Category: literature

Keigo Higashino

On a typical evening in Tokyo, a man staggers onto Nihonbashi Bridge and collapses in front of a policeman. However, he isn’t just drunk, he had been stabbed to death. Not long afterwards, a young man called Yashima is hit by a car nearby. In his possession he has the wallet of the dead man on the bridge.

When eventually a connection between the two men is found and Yashima dies from his injuries, the police close the case. But inspector Kaga is not so easily satisfied, and when he digs deeper into the murder victim’s life, the unearths a motive tied to the man’s strong belief in justice and taking responsibility.

An enjoyable read about two good men who have to pay the ultimate price – one for sticking to his principles and the other for letting go of them in a moment of weakness. Even though I felt that the mystery element wasn’t as strong as what I have come to expect from Higashino, I liked that there was a larger team involved in the investigation. This is closer to reality than the usual lone wolf detective of fiction.

Keigo Higashino, born 1958 in Osaka, started writing while still working as an engineer for a Japanese automotive company. His first novel won the prestigious Edogawa Rampo Award for crime fiction, which led him to become a professional author. Since then, he has written more than 65 novels and 20 short story collections, many of which have won awards or have been turned into films or TV series. About 20 of his books have been translated into English.

At the end of this book, there is an unexpected moral lesson that is timeless and transcends the boundaries of culture and language. Find out what it is and get the book on amazon.

Fuminori Nakamura

The Thief is an experienced pickpocket with hunting grounds all over Tokyo. He has honed his craft since childhood and over the years has even developed his own professional ethics: Target only wealthy people, only take the cash (and the occasional watch), drop the wallet into a mailbox after the deed.

His easy-going life is interrupted when his first partner in crime offers him a job: Simply tie up an old man and empty his safe. The Thief reluctantly agrees, and his instincts prove correct when he learns that after he had left the house, the man – a prominent politician – was brutally murdered. Now, the Thief is forced to leave Tokyo, but the person behind the murder may not be shaken off that easily.

This was an enjoyable, fast-paced read, and the unnamed Thief was easy to root for, thanks to his self-imposed moral code and his attempt to keep a poor boy from the neighborhood from following in his footsteps. As an interesting aside, the author poses the question of fate, essentially: “is our fate controlled by something outside of us, or is it our fate to be thus controlled?” While the story itself is quite straightforward, these are the questions that will keep you thinking for a while.

Fuminori Nakamura (a pseudonym) was born in 1977 in Aichi Prefecture and graduated from Fukushima University (Applied Sociology) in 2000. In 2002, his first novel won the Noma Literary Newcomer Award. Since then, he has won numerous prestigious awards for his writing – The Thief earned him the Oe Prize for example – and a number of his books were translated into other languages. Nakamura now lives in Tokyo.

The Thief was his first novel to be translated into English. However, its fairly straightforward style makes the original popular among Japanese students. Whatever language you prefer, the book is available on amazon.

Keigo Higashino

PR genius Sakuma is miffed when his latest idea is rejected out of hand by Nissei Auto, a major car manufacturer. After a drinking spree, he goes to Nissei CEO Katsuragi’s home, where he watches a girl climbing down the wall outside. It is Juri Katsuragi, trying to escape her abusive family.

Sakuma, thirsting for revenge, and Juri, who needs money, team up and fake Juri’s kidnapping. But Katsuragi is no fool, and when the two believe to have reached their goals, Katsuragi proves to be a master of the end game after all.

This was a fun, fast-paced thriller, and other than Higashino’s usual books, there is no police involved. The plot revolves around the three characters, with Sakuma and Katsuragi playing a wonderful game of mental chess. Of course, it wouldn’t be a Higashino novel without a twist at the end, and once again, it was a total surprise to me. I did feel that there was something wrong about Juri’s story, but what had really happened before she escaped the family villa, I couldn’t guess.

Another excellent and twisty book by Higashino, and of course available on amazon.

Haruki Murakami

In the early morning of May 20, 1995, members of Aum Shinrikyo, a now-forbidden religious cult, released sarin gas on three Tokyo subway trains. However, the deadly nerve gas, conceived in Nazi laboratories in the 1930s, failed to cause the destruction the perpetrators had intended. Yet, the families of the 12 people who died and the thousands of injured – a good part of whom had to deal with varying long-term aftereffects – would disagree with this assessment.

In the course of 1996 when the worse shock over the attack had passed, but memories were still fairly fresh, Haruki Murakami interviewed 62 survivors. Of these testimonies, 34 are contained in “Underground”, a shocking account of how a normal Monday commute turned into a nightmare for many, touching on emotions that were still raw a year or more after the attack.

