I’m more of a fiction reader than a non-fiction reader, so of the 110 books I’ve read this year, only 13 fall into the non-fiction category. To be honest, I’m surprised I even read this many, but then I looked a little more closely and most of them are memoirs or travelogues or biographies. Which some might consider cheating. Strange, because I used to read a lot of non-fiction (mainly philosophy, anthropology and popular science) in my younger days.
Fair: the Life-Art of Translation – highly recommended, this is a fast-growing genre on my shelves (translation essays or memoirs) and now warrants a shelf of its own
Indeterminate Inflorescence – an inspirational book about writing poetry – even if not all of it can be easily applied
Underground – Murakami’s exploration of the aftermath of the sarin gas attack on the Tokyo Underground – a really fascinating look at emergency situations but also at religious cults
Of these, I particularly recommend Jen Calleja’s Fair if you are at all interested in literature in translation, and Murakami’s Underground, although the latter is quite a tough read.
I’m currently reading the Kafka biography as well, so that will be my 14th and probably final non-fiction read of the year and will almost certainly be in the Top Three alongside the two recommended above.
Another very busy month, and, as always, a joyous birthday month too. In spite of my trip to Berlin to find a flat, and in spite of lots of other admin matters that required my immediate attention, I got quite a bit of reading done, and have now done nine of my planned #20Books of Summer (although I haven’t reviewed all of them yet).
11 books, of which six were in other languages or in translation, a further one was about life in translation, and yet another was about life as an immigrant in Britain in the 1950s. Of the translated books, four were from Japanese and two were in the original German. Several of the books on my #20Books of Summer list were crime fiction, such as All the Other Mothers Hate Me, and I also read an additional one The Chemist that I got in my goody bag at Capital Crime, but I found them only so-so. The Chemist was interesting as a concept and I quite enjoyed the plot, but found the style a bit bland, while I found the characters in the book by Sarah Harman rather infuriating and the plot simply full of holes, as well as predictable. I’ve also decided that Hirano Keiichiro’s style is not for me, as this was the second novel by him that I attempted and just found a bit sentimental and dull. However, I did enjoy horror manga writer Ito Junji’s loving descriptions of his cats Yon and Mu. I will write a review of Hangover Square in the near future, and I may also review The Dilemmas of Working Women if I have time, as it was a fairly fun collection of short stories about modern Japanese women, although it wasn’t necessarily anything ground-breaking.
I haven’t had much time to watch films either this month, but the few that I saw were very interesting. I discovered Korean film-maker Hong Sang-soo, thanks to my blogger friend Jacqui, and watched two of his films, Yourself and Yours and The Novelist’s Film (really enjoyed the latter). I rewatched Shoplifters by one of my favourite contemporary Japanese directors Kore-eda, a film that is both tender and brutal in its depiction of family relationships. Finally, I was intrigued by the anthropological exploration of Jia Zhangke’s Caught by the Tides, but found the narrative structure a bit confusing and loose.
I also attended some excellent events this month. Capital Crime in London, such a fun crime festival, and an absolute delight to meet our latest Icelandic author Jon Atli Jonasson, could have talked about plays and scripts with him all day! A wonderful session on translating onomatopoeia with Polly Barton and a generally fantastic time with fellow translators at the Oxford Translation day. Last but by no means least, falling in love with the music and unruly, high energy stage presence of Korean indie rock band The Rose (and having our K-pop trio of ‘mature ladies’ reunion) at the O2.
But of course the main event of this month has been finding a flat in Berlin, and, after viewing so many of them that my head whirled, I realised none was going to be absolutely perfect.
The balcony makes this seem like a green oasis, but it’s in the dreariest part of town in a non-descript grey building
Beautiful balcony, beautiful part of town, but the traffic noise from the nearby Autobahn and S-Bahn was so extreme that you had to shout to hear one another
What could you possibly fit into a pointy cornered kitchen like that?
A flat that was really a shell, requiring complete renovation
The volume and proportions were superb in this one, but it was on a busy and unpleasant road, and the communal areas were so poorly maintained that I feared everything might collapse before I could even move in
But I think I’ve found a good compromise in terms of price, location, number and sizes of rooms: it will be all systems go from now on to try and complete the move in 2 months.
When I made my original (generously overflowing) list of potential picks for the #20Books of Summer, I forgot to mention that any novel/memoir/experimental piece of work by a translator I know and admire has to take precedence. That was the case with:
Jen Calleja: Fair. The Life-Art of Translation. Prototype, 2025
I absolutely love Jen’s work as a translator from German (I had the good fortune to be in one of her workshops too), but I also admire her work as a publisher of Maltese literature and as a writer (the experimental novel Vehicle, also published by Prototype, made my Best of the Year in New Releases in 2023). She is also a musician, and has done many other things, some of which she mentions in her quasi-memoir Fair.
