite loudly to be about Japan’, as this is what appears to sell well at the moment. I’ve always been sceptical of books written by foreigners set in Japan, because they often are filled with all conceivable clichés. A bit like that relentless trickle of books about living in the south of France… This is a novel rather than a memoir, however. In fact, it’s a novel within a novel. Flo is an expat translator living in Tokyo, who’s reached a low point in her life, but finds herself charmed and then obsessed with a book she finds on the underground. We get extracts from the book for each season, and they’re about a grandmother and grandson learning to live together (and accept each other) in a small town close to Hiroshima. The story itself is somewhat predictable, and there are probably too many explanations of Japanese traditions for my taste. Interestingly enough, the framing plotline left me rather cold, although you might expect me to feel a lot of empathy for the struggles of an expat. After reading this book, I found the letters a university friend wrote to me from Japan, where she went to study and work – and her struggles seemed far more challenging and poignant. Nevertheless, this novel provided a pleasant enough way to while the time on the airplane flying to Bucharest.

Anton Hur: Toward Eternity, HarperVia, 2024

I just can’t seem to get enough of translators writing their own novels (or memoirs). Their books are almost guaranteed to be thoughtful, multi-layered and written with a great sensitivity towards language. Anton’s book is no exception: a fascinating future technology premise – curing cancer by replacing the defective cells with nanites, tiny robots that make the person virtually immortal, but also trying to make AI more human-like by teaching them an appreciation of poetry. Written as a series of diaries or documents left behind by various protagonists, the first part is at heart a love story – what are we prepared to do to cling onto a loved one, and what is it that truly makes up a person’s identity and what we love about a person, while the second part jumps into a future where soldier clones are commonplace, yet even they seek to find out what, if anything, makes each one of them unique.

There are action scenes and a mystery to keep readers entertained, but what I liked most about the book where those beautifully-written passages asking fundamental questions about language, humanity, the possibility of understanding each other and ourselves.

I suddenly realized that I understood the words like I’d never understood them before… Words that were not simply bits of cross-referential information but each a thing of living, breathing, tactile emotion. I felt these words against my skin as if they were physical objects, or as if they were light passing through the prism of my body and shattering into the spectrum. Had I ever truly understood any word before, ever? How could I have claimed to have made a study of poetry or that this study had made me human when I had never understood what it mean to feel words?

Yoshida Atsuhiro: Goodnight Tokyo, transl. Haydn Trowell, Europa Editions, 2024.

For fans of the TV series Tokyo Diner, this is a very similar set-up. Linked short stories that at first seem entirely disparate yet all come together and resolve themselves by the end. All set in nocturnal Tokyo, in the ‘witching hours’ between 1 am and dawn, with a diner run by three women friends in the background, a taxi driver, detective, a call centre operator, an employee in the prop department of a film studio and an antique store shop owner keeping bizarre hours keep meeting, intersecting, interfering and finding out more about each other. It was a pleasant enough read, but not particularly memorable (I struggled to remember any of the stories after a week), and fits very squarely into the ‘feel good, charming’ reads from Japan that seem to be so popular currently. Apologies, I seem to have less patience for them than most readers, but am glad that it’s giving Japanese to English translators so much work (and money, hopefully).

Ioana Pârvulescu: Aurul pisicii, Humanitas, 2024.

Ioana Pârvulescu is one of my favourite Romanian women writers currently writing. You too can develop a taste for her highly inventive books of historical/fantasy fiction, two of which have been translated and published by Istros Books. This one is very different, a love story set in the present-day, following a couple over twenty years or so, but of course, this being Ioana, the conventional love story then takes a strange turn. In the afterword, the author says that she began writing this story while she was in her twenties and still living under Communism, and only returned to it in 2022. It’s about the passage of time, time being, as she believes, the essential component in a love story, and it’s only how, in middle age, that she felt capable of writing a love story that avoids falling too much into sentimentality or, on the contrary, becoming too cynical and trite. Oh, and it does feature a cat – the title itself literally means ‘Cat’s Gold’, which is a much kinder way to refer to pyrite, aka Fool’s Gold in the English-speaking world.

