Morihei’s Page
Tag: #japan
The Diving Pool — Yoko Ogawa
Pregnancy Diary — Yoko Ogawa
The Cafeteria in the Evening and a Pool in the Rain — Yoko Ogawa
Wabi Sabi — Sosuke Takahashi
It’s such a shame that a book that is telling us about the things that this book is telling us about could have been translated so poorly.
Or was Sosuke deliberately trying to make this book full of imperfection in some weird sense of ironic humour that i just don’t understand? Maybe even that’s lost in the translation.
Seriously, if you are going to write books in a language, be sure to have a complete grasp of that language before doing so, if not, then write in your own language and get someone who has a complete grasp and understanding of the language you want the book in to translate it for you.
The content has a lot of good stuff for the reader to consider, but it’s presentation through the woeful English writing just ruins everything this book talks about and makes one think that this writer does no practice what he preaches.
Sosuke’s Page
#japan #wabisabi #sosuketakahashi
The Maid — Yasutaka Tsutsui
We have a young woman who can read minds who works as a live in maid so that she doesn’t have to stay in any single place very long so that no one will guess her secret.
Thus begins our journey with Nanase as she works for and lives with 8 different Japanese families and ventures through their thoughts and discovers all their private truths.
As a lover of Japanese fiction i found this very interesting, and i can imagine that it must have been quite controversial in Japan when published and probably still is. Tsutsui essentially strips away the public veneer of polite and controlled Japanese people and society and suggests that there’s something very different lurking underneath: what are their private thoughts and lives really like, can we really take people at face value?
My first book by Tsutsui and i’m looking forward to reading a few more soon, which are already queued up on my Kindle.
Yasutaka’s Page
#japan #yasutakatsutsui
Writing and Renunciation in Medieval Japan — Rajyashree Pandey
Zen Culture — Thomas Hoover
Earthlings — Sayaka Murata
Convenience Store Woman — Sayaka Murata
Hell — Yasutaka Tsutsui
Salmonella Men on Planet Porno — Yasutaka Tsutsui
The Dabba Dabba Tree
Rumours About Me
Don’t Laugh
Farmer Airlines
Bear’s Wood Main Line
The Very Edge of Happiness
Commuter Army
Hello, Hello, Hello!
The World is Tilting
Bravo Herr Mozart!
The Last Smoker
Bad for the Heart
Salmonella Men on Planet Porno
Yasutaka’s Page
#japan #yasutakatsutsui
Paprika — Yasutaka Tsutsui
Bullseye! — Yasutaka Tsutsui
Bullseye
Call for the Devil!
The Onlooker
It’s My Baby
Zarathustra on Mars
Having a Laugh
The Good Old Days
Running Man
Sleepy Summer Afternoon
Cross Section
Narcissism
Sadism
The Wind
A Vanishing Dimension
Oh! King Lear
Meta Noir
The Agency Maid
The Night they Played Hide and Seek
The Countdown Clock
Animated Realism
Yasutaka’s Page
#japan #yasutakatsutsui
At the End of the Matinee — Keiichiro Hirano
Tales from the Cafe — Toshikazu Kawaguchi
I soooo enjoyed Before the Coffee Gets Cold so i was really looking forward to some more tales.
And i wasn’t disappointed.
One thing that really stood out in this book was that all the niggly little questions that the first book raised got answered along the way: i won’t say what as it may spoil things. So it was rather good that as i started the book and i had questions in my mind that as i went along all the questions got dealt with. I imagine that Toshikazu had quite a few people asking these questions after reading the first book and it’s good to see that they all got answered.
Other than that, it’s pretty much more of the same as the first book whereby we have four people wanting to travel in time to make something right with someone. We also get to know the cafe staff and regulars a lot more along the way.
So yeah, great sequel and i really hope that Toshikazu thinks up a few more in the future and keeps the cafe going: it really is a good stage within which to fit stories into.
I continue to add my gripe from the first book, in that, there’s a cat on the cover but no cat in the book whatsoever. Toshikazu, if you ever read this, please put a cat in the next book.
Toshikazu’s Page
#scifi #japan #toshikazukawaguchi
The Courage to be Disliked — Ichiro Kishimi & Fumitake Koga
I couldn’t finish it. Bless me, i tried to, i really did, but i really couldn’t take any more of this tedious mediocrity.
I could barely manage a chapter before i had to put it aside and go off and read something else, but i kept on coming back to it with good intentions, but each time i would just end up putting it down again and go off once more to read something else. After 4 months of this, toing and froing, i just had to give up: it really wasn’t doing my happiness any good whatsoever.
To sum it up: there’s someone who claims to be a philosopher who is having a discussion with a young man, but the young man is asking all the wrong questions and failing miserably to point out the flaws in the supposed philosopher’s babble: the ridiculousness of this conversation just makes one feel like banging ones head against the wall.
Seriously people, you could just keep picking random books off library bookshelves for the rest of your life and not read anything as tedious and pointless as this book.
As such, this book has received my website’s great honour of being placed on “The Bookshelf of Infamy”, i’ve also deleted it from my Kindle and Amazon account: yes, it really is that bad.
I certainly won’t be bothering to read the sequel.
Ichiro’s Page Fumitake’s Page