The title of course refers to the structure of the book: imagine a book fair or a fairground, with all the various booths and attractions, and the author offering different types of guided tours by subject matter. But the title could also refer to the desire for fairness in recognising the role of translators, making sure they are fairly treated in terms of pay and visibility.
I was familiar with some of the content of the book: either having heard Jen reading from it or seen excerpts published in various literary magazines, but it was great to see everything together in one playful but nevertheless carefully planned structure. Jen combines memoir with laugh-out-loud funny, but always serious meditations on the working conditions for translators, who gets to translate, mastering a language, nationality, class, expectations and the publishing industry.
I particularly enjoyed the Hall of Mirrors( (Reflections on One Sentence), which describes a translator agonising over the right choice of words with just one apparently simple opening sentence. Very amusing and so true, especially the timely reminder: ‘Don’t forget, translators are paid by the word, not by the hour!’ I could also really relate to ‘The Translation Game’, which demonstrates just how much of a fluke it is just how your career as a translator will go.
I also really appreciate her fearless honesty – when so many are reluctant to speak out against discrimination or nasty comments or unfair treatment, for fear that they might not get to work again.
I was once a very quiet person, but I was radicalised by watching a panel discussion where panellists said that translators should work with real writers to create the best translation, and that the translation of literature should be crowdsourced, with translators chipping in a few paragraphs and getting paid accordingly. I couldn’t let this slide, so I had to become one of those cuntish translators who talk about themselves all the time… As with any made-invisible group – especially a group that is badly paid – the moment they start speaking out, it’s deemed too much, too visible, turn out the lights!
Above all, I enjoyed her description of the ideal co-working space for translators (Translator Dreamhouse) – it sounds like paradise, can I please be part of it too? A wonderful book, which has certainly made me reflect more deeply about my own cultural, linguistic and social background and how it shows up in my translation work.
Book #6: Carmen-Francesca Banciu: Berlin ist mein Paris (Berlin is my Paris), Ullstein, 2002
This was on my summer list, and is also a literary memoir about changing languages and cultural identity. The author is Romanian but settled in Berlin in the early 1990s. At first she thought that it was a short stopover on the way to Paris – because Romanians have gravitated towards Paris as a cultural capital since at least the beginning of the 20th century (French is also easier for most Romanians to learn, unless they have grown up in Transylvania or Banat next to German-speaking neighbours). But Banciu never makes it to Paris, and instead slip with some delight, some surprise and not always ease into life in Berlin. Her love for the city in all its raucous, messy splendour in the 1990s shines through:
Berlin has become the belly button of the world for me. Paris is established, while Berlin is unpredictable. Unique. You might think that I say this because of vanity. Because I have. Or it has. Discovered. Berlin and I have discovered each other. I discover myself anew every day thanks to Berlin. My weaknesses and my strengths.
City in progress. Berlin is full of surprising experiences, crouching around every corner. Strewn across your path. As long as you have eyes for it.
I was hoping for more descriptions of Berlin, but instead there’s a lot about the various Berliner characters she meets: anonymous people on the street or in cafes, but also famous cultural figures (she does like a bit of name-dropping). And many of the chapters are short personal essays on various topics that were in the news at the time she was writing the book, ranging from German reunification challenges and attitude towards immigrants, to whether girls should be allowed to play with Barbies. It’s like a series of newspaper columns gathered together in a book. Good for dipping in and out, but sadly Berlin has changed a lot since she wrote this, so it won’t be as helpful for me as I’d hoped.
What a busy weekend I just had, the crowning delight of a busy yet happy week. During the week, I had the pleasure of organising and hosting the Indie Press Network Spring Showcase on two separate nights, one dedicated to literary fiction and poetry, the other to genre fiction and non-fiction. If you’ve missed these sessions, you can catch the recordings and slides on the Indie Press Network website, and you can also sign up to be regularly updated about forthcoming ARCs or blog tours. I always say that the most interesting and varied types of books are now predominantly coming from indie publishers, and I know I personally want to read several of the titles presented on those two nights.
In fact, I already read one on the train on the way to Bristol (and in my hotel room). I was there for the last-ever CrimeFest, where I had the pleasure of chairing a panel on crime fiction in translation and also seeing two of our Corylus Books authors, Icelandic author Solveig Palsdottir and Catalan author Teresa Solana on other panels. Here are some pictures that I took from those sessions.
