Book Beginning: The Travelling Cat Chronicles by Hiro Arikawa

 I went to one of our newest libraries with the most viewing shelves, and borrowed enough books to last two or three months, if I decide to read them all. Here's the one I started:

The Travelling Cat Chronicles by Hiro Arikawa

Published October 2018, Berkley Books

Travels with a cat, through Japan, in changing seasons and with changing scenery. Nana the cat is found as a stray and taken in by Satoru. Both take a long trip together in a silver van, supposedly to visit Satoru's friends. 

The novel reminds me of other travels with animals books, Travels with a Donkey by Robert Louis Stevenson and Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck, both of which I loved and have reread at least once. They are, however, nonfiction.

Book beginning:

I am a cat. As yet, I have no name. There's a famous cat in our country who once made this very statement. 

I have no clue how great that cat was, but at least when it comes to having a name I got there first. Whether I like my name is another matter, since it glaringly doesn't fit my gender, me being male and all. I was given it about five years ago - around the time I came of age. 

Page 56:

"I'm so sorry," Kosuke said, still crying, his head on his chest. "My dad said I can't have him." 

 

Would you read on?

The Friday 56. Grab a book, turn to page 56 or 56% of your eReader. Find any sentence that grabs you. Post it, and add your URL post in Linky at Freda's Voice.
Also visit Book Beginning at Rose City Reader.

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.

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?

Review: The Old Capital by Yasunari Kawabata (Sunday Salon)

Welcome to the Sunday Salon! There are two very good books I read last week that I recommend.

 by Yasunari Kawabata made me think of spring and my trip to the city of Kyoto in March 2008, just before the cherry blossoms came out.  I spent two days walking through the old districts and visiting shrines, including the Heian-jingu shrine, described in the novel .

The Old Capital by Yasunari Kawabata, published 2006.

Comments: Kyoto in spring and during its many festivals throughout the year are the background for Kawabata's novel. It's an homage to the Old Capital of Japan, with its age-old temples, shrines, and gardens, and its history of artisans - silk weavers, pottery makers, designers of traditional silk kimono.

Here is a picture I took in Kyoto, the Old Capital.


This Torii, a Shinto gateway, is flanked by evergreen trees. It is one of the largest in Japan.

Plot: The main character in the book, a young woman named Chieko, finds out that she was a foundling,  adopted by her parents, a Kyoto kimono designer, Takichiro, and his wife Shige. Shige has always told Chieko she was found under the trees during cherry blossom time in the Gion district and kidnapped. The neighbors say she was found outside the lattice doors of her parents' warehouse, a foundling abandoned by her real parents. Chieko grew up privileged. Her discovery of who she might be leads to an interesting revelation in the novel.

I could picture some of the places described in Kyoto and I also liked the sense of beauty and love of the outdoors in The Old Capital. Chieko and her friends enjoy special trips to see the cedar trees, the mountains, the cherry blossoms in the spring that Japan is famous for. Inbetween festivals, Chieko also learns more about who she is and about her good fortune with Takichiro and Shige.

Yasunari Kawabata was born in 1899 in Osaka, Japan and became an orphan at age two. Also author of Snow Country, Beauty and Sadness, and Thousand Cranes, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968.

Last week I also finished a good Parisian mystery,  Murder in the Palais Royal (Aimee Leduc Investigations, No. 10). I've read all the books in the series and enjoyed every one!  A review later. Am now in the middle of a new library find,  A Dead Hand: A Crime in Calcutta by travel writer, Paul Theroux.

My review of At Home with Laurie Ann, an interior decorator's guide, was posted Tuesday. A very colorful book.

I looted the library of about six other books, most of them mysteries. The covers, the titles, or the authors or all three combined convinced me to borrow them, even though I am way behind in my schedule of "many things to do."

How was your week?

Japanese Women Don't Get Old or Fat by Naomi Moriyama

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme hosted by MizB at Should Be Reading. Choose two sentences from your current read, and add the author and title for readers. Anyone can join in.

Japanese Women Don't Get Old or Fat: Secrets of My Mother's Tokyo Kitchen
by Naomi Moriyama and William Doyle, 2006

"I think vegetables can be scandalously scrumptious....The creamy yellow flesh of eggplant becomes meltingly tender and almost sweet when it's grilled, broiled, or pan-fried and then garnished with a tiny bit of freshly grated gingerroot and soy sauce."  (ch. 5)

"Nori seaweed was something we ate in Japanese dishes, never in a sandwich.... I went home and said to my mother, "Nobody puts seaweed in a sandwich!"

