Reader of books and player of games. College professor and pokémon trainer. Writes about Japanese fiction, media, gender, and society. In love with monsters and magic.
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Maru Ayase’s short magical realist novel The Forest Brims Over is about a young woman named Rui whose husband is a famous writer. Fed up with the words her husband puts in her mouth in his fiction, Rui swallows a handful of seeds that sprout from her body, gradually turning her into a forest.
Despite its fantastic premise, the story is firmly grounded in the psychological realism of the authors and editors who treat women as nothing more than literary symbols to be exploited for sales and awards. In the first four chapters, Rui’s transformation inspires significant shifts in the lives of the people in her husband’s literary circle. In the fifth and final chapter, we finally get to see Rui’s own perspective, and it’s brilliant.
I sympathize with Rui, whose every word is stolen from her by the literary professionals who conspire to confine her existence to a page of pulped paper. If Rui can’t speak in the language of the cultural elite, she’ll find another way of expressing herself, and the vast and mysterious array of life she produces is infinitely more vibrant than her husband’s formulaic literary fiction.
Rui’s husband may have the privilege of publishing award-winning books made of dead wood, but she is the roots and the leaves and the flowers and the wind. The Forest Brims Over is much more subtle and nuanced than perhaps I’m making it seem, but I personally found it joyful and liberating to be reminded that there’s much more room to grow outside the walls built by literary gatekeepers.
Shima Shinya’s four-volume sci-fi manga Glitch opens in a mundane setting in contemporary Japan: a high school student named Minato Lee (who uses they/them pronouns) has moved to a small rural town with their mother and younger sister Akira.
Minato notices that there’s something strange about their new home after a fragmented hole in reality emerges from the ceiling of her classroom. Two of Akira’s friends confirm Minato’s experience, telling them that only some people can see the distortions.
The group consults with the clerk of a neighborhood corner store, a mild-mannered man in flip-flops with a Biblically accurate angel for a face. He tells them that, since the town was constructed on top of open fields thirty years ago, various visitors have been emerging from a mysterious forest. He should know, given that he’s one of them, but the town’s glitches are a mystery to him as well.
Shima is a big fan of Star Wars and a co-author of The High Republic: The Edge of Balance manga series. Glitch captures the fun “weird little creatures in rundown environments” spirit of Star Wars, but the manga also engages with the deeper themes expressed in the movies, especially regarding how the small-scale actions of a diverse coalition are necessary to undermine the mundanity of evil.
Glitch handles its portrayal of diversity in a light-handed and clever way, and the “evil” confronted by the characters isn’t what readers might expect. While its story takes time to develop, the strength of Glitch’s art is immediately apparent, as Shima mixes the dynamic poses and expressions of Disney-style animation with the detailed backgrounds and dramatic panel compositions of indie manga.
Tomoko is only twelve years old when she loses her father to cancer. To learn to support herself, Tomoko’s mother attends a dressmaking school in Tokyo, where she lives in a student dorm. From 1972 to 1973, Tomoko is sent to live with her aunt in Ashiya, an upscale suburb between Osaka and Kobe. Her uncle is the president of an international soft drink company, and his house is extravagantly large and quite grand. Tomoko’s cousin Mina lives a charmed life marred only by her asthma, which is serious enough to necessitate frequent hospital visits.
Mina’s grandmother Rosa emigrated from Germany in 1916, and the family’s house is filled with beautiful things, from foreign furniture and luxurious cosmetics to exotic Christmas paraphernalia to a room covered in Islamic tiles and used for a holistic health treatment called “light bathing.” Perhaps the most intriguing thing about the house is Mina’s pet, an aging Liberian pygmy hippopotamus named Pochiko who carries Mina to school every morning. The household is managed by Yone-san, an elderly woman who is ostensibly Rosa’s maid but can more properly be called her companion and life partner.
Tomoko’s aunt is attractive, elegant, and kind. Her uncle is handsome, friendly, and good-natured. The family’s groundskeeper and driver, Kobayashi, is a sweet and patient man whom everyone loves. The entire family welcomes Tomoko with style and grace, and she quickly becomes fast friends with Mina. The opening chapters of Mina’s Matchbox unfold almost like a Studio Ghibli movie, and I couldn’t help envisioning the characters in the style of When Marnie Was There.