Solveig on a panel about police procedurals in countries as different as Greece, Botswana, Scotland, Iceland and war-time Britain
Teresa on a panel with Michael Ridpath, Barbara Nadel and Emma Styles about the long shadows of past crimes
Our panel on the delights and challenges of translating crime fiction, maintaining good relationships with your translator, and how to steer clear of AI: with Peter Bush and Teresa Solana for the Catalan contingent, Solveig Palsdottir and Quentin Bates for the Icelandic contingent
On Saturday evening I also attended an event in the brilliant initiative Translated by, Bristol, launched by Polly Barton and two independent bookshops in Bristol, and got to see the translators of the shortlisted International Booker titles read from their books. I got my copies of Perfection and Under the Eye of the Big Bird signed by Sophie Hughes and Yoneda Asa respectively and gushed about how I look forward to being the cringey person who moves to Berlin to the first, and about how much I adore literature by Japanese women to the latter. I also found it funny that, when one person from the audience asked the perfectly justified question about how the translators dealt with the emotionally often gruelling aspects of these books, it was Sophie Hughes of all people who replied, saying that she thought Perfection was a bit sad. (However, I can’t help thinking that it must have been a nice break for her after translating Fernanda Melchor and the like.)
Poor quality picture, but it’s Polly Barton introducing the event. Seated, from left to right: Helen Stevenson (Small Boat), Yoneda Asa (Under the Eye of the Big Bird), Barbara Haveland (On the Calculation of Volume), Fiammetta Rocco, administrator of International Booker Prize, Deepa Bhasthi (Heart Lamp) and Sophie Hughes (Perfection)
Later that evening, I watched parts of the Eurovision Song Contest with a few blogger friends that I made at CrimeFest. It’s something that you can’t really take all that seriously unless you are drinking and partying with friends, but I realised once more that I support so many countries, simply because I either lived there or have good friends there. However, I may have a slight bias towards my childhood home, Austria, who presented a very intricate and different song with a countertenor and black-and-white effects… and won! I also thought the German song (my future home) was a banger (which is exactly what the title ‘Baller’ hints at), even though it didn’t score that highly. The Icelandic song was pure fun too, they were outrageously robbed!
Sunday marked a return to serious matters: a very close-run election for Romania’s president (a president is a much more significant political position in Romania than in other countries, closer to France and US style). Phew, happy to say that the far-right candidate did not win, although the voting patterns of the Romanian diaspora in Europe were rather discouraging. I suppose this is partly the result of decades of being humiliated and perceived as cheap, disposable workforce who should do the jobs no one else wants to do and then bugger off home (but yes, there are many other reasons too, including the fact that populist right-wingers promise you the earth until they get elected and offer you easy solutions and convenient scapegoats, in Romania as everywhere else).
I won’t start worrying just yet about how Nicusor Dan will be able to work with government and parliament when he has no party support (he was an independent candidate), or how impatient people get when things don’t improve in two weeks. Let me enjoy this just for a couple of days!
Tsushima Yūko: Wildcat Dome, transl. Lisa Hoffman-Kuroda, Penguin, 2025
Regular visitors to my blog will know how passionate I became about Tsushima Yūko’s work after reading Territory of Light in 2019 (rereading it in 2024). I then devoured all of her work available in English, which was mostly her earlier stories and novels, all translated by Geraldine Harcourt back in the 1970s-80s, and I expressed some curiosity about her later work, which turns to social, environmental and political concerns. Then I came across Laughing Wolf, dating from 2000, translated by Dennis Washburn, and it showed a marked change from the realism and close observation of psychological and domestic matters in her early work. Wildcat Dome was written in 2013, as a response to the tsunami and Fukushima disaster in 2011, what the Japanese call 3/11, and shows a continued desire to experiment with form and timelines.
It starts off in a present-day (of 2013) that bears a lot of resemblance to our world, except that the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear fallout have been much more severe, Japan seems to be on the brink of destruction, and the danger of a further earthquake and a complete nuclear annihilation is imminent. Mitch is an old man who travels to Japan after the disaster to reunite with childhood friend Yonko, although they haven’t spoken in over a year. He is haunted by three prophecies uttered by a sorcerer in Brittany: the first two have come true already and the third was that ‘Japan will be swallowed up by the sea and a mysterious evil spirit will take up residence there.’ Unsurprisingly, he would like Yonko to leave with him, but she refuses to evacuate.
The story then takes us back in time to when they first became friends. Mitch and Kazu were two orphan boys, likely the result of American GIs raping their Japanese mothers in the late 1940s. They are adopted and raised as brothers by Mama, who works at an orphanage catering for these ‘unwanted half-breeds’, and Yonko is Mama’s niece, who lives nearby and is not squeamish about playing with these children that the rest of society would rather not see.