This edition of “Underground” also contains a part 2, titled “The Place that was Promised”, a collection of 8 interviews with (former) members of Aum Shinrikyo. While most of the victims expressed a hatred toward Aum, these interviewees were torn in their views. Most of them initially joined the group because they felt alienated by the world around them or tried to fill a (spiritual) void in their lives.

Even though they had a spiritual home in and were completely devoted to Aum, they declared that had they been asked to carry out the attack, they would have declined. Only one said that he would have gone through with it “if I had been asked by the right person.”

This raises the question – and Murakami addresses it in his own reflections on the topic – how far each of us would be willing to go for “the right person” or “the right cause”. On average, as history shows: all the way down to the inner circles of hell.

Haruki Murakami (born in Kyoto, 1949) is a Japanese author. He is most famous for his novels, which have been translated into dozens of languages and received numerous (international) prizes. He also writes essays and non fiction like this book.

For a first-hand account into one of Japan’s deadliest terrorist attacks in peace time. I recommend this particular edition for a view of both sides; they are equally chilling but for different reasons. It’s available on amazon.

Haruki Murakami

This book delivers exactly what its author says in the foreword: “This is a book in which I have gathered my thoughts about what running has meant to me as a person.”

It was written between summer 2005 and autumn 2006 and comprises nine essays, written in different places and about different races – marathons and triathlons – and the training that went into them. Yet, the essays are not just about running, but are also a memoir about writing and how Murakami became a writer in the first place. His early life as the owner of a music bar was especially interesting; his love for music is undiminished as can be seen in his novels that all seem to have at least one character obsessed with music.

Overall, I’m not sure what to think of this book. I am not a runner and not much of a writer myself, which probably explains a certain detached interest. Murakami is also not very good when writing about himself. He seems to be more at ease in the role of a (self-) chronicler, preferring to keep his deeper thoughts to himself.

Certainly, the subject matter of long-distance running doesn’t lend itself easily to deep philosophical insights, but I also think that the vertical pronoun throws Murakami’s prose off somehow. At least all the “in my opinion’s” that were so obnoxious in his book on writing are less numerous here, which makes him sound much less pompous and more human.

I don’t regret having read this book, but had I not done so, I wouldn’t have missed much either. Try it out for yourself on amazon.

Hideo Yokoyama

When in August 1985, Japan Airlines Flight 123 crashed into the mountains of Gunma Prefecture, local newspaper reporter Yuuki Kazumasa is thrust into a position of leadership he never wanted: He is now in charge of the entire coverage of the accident, from choosing people to visit the crash site to editing the final articles. But tensions soon arise and never-healed wounds open up again as different departments – editorial, advertising, distribution – vie for influence to promote their own factions. Yuuki soon finds himself crushed between the front lines, but will he be ready to sacrifice his own career for what he believes in?

Once again, Yokoyama sheds light on what happens behind the scenes, but even though Yokoyama worked at a local newspaper at the time of the crash, I found this book lacking compared to SIX FOUR. That’s because arguments in the newsroom turned into physical altercations several times which I thought wasn’t very believable – images of Japanese parliamentarians on each other’s throats notwithstanding.

Also, even though I can believe that processing such an event can take years (Yokoyama even visited the crash site himself), the switching between the 1985 events with Yuuki’s personal rock climbing adventure in 2003 fell short to excite me.

Hideo Yokoyama was born in 1957 in Tokyo. He worked for 12 years as investigative reporter for a regional newspaper in Gunma Prefecture, where he still lives with his wife. His experience with the crash of JAL 123 made him quit the news industry and turn to fiction. He is now a popular writer of crime fiction and his novels are meticulously researched. He has won the annual Prize for Best Japanese Crime Fiction twice.

If you’re in for a dive behind the scenes of a (Japanese) newspaper, you should definitely try this book from amazon.

Yasunari Kawabata and Yasushi Inoue

This is a collection of four short stories by the two authors above. The stories are literary fiction, in other words: Not much is happening, really, but they provide an interesting glimpse into the Japan of the 1950s.

The Izu Dancer was the first story by Kawabata to appear in English; the foundation stone of international fame that eventually led to the Nobel Prize in 1968. It’s about a troupe of dancers from the Izu Peninsula who travel through Japan in summer to make money. The youngest one catches the eye of an equally wandering student, but when he finds out that she’s only 13, he is content with sharing the road only.

The other stories are all by Yasushi Inoue.

