Shadow Family by Miyuki Miyabe is variously hailed as a ‘mystery’, a ‘murder mystery’ and a ‘thriller’. It is all of these but more besides. It is a commentary on reality/pretence, honesty/concealment, the individual/the collective, permanence/ephemerality and the interface between the mundaneness of everyday life and the fantasy world of cyberspace.
This short novel begins very much [...]
Entries from July 2008
July 31, 2008
Shadow Family
July 30, 2008
Piercing
At face value Ryu Murakami’s Piercing is at least as shocking throughout as the infamous scene in In the Miso Soup. Kawashima Masayuki has a respectable, well-regarded career in advertising and is married to a beautiful wife and has a new baby daughter, both of whom he adores. Yet Kawashima suffers from night terrors and is [...]
July 29, 2008
Autofiction
Autofiction is the second novel to be available in English by one of the bright young stars of Japanese literature, Hitomi Kanehara. The themes of despair, paranoia, disengagement, nihilism and so on are familiar to those who have already read Snakes and Earrings.
There is a lot packed into this short novel. It is a story, [...]
July 28, 2008
Sabbath’s Theater
Reading a Philip Roth novel, I find, represents something of a commitment. This one took me the best part of two weeks to get through. For me, reading Roth is not unlike reading Balzac – the first 100 pages seem like heavy going, but once you’ve got through the detailed exposition, then you become completely [...]
July 8, 2008
The Paper Moon
The Paper Moon is the latest (the ninth, I think) of Andrea Camilleri’s Inspector Montalbano novels to be translated into English. There are, I’m informed, plenty more to come and they seem to be appearing at the rate of about two a year, so there’s lots still to look forward to. I’m now at the [...]
July 3, 2008
In The Miso Soup
Ryo Murakami’s novel is yet further proof, if any were needed, of the extraordinary, vibrant nature of contemporary Japanese fiction – or at least that which has found its way into translation. And the translator has done a great job here – the prose flows beautifully.
Murakami is one of a number of young Japanese novelists [...]
July 1, 2008
Half-way through the year
You may have noticed something of a flurry of blogging activity from me in the past couple of days. This was simply as a result of my trying to get up-to-date with all the reading I’ve done in time for the end of June. Well, I just about managed it and can report that at [...]