We then experience how these three friends come together and grow apart, how they individually and as a group (together with some of the other orphans, who have been adopted in the States) navigate the next five decades or so, at times in Japan, at times in other parts of the world. Through their eyes, we also tangentially experience Japanese history over those decades. We witness Mitch and Kazu being sent away to school in England but failing to fit in there and returning to Japan, although they will struggle to finish school there too. We see how others from their orphanage days forget the Japanese language or are conscripted to fight in Vietnam as American citizens. Yonko, the only ‘pure’ Japanese amongst them, engages in unsatisfactory relationships (even marriage) with unsuitable Japanese men, but it becomes clear that these children can only find refuge or a kind of home in each other. Mitch and Kazu have a very deep bond, almost like twins, and it appears that perhaps both Mitch and Kazu were in love at certain moments with Yonko, although the boundaries between friendship and love are kept deliberately blurred in Tsushima’s poetical prose.
But there is another layer to the story, a reason why these friends are unsettled and afraid and can only cling to each other. When they were 7-8 years old, they witnessed the drowning of one of their little orphan friends, a girl called Miki-chan wearing a little orange skirt, who died in the pond near their home. They saw a local Japanese boy, the loner and outcast Tabo, at the scene of the crime and have some suspicion that he might have pushed Miki in. However, since they themselves are outcasts and also the first to report the death, they too come under suspicion. And, just as they think they might have overcome this childhood trauma, another young woman wearing orange is killed in the same area ten years or so later. Several more killings following the same pattern occur over the next couple of decades, and the friends seem to be paralysed by the news: terrified, yet unable to definitely accuse Tabo of the subsequent deeds, nor able to entirely escape falling under suspicion themselves, even if they were out of the country for the later killings.
There are perhaps too many themes packed into this fairly slender book (240 pages): a murder mystery, found families, friendships over the years, nuclear fallout after an earthquake and tsunami, cultural identity and mixed-race orphans (or unwanted children) in post-war Japan and the discrimination they faced, vexed notions of cultural identity and home, the dangers of problems festering when they are unaddressed. Perhaps Tsushima felt that this might be her last major novel and tried to squeeze all she wanted to say into it.
The style also takes some getting used to: hopping from one viewpoint to the other, often deliberately vague, occasionally a bit pedestrian, but at other times quite hypnotic (the orange thread running through the book, the imperfect memories, the descriptions of nature).
Raindrops, glimmering white, slide off each leaf, the sound of the drip, drip striking his eardrums like a song, a quietness that could only be called a raindrop song, a cheerful song.
There are also passages that are directly critical of Japanese society (although attributed to grumpy old Mitch, for example, when addressing the son of one of their childhood friends, who has decided to grow up in Japan):
Japan is a strange, terribly conceited country that hates outsiders, so you have to be careful. You’re likely to be bullied wherever you go because of how you look. Terrible things are lying in wait for you. But I want you to overcome those things. I want you to live. Because those are the wounds of my own soul.
Finally, there are echoes of the earlier Tsushima, the troubled single mother narrator. I can imagine the translation challenges that Lisa faced with passages such as these (in Japanese it is often ambiguous whether it’s the first or third person speaking), and I admire her sure-footed, elegant choices.
There must be people living in those apartments, but as a whole, the building is quiet – here everyone lives holding their breath… The mother isn’t sure exactly who lives here, or how many of these hundred square-foot apartments there are. In one of them is her son, the cold stone, sunk to the bottom of the darkness.
I don’t want to go back in there, the mother things again. Why can’t she just abandon him? She wants so much to do it, and yet. This life she had birthed. It wasn’t as though her son had wanted to be born into this world. But she is afraid of him. She can’t stop trembling. As she approaches the apartment, she feels a scream rising in the back of her throat.
The ending is particularly lyrical and moving, although it is not the complete resolution that English-speaking readers might crave. Moving on is sometimes about sheer inertia and stubbornness, about survival rather than about being healed.
Are you ready for another dose of literary links, playing Six Degrees of Separation with books, as hosted by Kate? The starting point this month is Knife by Salman Rushdie, which I haven’t read but which I know is an account of the horrific knife attack the author experienced at a lecture he gave in the United States, just as he’d started leading a more normal life after spending many years in hiding.
My first link is not hugely imaginative, as the commonality is the word ‘knife’ in the title, namely The Subtle Knife by Philip Pullman, second book in His Dark Materials trilogy, which I loved far more than Harry Potter, although I believe they came out at roughly the same time. The knife here is not used to attack, however, but to cut doors into alternative worlds.
Most of Pullman’s trilogy takes place in a sort of steampunk Oxford, and it is the Oxford setting that brings me to my next book, the delightfully puzzling crime novel The Moving Toyshopby Edmund Crispin. I like to show visitors to Oxford where I believe the toyshop was located (and that there is still a toy and games shop close by).
Another rather obvious link to the next book: The Magic Toyshop by Angela Carter. This immediately came to mind because we also mentioned it recently on our Twitter discussions #DevonBookHour, which takes place every Monday at 8 p.m (London time).
A rather more unusual link for my next one, by an author I keep confusing with Angela Carter for some reason, although their names and appearance are not at all alike (although they did overlap a bit in terms of years). The Bottle Factory Outing by Beryl Bainbridge is a very unsettling novel about workers at a factory making an ill-fated day trip to Windsor.
