Touring the Land of the Dead by Maki Kashimada (tr. Haydn Trowell)

3rd January 2025 / / 0 Comments

2025 has begun, and we are starting the year in Japan. This is the first book by Maki Kashimada to appear in English translation, and it collects together two novellas. I would say the main theme connecting them is family, with contrasting relationships in each.

In the novella ‘Touring the Land of the Dead’, we meet Natsuko, whose family once lived the high life, but now her mother and brother are content to scrounge off her. She is caught between them and her husband Tachi, who is unable to do much for himself due to the effects of a neurological disease. 

Natsuko books a break for herself and Tachi at a health retreat which used to be a luxury hotel that her family would visit. Those old times are captured on 8 mm film that feels like a distant world to our protagonist:

Her mother’s brother, watching the dance from a leather sofa, was brazenly holding a champagne glass. And her mother herself, wanting to take a sip, was trying to snatch it away. There was something impenetrably startling about their actions, but in the middle of that monochrome world they flowed silently, matter-of-factly.

Translation from Japanese by Haydn Trowell

Being at the retreat, moving through the same spaces as her relatives once did, sparks off visions of the past in Natsuko. Their effect is disconcerting:

Her young mother, thinking that she was special. Thinking that she was one of the chosen few. Natsuko is overcome with vertigo, her heart filled with disgust. Just as it was all beginning to become too unbearable, a round rubber ring cut across her vision. 

That rubber ring is the tyre of Tachi’s wheelchair, a reminder of practical concerns in the present. This trip and the memories stirred allow Natsuko to confront how she views her birth family, and to move beyond this. They also allow her to appreciate where Tachi is coming from. She has always wondered why he doesn’t complain about what happens to him, but now she can see that he’s choosing to get on with life. The closing sense is that Natsuko now has the means to do the same.

If the protagonist of Kashimada’s first novella is pulling away from her family, the narrator of the second, ‘Ninety-Nine Kisses’, remains close to hers – sometimes uncomfortably so. Nanako illustrates her feelings towards her three sisters:

I’m just completely taken by my sisters, my sisters who don’t let themselves get overwhelmed by such things, who are able to go on fighting fearlessly among themselves over the same man. They’re my whole standard of reference. My personality only serves to add something to theirs. It might not even add anything. I’m just an echo of them. But it’s an erotic experience, this way of being.

The sisters’ closeness is challenged by the arrival of a man in their lives – as is Nanako’s sense of herself and her place. An acute confrontation with emotions is common to both of the novellas in Kashimada’s volume, and the aftermath lingers in the mind.

Touring the Land of the Dead is published by Europa Editions UK.

This review is for January in Japan, which Tony is hosting at Tony’s Reading List.

A selection of 2024 favourites

30th December 2024 / / 0 Comments

2024 was another year when, for whatever reason, I just didn’t click with reading in general as much as I would have liked. There’s no point dwelling on it, I just hope this will turn around next year. In the meantime, I have picked out the following four highlights from the reading year:

Leonard Cohen: a Novel (2024), by Jeffrey Lewis

An aspiring songwriter named Leonard Cohen writes to his more famous namesake, and we learn of an intense relationship that ended in ambiguous circumstances. This is a novel of a life haunted by possibility: what if Leonard could step out of the celebrity’s shadow? What else could have happened in that relationship? Other realities, just out of reach. 

Weasels in the Attic (2012-4) by Hiroko Oyamada
Translated from Japanese by David Boyd (2022)

This is the shortest book I read in 2024 – a collection of three stories – but it certainly carried its weight. Each story centres on a meal which acts as the focus for broader currents at play. For example, a tale told over dinner about weasels in the house points to deeper problems in a couple’s relationship. I found these stories to open out more the further I went in. 

84, Charing Cross Road (1970) by Helene Hanff

Collected correspondence between American writer Hanff and the staff of a London bookshop. It suggests that Hanff could be spiky but also generous, and there’s an obvious warmth in her relationship with the shop. This book felt like a fascinating glimpse into an older world, with an unexpected echo of the future in a comment about buying books without leaving the typewriter. 

Mary and the Rabbit Dream (2024) by Noémi Kiss-Deáki

If I were to choose a favourite book of 2024, I think this would be it. Mary Toft was a real-life 18th century figure who (for a time) was believed to have given birth to rabbits. In the novel, this is a scheme devised by Mary’s mother-in-law that gets beyond her control. What I like most is how the prose itself embodies the forces holding the characters in place, and enables Mary eventually to find a voice. 