She said, "Well, seaweed is good for you, but I will try not to do it again." (ch. 1)

Comment: Found this 2006 book in my library. A look at Japanese home cooking and recipes for keeping trim. I can certainly use more veggies and miso soup with bonito fish flakes, seaweed, edamame, soba noodles, and tofu. I'm considering this for my new year's resolution :)

About the authors: "Naomi Moriyama was born and raised in Tokyo and spent childhood summers on her grandparents' hillside farem in the Japanese countryside, eating tangerines from the trees and fresh vegetables from the family garden....Naomi lives in Manhattan with her husband and co-author William Doyle and travels to her mother's Tokyo kitchen several times a year."

From the Delta Trade Paperback Edition, published by Bantam Dell.     

Re-read Your Favorite Books: The Flashback Challenge

The Flashback Challenge to re-read three or more of your favorite books will run from January 1, 2010 - December 31, 2010. There are three levels of participation: Bookworm - Up to three books
Scholar - Four to six books  Literati - Over six books. Started by Aatri of Book Lust, sign up at Flashback Challenge.I found the challenge at mel u's blog, Rereading Lives.


This gives me an incentive to re-read a book I have wanted to look at again, When We Were Orphans: A Novel by Kazuo Ishiguro. Set in England and Shanghai during the 1930s, it's about a young English detective with a faulty memory who returns to wartime Shanghai in 1937 to find his parents who had disappeared there years ago when he was about nine years old. As he is an unreliable narrator, readers have to figure out the puzzle of his past and become detectives themselves to decide what is fact and what is fiction. Christopher meets a Japanese soldier in Shanghai who may or may not be his playmate from years ago. How Christopher reacts or doesn't react to him and to Shanghai during the Japanese occupation is part of his strange, delusional persona. This book intrigued me so much, I want to try again to get the hard facts about Christopher's past, which may not be possible, given his confused and inaccurate memory.

Ishiguro, born in Nagasaki, Japan and now living in London, is also author of The Remains of the Day, a Booker Prize-winning novel made into the award winning film with Anthony Hopkins.

Update: My number two book for this challenge will be Out by Natsuo Kirino, 2003. My memory of the book was jogged by the excellent review posted by mel u on his blog.
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Review: After Dark, a novel by Haruki Murakami

I decided to reprint this review I did in 2007 of Haruki Murakami's 12th novel, After Dark  for the Japanese Literature Challenge 3 hosted by Dolce Bellezza, which ends the end of January 2010.


Synopsis: The novel begins just before midnight in Tokyo and ends just before 7 a.m. The focus is Tokyo in the dead of night, after the trains have stopped running and the only public transportation out of the city is by cab.

Some of the people left in the city are college students and office workers. They are in the bars, hanging out in all night restaurants, in game parlors, or working late in the office.

The book follows a young college student, Mari, who decides to stay reading in a Denny's restaurant rather than go home. She meets another college student there, a musician who is in the city to practice with his band. At his suggestion, Mari leaves the restaurant to help a foreign woman who has been injured, and in the course of events, comes across unusual situations and makes some unlikely friends, including the manager and maid of an all night hotel. Long conversations during the night with the musician, who has met her older sister, help her come to terms with the reason she has avoided going home.

When morning arrives and the trains are running, Mari goes home to the suburbs, where she knows she will find her older sister, Eri Asai, still in a deep sleep. A beautiful and well-known model, Eri Asai has been sleeping steadily the past three weeks, getting up occasionally to eat, though no one has seen her when she is up.

Remembering how protective Eri Asai had been of her when they had been trapped in an elevator as children, Mari tries to empathize with her sister, in tears hugging her as if willing her to wake up out of her long dream. There is a glimmer of a response. Mari finally goes to sleep.

Comments: The novel only hints at the reason for Eri Asi's withdrawal. There is a suggestion that it involves the sinister office worker Shirakawa, whom Mari is unaware of though their paths overlap during the night in the city.