I’ll stick to workplace dramas and even the word ‘factory’ in the title for my next link, but I move to Japan, with The Factory by Oyamada Hiruko, transl. David Boyd. I haven’t read it but the blurb sounds very intriguing:
The English-language debut of one of Japan’s most exciting new writers, The Factory follows three workers at a sprawling industrial factory. Each worker focuses intently on the specific task they’ve been assigned: one shreds paper, one proofreads documents, and another studies the moss growing all over the expansive grounds. But their lives slowly become governed by their work—days take on a strange logic and momentum, and little by little, the margins of reality seem to be dissolving: Where does the factory end and the rest of the world begin? What’s going on with the strange animals here? And after a while—it could be weeks or years—the three workers struggle to answer the most basic question: What am I doing here?
I’ll stick to Japan and to a book also translated by David Boyd (in collaboration with Sam Bett), namelyHeaven by Kawakami Mieko, for my final link. I’ve read and reviewed this story of rather graphic violence and bullying among teenagers in a Japanese school, and, although I had to search hard, I did find some rays of light and hope.
I’ve not travelled this month quite as much as I usually do, sticking to Oxford (and alternative worlds), London and Windsor, and only venturing to Japan. Where will your six literary links take you?
The first reading chain of the year, as hosted by Kate, where we start in the same place and then each veer in wildly different directions! Our starting point this month is the widely-praised, unlikely bestseller Orbital by Samantha Harvey. I don’t think I know a single person who’s read it and not loved it, so I have high hopes for it when I do finally get around to reading it.
I used to dream of becoming an astronaut until about the age of 12, when I realised that Romania was not part of any space programme (needless to say, my self-confidence was such at the time that I did not detect any possible shortcomings in myself!). So my first link is an obvious one, space travel and a book that I adored as a young teen and have just recently bought again to reread: The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury.
Although it is presented as a novel, it is in fact a series of thematically linked short stories, so my next choice is one of the most interesting exploration of this interconnected narratives format, namely Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad.
Music plays a huge part in Egan’s book, so for my next link let’s find another book that makes me think of music, even if it’s not obviously about music. That book is Brigid Brophy’s Snow Ball, which has all the fun and wit of a Mozart opera (Brophy was a huge Mozart fan and connoiseur).
I’m making it really easy for myself with my next link, the novel Snow by Orhan Pamuk, which features real snowfall in a Turkish city, but also snow as writer’s block, and snow as covering much dirty politics and infighting. Perhaps even a blizzard of confusion.
Much of Pamuk’s work has been translated by Maureen Freely, who also co-translated Madonna in a Fur Coat by Sabahattin Ali, a classic of Turkish literature, set in the 1930s in Ankara and Berlin.
And it is Berlin that provides our final link in the chain: I cannot resist mentioning the book that will be coming out very shortly, set in Berlin in 1961, the summer that the Wall was built dramatically overnight. Nightingale & Co by Charlotte Printz is a charming period piece, a crime novel with a lot of humour and soul. It’s my first full-length translation from German and our first Corylus Books publication from German, available to pre-order now, so please do if you think you might enjoy it. Not just from Amazon, either. (And there is a reason why there is an Audrey Hepburn look-alike on the front cover, trust me!)
So our literary travels have taken us to Mars, San Francisco and New York City, London, Turkey and Berlin. Where will you be travelling with your six links?
I seem to be back on track with my reading, i.e. I’ve finished more books this month, probably because some of them were quite short, and also partly inspired by the #1970Club. All this in spite of having a friend over for a whole week and doing lots of sightseeing with her. Not all of the books filled me with delight, unfortunately, but there were some truly memorable ones among them.
I read twelve books, of which eight were in a different language or translated, three were crime fiction (well, just about), and one was non-fiction. I’ve reviewed a few of these: Jessica Au’s haunting Cold Enough for Snow, the Strugatsky Brothers’ zany The Dead Mountaineer’s Inn, the two Japanese novels about sex and violence First Love and Cannibals, and the witty Beloved by Empar Moliner. That’s far more than I’ve done over the past several months. Here are some thoughts on the remaining books.
Raluca Nagy: Un cal intr-o mare de lebede (A Horse in a Sea of Swans) – the title shows how the narrator feels as an English woman living for a while in Japan. This is a strange sort of novel, an auto-fiction I suppose, although the narrator is not the Romanian author Raluca Nagy (whose other novel Teo from 16 to 18 I really admire and have been trying to pitch to publishers for translation). Yet the narrator bears a lot of similarities to the author, who did indeed go to live in Japan for a while, studying both the language and engaging in anthropological research. It’s a very basic story, however, about adapting to a new culture and feels surprisingly dated, perhaps more interesting for a Romanian audience who might be less familiar with that culture.
