About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Yoko Tawada, trans. Susan Bernofsky
Rave Asian Review of Books Not a plot-driven novel ... Tawada aptly captures the sense of everlasting monotony of life under lockdown conditions ... Takes up language itself as a major motif. Characteristically, Tawada plays with the German in which her novel is written ... It takes only a passing knowledge of poetry and the world of academia, though, to understand Patrik’s quietly ironic sense of humor—one of the most enjoyable aspects of the novel.
Seishu Hase, trans. by Alison Watts
Positive Asian Review of Books Even if The Boy and the Dog rests in the familiar \"dog story\" niche, the novel is notable for the story it tells in the background ... Most compelling by far are the parts of the story grounded by Japan’s great 21st-century disaster—the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami ... Translator Alison Watts does a charming job rendering into English a story that is in turns sentimental and grim ... It is a charming, sentimental story set against the backdrop of a Japan that is still invisible to many people outside of the country. But it is also worth reading as a work of popular post-disaster \"Fukushima fiction\".
Sayaka Murata tr. Ginny Tapley Takemori
Positive The Asian Review of Books Most of the stories are deeply unsettling ... What all of Murata’s stories have in common is a discomfiting sense that the rules that govern how people behave don’t make as much sense as people would like to think they do. Murata is at her best when she calls the reader’s attention to those rules. She poses ambiguous moral problems—and then refuses to answer them ... The collection contains story upon story forcing the reader to evaluate the cultural norms she can never really escape.
Mieko Kawakami, trans. by Sam Bett and David Boyd
Positive The Asian Review of Books ... a stinging critique of the ways some women sabotage other women they think of as competition ... For most of the book, Fuyuko is a remarkably passive presence. Except for the decisions to quit her job and to begin drinking, most events happen to her rather than on her own initiative. But the first-person narrative, written in her voice, is never passive. Rather, it jumps off the page in almost synesthetic vividness. (The work of translators Sam Bett and David Boyd is again impressive) ... passes the Bechdel Test with flying colors as it reaffirms that relationships between women, no matter how raw and messy, can still be beautiful.
Masatsugu Ono tr. Juliet Winters Carpenter
Positive The Asian Review of Books ... translator Juliet Winters Carpenter captures Ono’s narrator’s deep, existential terror ... No single disaster drives these refugees. Violence. Climate change. Other people’s greed. At the Edge of the Woods puts these realities of the contemporary world on full display and presents them as what they are—horrors. It reads like a horror novel or a supernatural thriller because it plunges the reader into her own helplessness in the face of the mass suffering of other people.
Polly Barton
Positive The Asian Review of Books Throughout the memoir, Barton’s intelligence and erudition come across in every sentence of liltingly beautiful prose. As it is in her translations, her writing here is also unapologetically British ... isn’t perfect. Barton acknowledges her privileges in a Japanese context—that she gets to be a stranger in a strange land, that her whiteness covers all manner of sins—but she never really addresses her privileges back in the West ... For all this, though, she is always respectful of Japan and Japanese people. She never presents Japan as Other, reliably noting the things that might seem odd or idiosyncratic in her own culture as well. Above all, she is brutally honest about her feelings and failings ... what really makes the book sparkle is Barton’s abiding love of language itself ... Barton is brave. She celebrates this space between knowing and not-knowing a language. She approaches Japanese with the melancholy knowledge that she will never be able to fully integrate into the language’s embodied community. Nevertheless, her love of this liminal space is so great that she emboldens the reader, too, to sit in linguistic limbo.
Yoko Tawada, tr. Margaret Mitsutani
Rave Asian Review of Books Tawada’s dystopia is a quiet one ... Even the word \'Japan\' is absent from the novel. For the reader, Hiruko’s nationality is obvious, but Tawada never refers to Hiruko or her first language as \'Japanese.\' Instead, the novel is a running commentary on the ubiquity of “Cool Japan’s” soft power, even divorced from Japan itself ... The real heart of Tawada’s novel, though, is the \'eroticism\' of language—a love of language so all-encompassing it takes on a devotional fervor ... Tawada approaches language with wry humor ... It is also worth noting how alluringly Margaret Mitsutani translates this homage to language ... Scattered All Over the Earth doesn’t come to a neat conclusion ... Even as a stand-alone novel, as both a story and a work of translation, it is a remarkable tribute to language.
Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, Tr. Anthony Chambers and Paul McCarthy
Positive Asian Review of Books Notable in both Tanizaki’s writing and the translations here is the variation in tone. Each of these three stories is highly distinct. \'Longing\', translated by McCarthy, is claustrophobic and ethereal ... In comparison, \'Sorrows of a Heretic\' is cynical and driven by the narrator’s self-loathing. A sense of dread looms in \'The Story of an Unhappy Mother.\' A thoughtful and thorough translator’s afterword provides careful analysis of the stories’ shared features. Attributed to both Chambers and McCarthy, it is...an excellent addition ... Longing and Other Stories provides not only three thematically-linked stories to the canon, the afterword also adds an excellent resource of accessible scholarship and close-reading.
Hiromi Kawakami, tr. Ted Goossen
Rave Asian Review People from My Neighborhood isn’t a conventional book of linked short stories, and it is the relationships between each story that make the collection pop. Each story flows into the next, linked, not by a narrative arc, but by a common theme shared with the story that follows it ... The continuity between these tales is all the more remarkable because these stories are collected from already-published work. It is almost as though the compilation, rather than the narrative, is using stream-of-consciousness ... Kawakami’s is a book to keep on hand and to become intimate with: a book with which readers can have a relationship of their own.