To add to the magical atmosphere, Mina is thoroughly charming. She reads well above the level of a sixth grader and asks Tomoko to check out books from the local library like Yasunari Kawabata’s House of the Sleeping Beauties and Katherine Mansfield’s The Garden Party. Mina conveys her comments on these books to Tomoko, who shares them with the gentle young librarian she fancies.
Meanwhile, Mina has a crush on a deliveryman for her father’s company who drops by the house every week. During each visit, he gives Mina interesting matchboxes that he picks up on his rounds. Inspired by the graphics printed on the boxes, she writes short stories on paper that she uses to adorn the inside of the small containers she uses to store her collection. These stories are often fables about animals or other small creatures, and Tomoko loves them.
Mina’s Matchbox is a Yoko Ogawa novel, so it goes without saying that all is not well. Quiet tensions flow underneath the family’s beautiful surface, which is marred by the infidelity of Tomoko’s handsome uncle. To give herself a sense of purpose, Tomoko’s aunt combs through magazines searching for typos so that she’ll have an excuse to send letters of complaint. Mina’s older brother writes to the family from Switzerland but never mentions his father. In her devotion to Rosa, Yoneda-san almost never leaves the house and is frightened by everything outside of her immediate sphere of influence.
Nothing bad happens, and this definitely isn’t the sort of novel where the sick child dies. I hope it’s not a spoiler to say that both Mina and Tomoko go on to live happy lives. Aside from subtle but meaningful character development, Mina’s Matchbox doesn’t have much in the way of plot.
Regardless, this isn’t a slow novel. The pacing is excellent, and I finished the book quickly. In fact, I would have liked to spend more time with it. Every sentence is perfect, and each paragraph is a joy. Despite the child protagonists, Mina’s Matchbox has all the nuance of an adult perspective and steadfastly refuses to engage in melodrama. Reading this novel is like sitting outside and enjoying the sunshine on a warm spring day, and it’s a pleasure to follow the gradual progression of the small stories surrounding Mina and Tomoko as recounted in Ogawa’s impeccable prose.
Emergent Tokyo: Designing the Spontaneous City is a fascinating study of urban space augmented by a wealth of photographs and illustrations. Jorge Almazán convincingly argues that, instead of being designed from the top down, Tokyo’s distinctive cityscape emerged from history and opportunity.
Almazán focuses on five distinguishing characteristics of Tokyo, from the famous zakkyo “mixed-use” highrise buildings that line the main boulevards to the dense shopping areas that crowd the bays between support columns under elevated train tracks. Each feature of Tokyo’s cityscape is illuminated by three case studies that are meticulously documented and analyzed.
My favorite chapter is about the narrow and winding ankyo streets of West Tokyo, which were built on top of old canals and have gradually become pedestrian oases. The most famous is Harajuku’s Mozart-Brahms Lane, the chill and ambient twin to Takeshita Street. As in the case of Mozart-Brahms Lane, ankyo streets have often become communal backyards for neighborhoods with flashier public faces.
I especially appreciate the Conclusion section, in which Almazán demonstrates that corporate-led urbanism has created unwelcoming and visually unappealing spaces that have none of the vibrancy of the more organic spaces fostered by collectives formed by homeowners and small business managers. While urban planning is still necessary, Almazán argues, emergent communities should not be stifled.
Emergent Tokyo isn’t a book for tourists, but I imagine it will be of interest to anyone who’s curious about urban design. Also, although some of the more academic text might fly above the heads of small children, I think Emergent Tokyo would be a wonderful book to give a kid. The illustrations and diagrams are truly fantastic, and they’re so immersive that I found myself disappearing into the details as I imagined walking through the Tokyo gorgeously laid out across the pages.
Being Dead Otherwise is an anthropological account of the shifting cultures of death and dying in contemporary Japan. Despite its seemingly grim topic, this is one of the most hopeful academic books I’ve read in recent years.