The novel has many levels of meaning. Murakami reveals the flip side of the city, after dark, at times with humor. The city at night also reveals the dark aspect of some of the characters he explores. However, Mari and the musician walk about the city and among these people, but remain unscathed.

Submitted also for the Lost in Translation Reading Challenge.

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Japanese Literature Challenge 3

Wish I had more time to read contemporary Japanese writers. Now is my chance. Join me in the third challenge to read books of Japanese origin. You will have from July 30, 2009 to Jan. 30, 2010. The rules are from Dolce Bellezza, who sponsors the challenge.

"All you have to do is read one work of Japanese origin. It can be literature of course, but don’t feel confined to that. You may choose to read poetry, biographies, short stories or even manga. If you are willing to read one such piece, you’ve met the challenge. If you read more, all the better."

Please check her website, Japanese Literature Challenge 3 for the details, and the list of very nice prizes!

Here is a review of The Housekeeper and the Professor by Ogawa and a review of After Dark, a favorite of mine by Haruki Murakami.

I plan to read:
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: A Novel by Haruki Murakami, literary fiction
Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami, literary fiction
The Devil's Whisper by Miyuki Miyabe, a mystery
Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto, literary fiction

(Challenge photo is by Tanabata from In Spring It is the Dawn)

Book Review: The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa

 Memorable characters and story are a prerequisite for literary fiction, according to Literary fiction vs genre fiction.

The Housekeeper and the Professor  is definitely literary fiction based on those criteria. The housekeeper and the professor aren't named, as names aren't important in the book. Nor is time. What matters are the personalities, their interactions, and the relationship they develop.

The professor is a math genius who remembers nothing that happened after 1975 because of head injuries in a car accident. His short term memory lasts only eighty minutes. His new housekeeper has to remind him who she is every day when she comes in to clean and cook. The professor keeps track of his chores or work schedule by pinning reminder notes to his suit.

In spite of the strange situation, the Professor and the Housekeeper and her young son develop a caring friendship. He teaches them math concepts and math formulas, and becomes concerned about the son's welfare. How this is possible given his short term memory is the basis of the novel.

A five star book, definitely. Also short and easy to read, so long as you don't stop to solve the math problems!

"The thing the Professor hated most in the whole world was a crowd, which is why he was to reluctant to leave the house. Stations, trains, department stores, movie theaters, shopping malls - any place people gathered in large numbers was unbearable for him. there was something fundamentally incompatible between crushing, random crowds and pure mathematical beauty." p. 64

(Japanese Literature Challenge 3, Lost in Translation Challenge. and Support your Local Library Reading Challenge)

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Book Review: Salmonella Men on Planet Porno by Yasutaka Tsutsui

Salmonella Men on Planet Porno the first book by prize-winning author Yasutaka Tsutsui that has been translated into English for an American audience. Published November 4, 2008 by Pantheon.

This is a collection of short stories that delve into conformity, individual craziness, and the fluidity between reality and the world of dreams. Two stories deal with men rejecting family intimacy and another examines people following their society's norms like unthinking automatons.

There are 13 stories in this 2008 book. Yatsutaka Tsutsui has won prizes in his native Japan and named a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French government.

Book Review: Real World by Natsuo Kirino

Title: Real World by Natsuo Kirino

Hardcover: 224 pages

Publisher: Knopf (July 15, 2008)

How would you react to a writer who names her books Grotesque and Out? I read the latter some time ago and found it so fascinating, I readily picked up Real World, (by Natsuo Kirino of Tokyo) when I found it on the New Releases shelf at the library.

Out portrayed the lives of a group of women harassed at work and/or at home in a male dominated society. They support each other through thick and thin in an "unholy" alliance of women. They get even, as I remember it, and cover for one another.

This new book, Real World, is about four teenage girls who suspect a local boy of committing a murder and are curious enough about him that they go out of their way to befriend him. Two are bored with their humdrum lives and want to be part of a new "adventure," so they befriend the boy, helping him in his escape. This in spite of the fact that the murder is of his own mother.

One of the girls gives him her bike and a new cell phone. Another takes the train to join him for a time while he runs from the authorities, paying for a cheap hotel where he can take a bath and get some sleep. A third is coerced into writing a "story or poem" of confession for him, which he wants to carry around in case he is ever caught by the police and has to answer to them. They all carry on conversations with the boy by cell phone.