Sarah Manguso: Liars – I remember someone (an agent possibly?) telling me that no one is interested in reading about someone’s marital breakdown and divorce, but with the increasing appetite for relatibility among readers, maybe that’s not quite true. Although at times I felt like shaking the narrator for being so blind and misguided as to not spot the red flags – but, hand on heart, have we always been wise in our own relationships? This sounded very true indeed to me and was also quite painful to read
Marie Tierney: Deadly Animals – this crime novel started off well, with a precocious 14 year old heroine who is fascinated by decaying bodies of animals and documenting things as scientifically as possible. However, once the police get involved in tracking down a serial killer, the story becomes rather over-the-top, and the killer predictable (and very sad).
Jordi Martí-Rueda: Brigadistes, transl. Mary Ann Newman – 60 illustrated profiles (none of them longer than one page) of some of the international participants in the International Brigades, fighting alongside the (ultimately unsuccessful) Republicans against Franco’s Nationalists. I’d have liked to see even more profiles and from other countries as well (I know several Romanians who fought there, for example), but it must have been an immense effort to research even those profiles that appear here. One not mentioned in this book but that I always think of is Virginia Woolf’s nephew Julian Bell.
Patrick Quentin: Puzzle for Pilgrims– a crime novel that feels more like an entertainment written by Graham Greene if he had collaborated a little with Raymond Chandler. Patrick Quentin is a pen name for a group of writers, so many of the novels until 1952 were collaborative, but one of the main authors was Hugh Callingham Wheeler, who later moved to the States and became a playwright. It was an entertaining mix of wisecracks and memorably sarcastic descriptions of local scenes and American tourists (the novel is set in Mexico).
Sanborn’s is where the American tourists congregated over strawberry shortcakes, bandying stomach conditions and bargains in silver. The brassy normalcy of my compatriots was refreshing. To them Mexico wasn’t a place where you lost your wife; it was something at the other end of Thomas Cook & Sons where you had to be careful about the water and where a lot of quaintness could be stored up on Kodachrome to bore the folks back home in Minnesota.
Verena Roßbacher: Mon Cheri und unsere demolierten Seelen (Mon Cheri and our demolished souls) – I struggle to understand how this could have won the Austrian State Book Prize in 2022, because I struggled to fully appreciate it. It’s Bridget Jones meets Mamma Mia but also tries to introduce a critique of contemporary society and a more contemplative note about life and death and families (of birth versus families of choice). The tone felt really uneven – too farcical and annoying in parts, trying too hard to be profound in others. And yet, I shouldn’t be too harsh, because there were passages that made me laugh out loud, and there were some beautifully very witty and beautifully written ones too. It just didn’t quite hang together overall – and was also a bit too long for the story itself.
Faruk Šehić: Under Pressure, transl. Mirza Purić – this was a book I had to read for the London Reads the World Book Club meeting for November, and if that hadn’t been the case, I swear I’d have abandoned it several times over, because it was such a gut-wrenching, brutal description of the war in Yugoslavia, and its lasting effects on an entire generation of young men. This is drawn from the author’s personal experience, because he was a soldier in the Bosnian army. This is like All Quiet on the Western Front but with the ruthless brutality ramped up even more, and with the occasional mentions of Pearl Jam, Star Trek and Andrea Bocelli reminding us that this war took place not that long ago.
Films
This also seems to be the month that I started watching more films once more, rather than just K- and J-dramas. Some of them, like Black Box Diaries and The Last of the Seawomen, were feature-length documentaries, very well done and very thought-provoking, about the lives of women in Japan and Korea respectively. I was less impressed with the film Queer that I saw as part of the London Film Festival, although Daniel Craig is quite good in it as an aging, drug-addled gay man. Maggie Cheung was also impressive (in three languages) in the film Clean, about a woman trying to reform her life so as to keep custody of her child after the death of her rockstar partner. And, while Wicked Little Letters featured the combined talents of Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley, it was a bit disappointing overall as a comedy.
My Name is Loh Kiwan could have been so much more incisive about the plight of immigrants: it started out well but then ended up being a bit of a romance, which was disappointing. Host was an amusing short horror film very suitable for some Halloween viewing (and best watched on a laptop as it takes place during a Zoom session), while To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before was an undemanding comedy my friend and I needed after a busy day of sightseeing in London. I wouldn’t claim either of those two are essential viewing! Of the remaining series that I watched, I found Mr Queen highly amusing and irreverent, although of course not historically accurate, Fishbowl Wives was a bit meh (largely notable for featuring lots of sex scenes, unusually – although J-dramas tend to feature more of them than K-dramas), Itaewon Class was less amazing than I’d been told to expect from reviews.