t. s. khasis: Placerea spectacolului (The Pleasure of the Show), Tracus Arte, 2023

A poetry collection by an award-winning poet from Arad, Romania, born in 1975. I’m translating a couple of his poems for a volume of contemporary Romanian poetry so I wanted to find out more about him and his style. It’s a bit too cynical, try-hard and macho for my taste, aspiring to the style and lifestyle of the Beat Poets, if I’m not mistaken. But there are glimmers of beauty here and there, and I hope I can do those justice when translating.

Takase Junko: May You Have Delicious Meals, transl. Morgan Giles, Hutchinson Heinemann, 2025.

This book isn’t out yet, but I begged for a proof copy from the publisher, since I really like the translator and also love reading about Japanese office culture (having suffered through it myself) and food. This novella won the prestigious Akutagawa Prize in 2022 and has been somewhat of a bestseller in Japan and it’s easy to see why. It tells the story of Nitani, a young salaryman dispatched to a new office, where he struggles to come to terms with the implicit rules about food and displays of power in the corporate environment. He’d far rather eat his pot noodles alone, rather than attend the mandatory lunches or drinking sessions with his boss. The only person who seems to understand him and also attempts to resist this culture of conformity is Oshio, an efficient young woman, who despises the ‘poor me’ persona of the hapless Ashikawa, a young woman who avoids late hours and any additional tasks by bursting into tears and currying favour by bringing in baked goodies for her colleagues. Oshio and Nitani are drinking buddies and complain about the pressures of work, the emptiness of life outside work (when you don’t really have much time for it) and relationship expectations… and yet, when it comes to it, will either of them have the courage to break free of those expectations? It’s a sad indictment of Japanese working culture, and the ending made me even sadder. Although a relatively simple story, this is perhaps the book that stayed most with me from this month’s reading. (But also Love at Six Thousand Degrees)

He imagined his life working there for another, what, forty years. How he might be moved to another branch in that time, but wherever he went there’d be someone like Ashikawa there; how he’d have to work with them, day in day out; how many more days, how many more hours’ worth of work he would have to shoulder for someone else.

Tell me all you like that eating a proper meal means taking care of myself and that eating pot noodles and ready-made side dishes is like self-abuse, but would working, doing overtime, going to the supermarket before it closes at ten, then making and eating dinner really be a better way to take care of myself?… Cook, eat, wash up, and before you know it an hour’s gone by. I only have two hours after getting home before I have to go to sleep, and if I use one hour on eating, then in the remaining hour I have to take bath and brush my teeth, then I only have half an hour to live my life! Would you still eat then? For your body? For your health? That’s not eating to live, is it?

Tudor Ganea: Vreau să aud numai de bine (I only want to hear good news), Polirom, 2024

An interesting young writer from the port town of Constanta, and the town features once again in his latest novel, about high school friends who are invited back to their home town twenty years later by the mother of their friend who died at a young age. When they show up on her doorstep, however, the whole thing seems to have been some kind of joke or set-up. But they take the opportunity to reacquaint themselves with each other, reminisce, and find their way back to what is important. It sounds a little predictable, but it is so well written, with punchy dialogue, so much local and historical flavour (of the 1990s and early 2000s), and packs so much social commentary in, that I was never bored. Just like with Ioana Pârvulescu, this book feels like a departure for Ganea, a far more realistic book than his previous ones, which tended more toward sci fi or surrealism.

Charlotte Printz: Im Netz der Lügen (Web of Lies), dtv, 2024

This is the sequel to the first Nightingale & Co dectective agency book that I’ve translated for Corylus. The first book Nightingale & Co will be published in January 2025 and leaves some issues unresolved, so of course I was curious to see what happens next.