The Counterfeiter describes the life of Hosen Hara, a childhood friend Keigaku Onuki. While both show artistic talent from a young age, it is the latter who becomes a famous painter. The former eventually produces forgeries of his friend’s artwork. Inoue asks the question whether this outcome was inevitable.

In Obasute, Inoue traes the legend of abandoning old people on a mountain and relates it to the inner dynamics of a family: Their matriarch has just turned 70 – the age for the legendary abandoning – but at the same time, his younger sister abandons husband and children to pursue her own life.

The Full Moon details the rise and eventual fall of Kagebayashi, who is made president of a company just before the annual moon viewing celebrations. We hear about leechers and hangers-on as well as of his enemies, all this with the backdrop of the harvest full moon. One of them will be Kagebayashi’s last…

While Kawabata has become famous as the first Japanese to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968, Yasushi Inoue is less known abroad. He is, nevertheless, considered one of Japan’s greatest modern novelists and his work has received numerous awards: The Akutagawa Prize (1950 for The Hunting Gun), the Mainichi Press Prize, the Kikuchi Kan Prize to name just a few. Born in 1907 in Hokkaido, he died in 1991.

Discover Inoue and get the four stories from amazon.

Yukio Mishima

Nine stories of various lengths are collected here, plus Dojoji, one of Mishima’s modern Noh plays. The stories that stood out to me are:

• The Priest of Shiga Temple and His Love
  Heian period. And old, saintly priest catches a glimpse of the Great Imperial Concubine of Kyogoku. He immediately becomes infatuated with her and experiences once again feelings he had long thought conquered. He believes that all he needs to cure himself is a single meeting with her…
• Onnagata
  We delve behind the kabuki stage and see the actor Mangiku through the eyes of his assistant Masuyama. Mangiku is an onnagata who specializes in female roles, and like many a drag queen, he is more attractive than a women. But what does Masuyama see in Mangiku?
• Patriotism
  Just after the February 26th Incident, a young lieutenant of the Imperial troops is shocked to find that his closes colleagues are implicated in the mutiny. Worried that they might meet on opposite sides on the battlefield, he prepares for his ritual suicide – and his wife of six months with him.

Yukio Mishima is a fantastic writer, and even in translation, he creates images in the reader’s mind that put him directly next to the protagonist of the story. “Next to” is important here, because I feel that Mishima stays on the outside of his characters, a mere observer who doesn’t get emotionally invested. Whether this is by conscious choice or due to his own character, I do not know, it’s definitely not because of a lack of talent.

While Mishima is unequivocally lauded as exceptional author, as a person, he is more controversial, at least in Japan. The story “Patriotism” can be seen as a foreshadowing of Mishima’s own death: The staunch nationalist committed ritual suicide in 1975 after a failed attempt at a coup d’etat.

Discover more Mishima with this book from amazon.

Kotaro Isaka

The Hayate Shinkasen leaves Tokyo for Morioka. A number of extraordinary people are on board, they are all dangerous – and on a mission:
Nanao must steal a suitcase and get off at the next station, but he isn’t the world’s unluckiest assassin for nothing…
Kimura is bent on revenge, but his target, known as The Prince, manages to turn the tables…
Lemon and Tangerine have rescued the son of a crime boss and are supposed to accompany him home, but when the boy winds up dead, they instead must find the killer before they arrive, if he’s still on board…

And while the train makes its way up north, these passengers’ goals become intertwined, and in the end, it’s all about who’s the last one standing.

Talk about a fast-paced thriller – no pun intended! I finished the book within a day. There is no ounce of fat in the narrative, every person, every thing that is introduced has its role to play at some later point. That means, you’ll need to pay attention throughout, but this never becomes tedious or annoying.

Interestingly, although all five main characters were decidedly bad people that I would go out of my way to avoid, I found myself rooting for one – and absolutely despising another.

If I had to quibble about something, it would be the introduction of two new characters close to the end, it felt too much of a “deus ex machina” to me. However, since they brought the story to a nice close and dealt beautifully with my least favourite bad boy, I will forgive the author for doing so.

Kotaro Isaka, born 1971, is a Japanese author of mystery fiction. He studied law at Tohoku University and after graduation worked as a systems engineer. His debut novel won the 2000 Shincho Mystery Club Prize and Isaka became a full time writer afterwards. He writes novels, short stories and manga, and 12 of his books have been adopted for film or TV so far. This particular thriller even made it to Hollywood and Brad Pitt.

It seems that the film has “adapted” the novel quite a bit – the train now goes into the opposite direction to Kyoto, for example – so if you’d like to read the original,you can get it from amazon.