The very recent What Comes After Love is a Japanese-Korean collaboration and received such high praise that I took out one month’s subscription with Viki Rakuten so I could watch it. Given that both my friend and I spent our formative years studying abroad and met our husbands there, we thought we might be able to relate to the story quite well. The slow-paced drama had some realistic moments, as well as very romantic ones, but it clearly showed the drastic difference in our approach to and belief in love. My friend, who was very happily married until the death of her husband from Covid three years ago, was much happier with the romantic aspects of the TV drama, while I was cynical and impatient (‘what’s over is over, no point in trying to flog a dead horse’).
Plans for November
This will be all about German Literature Month and that’s the reason why I read Mon Cheri, but I’m not sure I have it in me to provide a more in-depth review of this deeply disappointing book. So I hope to have some other good books to read instead. I’ll also be reading a couple of Han Kang novels, although I have to admit I’m disappointed with the new covers (to the left). Some of the books may also fit in the novella category (Greek Lessons by Han Kang, for example), so where possible, I will also participate in Novellas in Novembers.
Honford Star is a small indie publisher of translated East Asian literature (mostly Korean, a growing number of Japanese titles and a sprinkling of Taiwanese). Their books are always exciting and very different, some science fiction, some horror, some a mix of genres, but it would be fair to say that many of them are quite dark. I first encountered them via Bora Chung’s Cursed Bunny, translated by Anton Hur, and have just read two of their recent releases translated from Japanese. Although I didn’t intend to read them together, they have a similar theme: dysfunctional, abusive families, violence, grim sexual relationships and ultimately murder. However, the two books are quite different in style and resolution. (I follow Japanese name convention below for the authors, surname first, given name last).
Shout out for a particularly beautiful, evocative cover (and flaps, which you cannot see here)
Tanaka Shinya: Cannibals, transl. Kalau Almony.
The original title in Japanese is ‘tomogui’, which can mean cannibalism or feeding off each other, but also mutual destruction or damage, and this helps in understanding this very graphic, very disturbing novella (just under 80 pages long). It can be read in one sitting, but it will leave a nasty taste in your mouth. It reminded me very much of the Nakagami Kenji’s portrayal of a Burakumin family on the margins of society, both in terms of style and subject matter.
The book was published in Japan in 2012 and won the Akutagawa Prize, but it is set in the last year of the Showa era (1988 – there is a discrepancy there on the first page, the summer of 1989 was no longer the Showa era). For a while I was puzzled why it had to take place then, since the setting often feels like it could be set in the 1950s. In retrospect, however, I think it’s significant that it happens just as Japan is about to experience a change of eras: from the Emperor who had presided over Japan’s militaristic regime and invasion of other countries in the 1930s, then the war and its aftermath, then the economic boom, to the Heisei era, the name meaning ‘universal peace’, but actually bringing economic stagnation (the so-called Lost Decade), political turmoil and multiple natural disasters which devastated many cities. It might not be an exaggeration to see certain parallels with this story about a seventeen-year-old boy who dreads becoming like his violent father and yet finds himself unable to escape that inheritance – or so he believes.
Toma is the seventeen-year-old in question: he lives with his father and his father’s new girlfriend, Kotoko, but frequently visits his mother Jinko, who runs a fishmonger shop on the other side of the river. His mother was ten years older than his father and had lost her right hand during the war, so was considered damaged goods and therefore initially grateful that a man paid attention to her, but after they got married, he started showing both his violent and philandering side, so she left him. Toma goes fishing for eels (unagi in Japanese) with his mother (and sometimes the father joins them as well, since that’s his favourite food – unsurprising, given the phallic symbolism of the fish). He is partly fascinated, partly repulsed by the sight of the unagi on the hook, as well as his mother’s metal prosthetic, which is not shaped like a hand but a cylinder of long, thin stainless-steel rods, looking like a metal cage.
It’s this image of a cage that stayed with me while reading the book. It feels like Toma and the people around are stuck in cages, suspended somewhere next to the foul-smelling river filled with dirt and ever-decreasing quantities of fish. It’s a summer of drought, the river levels are low, all the rubbish is coming to the surface and the rats are coming out. The heat and heavy air seems to be driving everyone crazy. Toma is also in that state of suspension, although his life seems to be on the brink of change: Kotoko is pregnant and his father might throw him out of the house once the baby arrives. His relationship with his girlfriend Chigusa is causing him anxiety, because he doesn’t quite know any other way to express his desire while having sex other than the violence he has seen from his father. He is confused and and steeped in hatred of his father but also himself, so be prepared for some rather uncomfortable scenes, especially in the encounter with a prostitute that his father also visits and abuses.
