Book Review: Evil and the Mask by Fuminori Nakamura

Title: Evil and the Mask by Fuminori Nakamura
Published June 11, 2013; Soho Crime
Genre: literary thriller

My comments: I gave this 4.5/5. This is on the surface a story of a wealthy business family who has raised certain sons over generations to become "cancers,"  training them to become destructive to society.

The book uses this narrative to ponder what the action of killing does to individual people, whether they are soldiers, terrorists, or civilians.

Well worth reading for the topics it brings up that make us consider. Excellent book for discussion.

Publisher description:A follow-up to 2012's critically acclaimed The Thief ─another creepy, electric literary thriller that explores the limits of human depravity─and the powerful human instinct to resist evil.

When Fumihiro Kuki is eleven years old, his elderly father calls him into his study for a meeting. "I created you to be a cancer on the world," his father tells him. It is a tradition in their wealthy family: a patriarch, when reaching the end of his life, will beget one last child to dedicate to causing misery in a world that cannot be controlled or saved. Fumihiro is to be specially educated to create destruction and unhappiness in the world around him. Every door is open to him, for he need obey no laws and may live out any fantasy he might have, no matter how many people are hurt in the process.

But as his education progresses, Fumihiro begins to question his father's mandate, and starts to resist.

Thanks to Soho Press for an ARC copy for review.

Submitted to the Japanese Literature Challenge 7 hosted by Dolce Bellezza.

Book Review: A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki

Title: A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki
Published March 12, 2013; Viking Adult
Genre: fiction
Source: library book

My comments: Nao, the young Japanese writer of a diary found by Ruth will break your heart several times over during the course of the novel. A victim of extreme bullying in school, she contemplates suicide, then meets her great-grandmother, a 104-year-old Buddhist nun who will have a great effect on her life. Nao's grand-uncle Haruki #1 will also grab your sympathies through his diaries, the writings of a conscripted kamikazi pilot on the hardship and brutalities of his military life. If I could give this novel a higher rating than 5, I would.

The characters are so real that you easily become involved in their lives and care deeply about what happens to them. The book also combines in its mixture, religion, quantum physics, history, biology, dreams and paranormal events, and philosophy.  Kudos to an outstanding author.

Goodreads book description:

“A time being is someone who lives in time, and that means you, and me, and every one of us who is, or was, or ever will be.” 

 "In Tokyo, sixteen-year-old Nao has decided there’s only one escape from her aching loneliness and her classmates’ bullying. But before she ends it all, Nao first plans to document the life of her great grandmother, a Buddhist nun who’s lived more than a century. A diary is Nao’s only solace—and will touch lives in ways she can scarcely imagine.

 Across the Pacific, we meet Ruth, a novelist living on a remote island who discovers a collection of artifacts washed ashore in a Hello Kitty lunchbox—possibly debris from the devastating 2011 tsunami. As the mystery of its contents unfolds, Ruth is pulled into the past, into Nao’s drama and her unknown fate, and forward into her own future.

 Full of Ozeki’s signature humor and deeply engaged with the relationship between writer and reader, past and present, fact and fiction, quantum physics, history, and myth, A Tale for the Time Being is a brilliantly inventive, beguiling story of our shared humanity and the search for home."

Submitted for the Japanese Literature Challenge 7 hosted by dolcebellezza.
Submitted to Cym Lowell's Book Review Link-Up Party

The Japanese Literature Challenge 7

I am joining the Japanese Literature Challenge 7 hosted by Dolce Bellezza.
It runs from June 1 through January 30, 2014;  the challenges have been very popular. The link above will take you to a sign up post and suggested books for reading. This year, children's books and manga, short stories, and poetry will be included.

My first book for the challenge? To finish reading The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which I started some time ago. I hope to include some children's books and poetry this year.

My planned readings so far:

1. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami, literary fiction
2. Evil and the Mask by Fuminori Nakamura, thriller
3. Paprika by Yasutaka Tsutsui, sci-fi


What I have actually read for the challenge so far: 

1. A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki, fiction
2. Evil and the Mask by Fuminori Nakamura, thriller


What Japanese novels or books have you read or hope to read?