“Sandwich generation” refers to adults responsible for both aging parents and growing children. Lauded Japanese poet and writer Hiromi Ito’s fictionalized alter-ego is stuck in a triple-decker. Above are her partially paralyzed mother in a geriatric clinic, her father struggling alone, and her third, 28-years-older...
*STARRED REVIEW In 1983, two years before Hayao Miyazaki cofounded the acclaimed Studio Ghibli, he published Shuna's Journey, a spectacularly illustrated graphic novel in watercolors about a young prince who undertakes an epic quest to save his citizens from looming starvation. Nearly 40 years after its...
Beyond the countless corpses, Japanese manga auteur Junji Ito’s latest import deftly – and, of course, ever so gruesomely – highlights the liminal spaces between life and death, good and evil, waking and sleep. An engaged couple’s innocent decision to “stop somewhere on a whim” during...
Oto Toda’s first manga collection translated into English presents four short stories and seven “two-page manga” that range from poignant to gruesome, whimsical to surreal. The titular “To Strip the Flesh” is the most developed, about a YouTube star who butchers freshly-shot game on camera....
Four strangers – Taburo, Pii-tan, Baracchi, Maruso – gather for the first time and embark on their “journey to paradise”: “We met on the suicide site Black Paradox, and now we’re each other’s final companions.” The quartet’s reasons for seeking death suggest strange parallels: “So the...
Reminiscent of Groundhog Day-like repetition, each chapter duplicates the same opening paragraphs, ending with the same “gross love language” (but watch for that perspective shift). The intriguing premise is that an unnamed university junior in Kyoto reveals how he “accomplished absolutely nothing” in his first two years....
In the third installment of the internationally best-selling Before the Coffee Gets Cold series, some of the familiar crew from Tokyo’s Café Funiculi Funicula move to Hakodate’s Café Donna Donna on Hokkaido after its proprietor, Yukari Tokita, leaves indefinitely for the U.S. to help a young...
Multiple shes and cats populate this gratifying, slim novel-in-stories, which arrives with a decades-long history that undoubtedly underscores its timeless appeal. Makoto Shinkai launched his career as one of Japan’s most lauded animation and manga artists with the five-minute film, She and Her Cat (1999), later expanded...
Kotaro Isaka has written dozens of award-winning, internationally bestselling novels and story collections. This, his third Anglophoned title, is notably narrated by versatile actor Adam Sims, who earnestly embodies former math teacher Suzuki, transformed by the senseless murder of his beloved wife. Her killer remains...
Emi Yagi’s first novel, which won Japan’s Dazai Osamu Prize for the best debut fiction, is a brilliant exposé of discontented contemporary womanhood. Shibata’s professional life has been plagued by men – from sexual harassment at her last job to sexist roles at her current....
"Prodigy" comes to mind when examining Rin Usami's brief (thus far) but astounding literary trajectory. Her 2019 debut novel, Kaka, made her the youngest recipient of the prestigious Yukio Mishima Prize. Her intriguing follow-up, Idol, Burning, published in 2020 when Usami was just 21, garnered the...
*STARRED REVIEW Winter in Sokcho, the extraordinary first novel, gorgeously translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins, by French Korean author Elisa Shua Dusapin, won the 2021 National Book Award for Translated Literature. The two reunite for The Pachinko Parlor, in which Dusapin's remarkably intricate and lean prose reveals...
*STARRED REVIEW Initially serialized in Japan between 1981 and 1984, this is considered the late Yamada Murasaki’s most famous work; it’s also her first to arrive in the U.S., translated by notable manga historian Ryan Holmberg. Decades since its introduction, the slice-of-home-life bildungsroman remains hauntingly relevant...
Tokyo-based author/artist Erika Kobayashi makes an intriguing, albeit uneven, translated-into-English debut, enabled by Canadian Brian Bergstrom. The consequences of Japan’s 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster are manifest in three generations of an all-female Tokyo family. Kobayashi’s novel takes place on a single day, following the schedule...
*STARRED REVIEW Once upon a time, Banana Yoshimoto (born 1964) debuted as one of Japan’s youngest literary phenoms. In the decades since, she continues to produce brilliantly relevant fiction, notable for an open, accessible simplicity that belies revelatory observations about life, love, happiness, and more. Her latest...
Following the notable success of The Aosawa Murders, prolific, award-winning Japanese author Riku Onda reunites with translator Alison Watts for Fish Swimming in Dappled Sunlight, another riveting, tightly plotted psychological thriller. "This, I guess you could say," the novel opens, "is the story of a photo." That...
*STARRED REVIEW Once more, internationally bestselling Sayaka Murata confronts unspeakable topics with quotidian calm, shockingly convincing logic, and creepy humor in a dozen genre-defying stories, translated again by her chosen, Japanese-to-English enabler, Ginny Tapley Takemori. Death is no longer an ending, full stop, in “A First-Rate Material,”...
Brian Nishii’s fluency is evident within minutes, and continues throughout, as he reads Japanese names, places, and words as smoothly and accurately as English text. What’s not as initially clear is that the narrative is a multilayered reveal – something easily distinguishable in the print...
Welcome to one of the more hope-filled, albeit cautious, Asian Pacific American (APA) Heritage Months in recent history. Plenty remains unsettled, challenging, and tragic, but a glass-half-full outlook extols the news that the world is finally, excitedly opening up from the last two-plus years of...
Japanese manga powerhouse Gengoroh Tagame follows the phenomenal success of My Brother’s Husband with another poignant, empowering, gay-centered narrative, again translated by queer manga expert Anne Ishii. Sora and Nao have been neighbors and close friends since early childhood. Now that they’re older, their interactions are...