And then the weather breaks, just as the summer festival is about to take place. Needless to say, something else happens at the same time, a shocking act which forces everybody out of their state of suspended animation. Like the unagi Toma sees in a whirlpool of mud at that crucial moment in the story, it will be a painful struggle to make his way out of the mud:
The earth and rain had mixed together, and emerging from a shallow whirlpool of the resulting mud was a single large unagi with the girth of a grown man’s arm, its pectoral fins spread like the cotyledons of a plant, and its head shaking from left to right. There was a wound on its face. At the edge of the wound its smooth flesh glistened, and from it oozed a golden mucus. At first, the eel extended its long body upwards, then fell diagonally, twisted itself, and pulled its body from the whirlpool of mud. It was so big, and it was hurt, but it looked new. For a moment, it stirred up the mud in a single spot, but eventually began swimming slowly away.
In summary, not an easy or pleasant book to read, but undeniably powerful. The book has been adapted into an arthouse film directed by Aoyama Shinji entitled The Backwater.
Shimamoto Rio: First Love, transl. Louise Heal Kawai.
Winner of the Naoki Literary Prize in 2018 (awarded to ‘popular’, i.e. commercial literature rather than more esoteric literary efforts of the Akutagawa Prize), and I think we can see the differences between the two prizes clearly if we compare the two novels. This book was also adapted for film in 2021, directed by Tsutsumi Yukihiko, but both the film and the book follow a more conventional format of melodrama – part psychological thriller, part courtroom drama.
Kanna is a university student who, on the day of the second interview for a TV announcer job, suddenly stabs her father to death without any apparent motive, other than that he was against her applying for that kind of job. Assigned to write a book on the crime and the mental state of the perpetrator, clinical psychologist Yuki begins a series of face-to-face sessions with Kanna in prison. Working together with Yuki’s lawyer, Kasho, who happens to be Yuki’s own brother-in-law, she seeks to understand the motivations for the murder and begins to suspect there are deeper causes for Kanna’s actions and emotional state. Yet, in the process of delving into Kanna’s family’s past, Yuki’s own repressed memories resurface.
The book is written in the first person from the perspective of Yuki the psychologist and perhaps a third person narration would have worked better, for I felt it was initially withholding too much (about the relationship between Kasho and Yuki for example), and too emotionally distant, although that could be deliberate, to show the numbness that comes from not processing trauma properly. Yet, as a psychologist in her thirties working with victims of domestic abuse, I’d have expected Yuki to have worked through some of her personal issues with a psychiatrist herself.
The book differs in tone, the prose is quite matter-of-fact, sometimes feeling a little flat, compared to the poetic, occasionally overwrought style of Cannibals. Yet, although it is marketed (in Japan at least) more overtly as a thriller, it is in fact an exploration of topics that are still somewhat taboo in Japanese society: sexual abuse and exploitation (whether direct or indirect), mothers choosing to ignore or disbelieve it for the sake of family ‘harmony’, and the long-term impact this can have on survivors of such situations. Alongside the two main female characters, there are also other stories of women feeling they do not deserve or must not expect better from men, or who are so desperate for affection that they want to believe that sex equals love.
But… he did like me a little bit, didn’t he? He must have done. I mean, a man wouldn’t do something like that if he had no feelings at all, right?’
‘Do you know what love is? I think it’s all about valuing and respecting someone, and trust.’
‘But there’s nothing about me to be respected.’
The book also shows just how complex and problematic the issue of ‘consent’ is:
‘Kanna, have you ever refused a man who approached you for a physical relationship?’
She hesitated. ‘Hardly ever.’
‘And was that what you wanted?’
‘Sometimes I may have wanted it, and sometimes I felt responsible that I’d made them feel that way, so I felt I had to do it.’
It feels like quite a sad book in that respect, but also an angry one. With one exception, Yuki’s husband Gamon, all the men in the book are highly problematic, even the ones dismissed in one paragraph:
I’d met that male presenter several times previously, but he’d never once made eye contact with me. There were men like that everywhere in the television industry – men who wouldn’t engage in conversation with women they’d give less than an eight out of ten on looks. Men who thought nobody would notice this behavior. Or maybe they just thought it didn’t matter. These were men who had never suffered a single setback in their lives.
A lot of the anger is also directed at parents who are blind to their children’s suffering or try to normalise situations that shouldn’t be acceptable. Or any people in positions of authority over younger, more impressionable people. ‘Comply with his wishes. Live up to adults’ expectations. Pretend you feel no discomfort or fear.’
Although it raises many important issues, the book did feel a little too on-the-nose and preachy, more suitable perhaps for a book club discussion rather than appealing through its prose or subtlety.
Anyway, although I sometimes laugh at the English reticence to show sex scenes in books, after reading the two books above I felt I needed a good long shower to wash away the misery and dirt. I’d be quite happy now to retreat to those kinds of stories where sex is more implied than explicit, and perhaps relationships in general are a bit healthier and happier. But does that make for a good story?
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.
findingtimetowrite 