The boy fantasizes that he is the Japanese soldier he saw in a film in grade school, a soldier being beaten and stabbed by an old Filipino woman and a man, evidently as a revenge for the Japanese occupation during WWII. This image seems to haunt him, and he sees his own demanding and nagging mother as the Filipino woman.

The four teenage girls who are curious about the boy and the 17 year old boy himself try to escape the reality of their lives, humdrum or horrific. They feel that what people see on the outside is different from what they are.

Real World is another noir novel by Kirino, this time about teens facing the consequences of the decisions they make.
***** Five stars for this novel!

Asian books

I hope to get through all or part of It Happened In Peking by Louise Miln, published in 1926. Setting is during the Boxer Revolution in 1900, when foreigners were not welcome in China. One hundred and eight years later, 2008 in Beijing, foreigners are much sought after and being made more than welcome at the 2008 Olympics. Ah, history!

Also hope to try to read Kinshu, Autumn Brocade by Teru Miyamoto, in translation, and Shame in the Blood by Tetsuo Miura, a literary prizewinner in Japan. Then there is The Strangeness of Beauty by Lydia Minatoya, about an American born woman who returns to the strict samurai family of her mother in Japan. All fascinating novels that may reveal more about Japanese traditional and modern culture.

These books are all at home, borrowed from a library, waiting to be read. I've just started Sujata Massey's novel about the Shimura family's cousins in Hawaii. Found out that some Japanese Hawaiians speak an old fashioned version of Japanese and use words differently, dropping parts of words that made them more formal or polite.

Book Review: Street of a Thousand Blossoms by Gail Tsukiyama

The Street of a Thousand Blossoms, a novel by Gail Tsukiyama, follows the lives of two ordinary boys growing up in Tokyo, their hopes and dreams and their experiences from 1939 through war in the 1940s and new lives in the modern Japan of the 1960s.

Tsukiyama tries to portray the lives of the ordinary Japanese and how they might have been affected by the war. The two brothers have different goals - Hiroshi dreams of becoming a famous sumo wrestler and Kenji learns to hand craft masks used in Noh theater. Their lives are changed and affected by the war thought they are not an integral part of it.

A novel from a Japanese-American author who has written five other novels including Women of the Silk and The Samurai's Garden.

Review: After Dark by Haruki Murakami

Title: After Dark by Haruki Murakami
Paperback: 256 pages; Kindle; Audiobook
Publisher: Vintage (April 29, 2008)


Haruki Murakami's latest novel, After Dark, begins just before midnight in Tokyo and ends just before 7 a.m. The focus is Tokyo in the dead of night, after the trains have stopped running and the only public transportation out of the city is by cab.

Some of the people left in the city are college students and office workers. They are in the bars, hanging out in all night restaurants, in game parlors, or working late in the office.

The book follows a young college student, Mari, who decides to stay reading in a Denny's restaurant rather than go home. She meets another college student there, a musician who is in the city to practice with his band. At his suggestion, Mari leaves the restaurant to help a foreign woman who has been injured, and in the course of events, comes across unusual situations and makes some unlikely friends, including the manager and maid of an all night hotel. Long conversations during the night with the musician, who has met her older sister, help her come to terms with the reason she has avoided going home.

When morning arrives and the trains are running, Mari goes home to the suburbs, where she knows she will find her older sister, Eri Asai, still in a deep sleep. A beautiful and well-known model, Eri Asai has been sleeping steadily the past three weeks, getting up occasionally to eat, though no one has seen her when she is up.

Remembering how protective Eri Asai had been of her when they had been trapped in an elevator as children, Mari tries to empathize with her sister, in tears hugging her as if willing her to wake up out of her long dream. There is a glimmer of a response. Mari finally goes to sleep.

The novel only hints at the reason for Eri Asi's withdrawal. There is a suggestion that it involves the sinister office worker Shirakawa, whom Mari is unaware of though their paths overlap during the night in the city.

The novel has many levels of meaning. Murakami reveals the flip side of the city, after dark, at times with humor. The city at night also reveals the dark aspect of some of the characters he explores. Mari and the musician walk about the city and among these people but remain unscathed.

Submitted for the Lost in Translation Reading Challenge. and resubmitted for the 2012 Haruki Murakami Reading Challenge.

© Harvee Lau of Book Dilettante. Please do not reprint without permission.