***

So, there was 2024. You can find my highlights of previous years here:

2023, 2022. 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, and 2009.

You can also find me on social media at Instagram, Facebook, Bluesky, and X/Twitter. I wish you well for 2025!

Gliff by Ali Smith: Strange Horizons review

20th December 2024 / / 0 Comments

Over at Strange Horizons, I’ve reviewed the latest novel by Ali Smith. Gliff is the tale of two young siblings living in a future of banal oppression, and the ways they find to resist. I found its abstract dimensions strongest, the way it articulates that resistance must take place partly at a conceptual level. But the concrete aspects of its future are a bit too sketchy to have real heft. There will be a companion novel, Glyph, next year, which will apparently tell a story hidden in the first volume. I will be curious to see how that turns out.

Read my review of Gliff in full here. The book is published by Hamish Hamilton.

Stories from Taiwan: ká-sióng, Part 1

25th November 2024 / / 0 Comments

Strangers Press is a publishing project based at the University of East Anglia, specialising in sets of strikingly designed chapbooks, with stories in translation. Their latest project is ká-sióng, a collection of five tales from Taiwan. They kindly sent me a set for review, and in this post I’m looking at the first three.

‘Not Your Child’ by Lâu Tsí-û
Translated by Jenna Wang

Parliamentary assistant Yu-Jie is on the train, going to visit her niece, when her leave is interrupted. A speech given by her MP following an assault on a young girl – a speech that Yu-Jie wrote – has been taken out of context and gone viral, the MP now seeming callous and out of touch. People ask what right she has to comment when she’s not a mother herself. 

I have a soft spot for strong thematic parallels in stories, and there’s one here. Yu-Jie is taking that journey because she’s concerned about the welfare of her niece. She feels that she may even be more concerned than the girl’s own mother, and questions whether that’s right when this is not her child.

So, you have that personal quandary playing out with and against the professional scandal unfolding in wider society. Yu-Jie can’t really do anything about either situation while she’s on the train, so the ultimate sense for me is of the protagonist in her own bubble of reality, heading into an unknown future. 

‘Cage’ by Qiu Miaojin
Translated by Shengchi Hsu

This tale begins with a character in a room with an open exit. What, it asks, is keeping this person from leaving? We then cut to the voice of Li Wen, who meets Ping when they are both about to jump off the same building. They talk each other out of it, and Li Wen goes on to become a successful journalist. Ping reappears in his life intermittently, happy to be alive while he’s alive also. She is an almost idealised hanger-on, someone Li Wen cares for deeply without allowing it to become love. 

At the same time, Wen is haunted by “him”, a bedraggled and boorish figure who takes up space and brings out the worst in him: “Our co-dependence was toxic: we were each other’s plaything, like live targets in a dart match, the darts poisoned with repulsion.”

The question arises for the reader of whether this other figure is real: probably not, is my guess – I imagine him to be an embodiment of Li Wen’s worst attributes. This also raises the question of whether Ping is real: probably, although Li Web may be projecting his desires on to her. 

One of the most powerful scenes in ‘Cage’ for me comes when all three characters – Li Wen, Ping and “him” – apparently occupy the same space, and one has to interpret what’s actually happening. The uncertainty over how much we’ve really seen of Li Wen electrifies the reading. 

‘Mountain Rat’ by Lulyang Nomin
Translated by Yu Teng-Wei

Our protagonist is chopping at a tree knot when a mountain rat bites his ankle. He retreats to a bamboo hut reserved for members of his tribe to quarantine in times of plague. Instead of healing, though, he finds himself transmogrified into a hybrid rat-human creature. He also finds his consciousness being pushed out by a malevolent spirit. 

This is a splendidly disturbing story. The sense of horror escalates as the protagonist tries to shake off the spirit’s hold, but it’s coupled with a nagging sense of allure. The protagonist recalls a tale his grandfather told him, about a young man who turned into a monkey and decided he preferred to live that way. Perhaps, for this protagonist, there is something to be said for life as a rat. That tension underpins ‘Mountain Rat’ right up to the final page. 