Ruth Ozeki
Mixed Asian Review of Books \"... the characters here are believable and human; Annabelle in particular is lovely, lonely, and strikingly real. Her flaws are written large, but, like literature’s best flaws, her hoarding is a perversion of her greatest strength ... Despite its strengths, The Book of Form and Emptiness is less ambitious than its predecessor ... the metatextual elements...feel forced and—frankly—cliché ... The voice of the Book Benny hears is charming and sometimes helpful. It is not particularly original. When the Book speaks, its words are often heavy-handed and self-righteous ... The Book is likewise responsible for many of the novel’s clunkier moments. Nevertheless, The Book of Form and Emptiness has charms of its own ... The novel is at its best when it is simply the story of Benny and Annabelle, two broken people who must learn to love themselves, flaws and all. \
Natsuko Imamura
Positive Asian Review of Books Yellow Cardigan’s failure to reveal anything about her own life or describe anything about her own actions disorients the reader and adds to a growing sense of foreboding ... The Woman in the Purple Skirt is an apolitical novel, but evidence of the challenges facing Japan’s economy and culture are everywhere. Unreliable employment and limited professional opportunities are the lived reality of Japan’s have-nots. They invisibly shape the way people live no less than Yellow Cardigan invisibly interferes with Purple Skirt. And at the heart of the Woman in the Yellow Cardigan’s obsession is an unsated desire to initiate a relationship—to form, not a sexual or romantic bond, but a connection to any other person.
Mieko Kawakami, tr. David Boyd and Sam Bett
Rave Asian Review of Books Heaven is excruciating. Readers share viscerally in the protagonist’s victimization at the hands of sadistic bullies ... Heaven’s bullying is all the more real to the reader because of Kawakami’s descriptions, vividly rendered into English by translators Sam Bett and David Boyd ... The psychological tension of the novel lies in the narrator’s responses to the world views Kojima and Momose propose.
Izumi Suzuki, tr. Polly Barton, Sam Bett
Rave Asian Review of Books Like much of Suzuki’s fiction, Terminal Boredom is even more striking and believable in 2020 than it was in 1980 ... Suzuki was also remarkably forward-thinking on feminism and gender ... The stories collected in Terminal Boredom are fundamentally science fiction, and a few may make more comfortable reading for long-standing sci-fi fans. Suzuki’s writing can be evasive: she skips from one narrative perspective to another or makes leaps forward in time without warning. Aliens, space travel, and impossible drugs all make appearances. But Suzuki also uses the genre as a tabula rasa for her commentary on the present—and grim predictions about the future. Many of her stories will easily hold the interest of people who don’t normally read speculative fiction ... this collection is worth reading for more than its historical importance. Suzuki’s feminist spirit is as relevant and her stories as piercing today as they were more than thirty years ago.
Maki Kashimada tr. Haydn Trowell
Rave The Asian Review of Books ... Kashimada writes about one woman’s trauma with razor-perfect concision and an austere beauty ... There is certainly no shortage of novels about hotels with complicated histories, but Touring the Land of the Dead is fairly unique in its execution ... Through Natsuko’s story, Kashimada takes up some of the most complex issues in contemporary Japanese society: the future of the family in an aging country and what some people perceive as a post-bubble cultural ennui ... In comparison to the muted, third-person narrator of Touring the Land of the Dead, Nanako’s voice is eccentric and character driven. The two markedly different narrative voices show off the talent that helped Kashimada win Japan’s most coveted literary award, the Akutagawa Prize, for Touring the Land of the Dead. Haydn Trowell’s unobtrusive translation leaves room for Kashimada’s prose as she reflects on family, memory, and identity.
Minae Mizumura
Rave Asian Review of Books In Japanese, several features set it apart from a conventional Japanese-language novel. The words flow horizontally left to right as in many European-language books, as opposed to vertically and right to left as in most Japanese-language books. It also freely moves from English to Japanese and back, the way a fluent speaker of both languages like Mizamura might ... Carpenter’s compromise is to use different typefaces to represent the use of different languages. A great deal must be lost in translation, but the novel is still a thoughtful reflection on language and culture ... Mizumura’s reflections on race are some of the most eloquent in the book ... An I-Novel ends without a conclusive answer, but it becomes clearer that Mizumura’s distinction between her \'Japanese-language self\' (her \'real self\') and her \'English-language self\' isn’t a comfortable one. Her dual identity makes her a keen critic of two very different cultures that are, in some ways, inseparable.
Kikuko Tsumura, trans. by Polly Barton
Positive Asian Review of Books In the novel’s final pages, when the author finally reveals what that first career was, all of the narrator’s contract work appears in a different light. It is this conclusion, dramatically shifting the reader’s understanding of the events in the novel, that makes the novel so satisfying. Polly Barton’s engaging and readable translation makes sufficient use of Britishisms—\'bloody\', \'moreish\' for \'tasty\', \'skive off\' for \'to skip work\'—to briefly draw the reader out of a Japanese life and into an incongruously British one ... For all its critique of the modern workplace, the resolution of There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job is fairly conventional. Even while new jobs farther away from her original field, the narrator finds herself doing work more and more like what she trained for. She can’t help doing what she loves any more than she can help doing her best, even when she has resolved to do mindless work.
Aoko Matsuda, Trans. by Polly Barton
Positive The Asian Review of Books The collection’s source notes may sometimes be too brief for a non-Japanese reader ... The Jealous Type complicates an easy reading of Where the Wild Ladies Are as a feminist effort—as does the presence of a man, Shigeru, as the collection’s unifying figure. Nevertheless, Matsuda presents a radical reimagining of stories fundamental in Japanese popular culture. Women are no longer victims, no longer the objects, but the subjects of these stories. Whether made over into heroines or as villainous as they have always appeared, the women finally take center stage. For better or worse, it is what the “wild ladies” have to say that matters.