The Black Orb by Ewhan Kim (tr. Sean Lin Halbert): Strange Horizons review

28th October 2024 / / 0 Comments

I am back at Strange Horizons with a review of The Black Orb by Ewhan Kim, translated from Korean by Sean Lin Halbert. This is the tale of an unusual apocalypse, as mysterious dark orbs proliferate across the world, absorbing everyone who gets in their way. Our protagonist is Jeong-su, who may not seem to be cut out for surviving an apocalypse, but does so anyway. It turns out that the real danger in this novel lies on the inside.

To find out more of what I thought, read my review in full here.

The Black Orb is published by Serpent’s Tail.

#1970Club: 84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff

17th October 2024 / / 10 Comments

Twice a year, Kaggsy and Simon host themed ‘club’ weeks dedicated to books from a particular year. Joining in has long been on my to-do list, and this week finally I’ve managed it, with the 1970 Club. 

84, Charing Cross Road was the address of a London second-hand bookshop, Marks and Company. The book of the same name is a collection of correspondence between the shop and Helene Hanff, a writer who lived in New York. The letters begin prosaically enough in 1949, with a note from Hanff accompanying an order, and a formal reply from the manager, Frank Doel. But, over the years, this blossoms into far more. 

Hanff’s voice in her letters is often spiky and forthright, and I can imagine the British bookshop staff finding it disconcerting. For example, here Hanff writes in 1950, wondering where her books are:

you leave me sitting here writing long margin notes in library books that don’t belong to me, some day they’ll find out i did it and take my library card away. 

I have made arrangements with the Easter bunny to bring you an Egg, he will get over there and find you have died of Inertia. 

As that second sentence suggests, though, Hanff was also often generous, sending the shop parcels of food and other supplies at a time when rationing was still on in Britain. Hanff’s evident warmth gains a response in kind: Frank’s letters become less formal, and Helene also hears from other shop staff, and even Frank’s family. 

Hanff’s correspondence with Marks and Co. lasts for twenty years, until Frank Doel’s sudden death. Reading the book now feels to me like a glimpse into an older way of selling and relating to books that, for better or worse, has now gone. There was one line of Hanff’s from 1950, though, which struck me as an unexpected echo of the future:

Why should I run all the way down to 17th St. to buy dirty, badly made books when I can buy clean, beautiful ones from you without leaving the typewriter?

I don’t know if Helene Hanff could have imagined how we’d be buying books fifty or more years in the future, but there’s a familiar impulse behind that comment all the same.

A Han Kang retrospective

11th October 2024 / / 2 Comments

I was really pleased to learn that Han Kang had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature yesterday. She has become one of my favourite writers that I’ve discovered during the lifetime of this blog. Indeed, she was the author of my ‘book of the year’ twice in a row. Her writing has a way of getting under my skin like few other authors’.

It also happens that I’ve reviewed all of Han’s books that have appeared in English translation to date, so this seems a good time to look back on what I thought of them. Here, then, are the links to my posts on Han Kang’s work:

  • The Vegetarian (2007, tr. Deborah Smith 2015) – reviewed for Shiny New Books.
  • Human Acts (2014, tr. Deborah Smith 2016) – reviewed on the blog.
  • From 2016, a few thoughts on Han Kang, Lionel Shriver, and a writer’s relationship to their material.
  • The White Book (2016, tr. Deborah Smith 2017) – reviewed on the blog.
  • Greek Lessons (2011, tr. Deborah Smith and Emily Yae Won 2023) – reviewed for Shiny New Books.

A Challenge of Empathy: Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata (tr. Ginny Tapley Takemori)

29th August 2024 / / 0 Comments

This review was first published at Splice in October 2018.

***

Meet Keiko Furukura. She has always found it difficult to conform to what her family and wider society consider “normal”. She once stopped a fight between a group of boys at primary school by hitting one of them over the head with a spade. She couldn’t understand what was wrong with this: “Everyone was saying to stop them, so that’s what I did,” she told her teachers. Throughout the rest of her childhood, Keiko kept her head down, saying no more than she had to — and the adults around her didn’t think that was normal, either. It wasn’t until she got a job at the Hiiromachi Station Smile Mart in 1998, whilst at university, that she felt she had finally found her place in the world. Eighteen years later, she’s still there.

Convenience Store Woman is Sayaka Murata’s tenth novel, but the first to appear in English (translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori). The title may appear prosaic, but it points towards the essence of Keiko’s situation by combining place and person to suggest something greater than the sum of both. Keiko really does live and breathe her job. The store’s sounds reverberate through her head as she falls asleep at night, and she imagines the cells of her body energised at the prospect of being there. Those cells are also made up of food from the convenience store because that’s all Keiko eats, and the thought of this makes her “feel like I’m as much a part of the store as the magazine racks or the coffee machine.”

Continue reading

Women in Translation Month: Jellyfish Have No Ears by Adèle Rosenfeld (tr. Jeffrey Zuckerman)

14th August 2024 / / 0 Comments

Meet Louise: she has used a hearing aid since childhood, but her ability to hear has now deteriorated so much that she faces the choice of whether to have a cochlear implant. The issue for her is that, if she does, she’ll lose what ‘natural’ hearing she already has, and the sound she hears will be mediated entirely through an electronic device. Louise wonders if that will change her as a person. Adèle Rosenfeld’s debut novel explores how Louise confronts the different possibilities.

Louise is depicted as effectively living between two worlds: not able to get by easily in hearing society, but also unable to embrace Deaf culture. The way she hears is also on a continuum, sometimes straightforwardly intelligible, but more often a fluid experience of sound that leans towards the abstract:

At the supermarket, the voices blurred into a single echo. An epidemic of sorts had spread across all sound: the jam jars that the stock boy was shelving chattered; the product codes’ beeps at the checkout seeped into the women’s stressed syllables like fantastical outbursts; the deli-counter machine let out a hoarse cough. At the checkout, I overheard “bulgur” or maybe “burer”. To a “you” – static – “there,” I answered yes twice without understanding, replied no three times without understanding, and finally declared “I don’t know,” still without understanding. 

Translated from French by Jeffrey Zuckerman

This experience extends to how Louise relates to other people. The other characters tend to feel as though they’re at arm’s length, even those closest to Louise, because she has to stretch to reach them. She imagines some characters, such as a soldier whose story springs forth from the words in an auditory test – and they become no less (or more) important to Louise’s experience of the world than ‘real’ people (if the reader can be sure which characters are real, that is).

For me, Louise’s dilemma is perhaps best summed up in the person of Thomas, her lover. On the one hand, he’s willing – more so than any other character – to accommodate Louise’s needs and desires; for example, he adjusts a music recording to make it more accessible to her hearing profile. On the other hand, Thomas is much more enthusiastic about the idea of a cochlear implant than she is. So, would Louise rather engage with the world from here, or step over there into the unknown? Either way, her journey is absorbing.

Jellyfish Have No Ears is published by MacLehose Press in the UK and Graywolf Press in the US.

Scratch Books: The Unreliable Nature Writer by Claire Carroll

29th July 2024 / / 0 Comments

The protagonist of Claire Carroll’s story ‘Paddling Pool’ doesn’t really need to buy a paddling pool. But there’s nothing stopping that person from doing so – besides, it’s hot, and there’s the gentle voice of the narrator reassuring the protagonist that their choices are fine in the moment, even if the long-term consequences might be severe:

You might, years later, starving, dragging yourself along the beach in the unbearable heat, you might discover a fish, partially dried out on the orange sand. Peeling away at its skin, you might find microscopic parts of your paddling pool inside. But there’s no way you’ll ever be able to tell if it’s the same one, so don’t worry about that now.

That quotation was a powerful moment for me among a set of striking tales in The Unreliable Nature Writer (which is the first single-author collection from Scratch Books). Broadly, Carroll’s main theme is the relationship between humanity and nature, examined from a variety of angles. 

Some of the stories give form to a (perceived) distance between the human world and the natural, and look at what may fill the gap. For example, the narrator of ‘There Or Not There’ works on an advertising installation that places indoor objects among a patch of real woodland. Their work is supposed to be environmentally friendly, but it might have killed some nesting birds. The narrator’s doubts and self-reassurances give this piece its sharp edge. 

‘Re: Wreck Event’ creates uncertainty by giving two different versions of what happened on the day a couple split up. One partner writes an account which the other one annotates with footnotes, undermining most of the key details. The dead and dying birds on the ground that day become just another piece of this contested reality.

Carroll also ventures into the future (or sideways in reality) in some of her stories. ‘Dream Reading: On Higher Ground’ depicts extreme bureaucracy as housing applicants are chosen according to how well they describe their dreams – but also a raw euphoria at being in touch with nature. ‘The Sheer Delight of What You May Become’ juxtaposes a formal process for land to be acquired and returned to nature with the reality of what happens to the people displaced from that land. The interests of humans and nature are held in tension – which is what so often animates Carroll’s stories. 

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