Anne Allison is primarily concerned with Japan’s aging population, who have begun to form communities surrounding their preparations for burial. Due to urbanization and an increase in nuclear family households, it’s no longer feasible to rely on one’s children or relatives for end-of-life arrangements. Still, older generations have been finding practical solutions.
I especially enjoyed the chapter about the social meetings of the future occupants of urban columbaria (repositories for burial urns), who call themselves “grave friends” and get together to make scrapbooks and other creative projects that will commemorate their lives for their children and grandchildren.
Allison argues that this type of self-care is often necessary to work around Japan’s outdated burial laws, in which only the formally registered Head of Household (who is almost always male) is allowed to make arrangements with a Buddhist temple. Thankfully, many temples are starting to ignore this law in order to serve the needs of older women who survive their husbands.
Without a doubt, many problems still exist in an increasingly fragmented society, but Allison is optimistic and respectful as she interviews death workers ranging from priests to city officials to entrepreneurs. Being Dead Otherwise is an academic book that achieves the highest standards of scholarship, but it’s also a fascinating read that’s easily accessible to a wide audience.
A word of warning, however: Being Dead Otherwise contains photos of human remains that may be disturbing to those who aren’t used to such things. Sensitive readers may want to skip Chapter 6 entirely.
Takehiro Fukunaga’s 1954 novel Flowers of Grass is considered to be a classic of postwar Japanese fiction, and it’s the sort of book that I imagine many people envision when they think of “literature.” The main narrator is Shiomi, an intelligent but sad young man who’s deeply concerned with spiritual and philosophical matters. As the novel opens, Shiomi has opted to undergo a risky operation at a tuberculosis care facility. Knowing that he won’t survive, he leaves a handwritten account of his life before the war, when he loved and lost both a male classmate and that classmate’s sister.
If one reads Flowers of Grass “straight,” Shiomi is a passionate but pure-hearted young man who has a tendency to fall in love with the idealistic versions of people he creates in his head instead of the actual people themselves. If you’re me, however, it feels much more natural to read Shiomi as a closeted gay man who has an intense sexual crush on a fellow member of his high school archery club but feels obligated to transfer his affection to the boy’s sister once he enters college. Despite being a devout Christian, the sister loves the apostatic Shiomi and twice attempts to initiate a sexual relationship, but Shiomi finds himself unable to reciprocate her physical attraction.
Perhaps this is just my own personal bias, but I also picked up an element of homosexual attraction between Shiomi and the narrator of the novel’s frame story, a fellow patient at the tuberculosis sanitarium. In my reading of Flowers of Grass, the burgeoning romantic relationship between Shiomi and the frame narrator goes a long way toward answering the novel’s opening question: Why does Shiomi decide to undergo a dangerous operation that’s almost certain to be fatal? Essentially, Shiomi has decided to commit suicide, and the point of the testament he leaves behind is to explain why. The answer is complicated, but I get the feeling that Shiomi’s inability to come to terms with his queer sexuality is not inconsequential.
Putting the matter of sexuality aside, the bulk of Flowers of Grass is set during the late 1930s and early 1940s, and the story is of historical interest for its clear and unapologetic stance against the aggression of the Japanese imperial state. Shiomi is eventually drafted, and I think the author intends him to serve as a representative symbol of a typical Japanese soldier in that he really, really wasn’t cut out for the army. No sane military organization would want someone like Shiomi to be a soldier, but the Japanese Imperial Army was not sane.
The two love stories at the core of Flowers of Grass are intriguing, as is the mystery posed in its opening section. Unfortunately, the beginning of the novel is somewhat dull and meandering, and it takes an inordinately long time for the story to find its feet. In particular, your mileage may vary regarding how many dozens of pages of teenagers discussing philosophy you’re willing to wade through. Flowers of Grass requires patience, but it rewards thought and reflection.
As an aside, this novel was translated by Royall Tyler, who is famous for his translation of The Tale of Genji. I was curious about what Royall Tyler is up to these days, and I was amazed and delighted to find that he’s retired from academia to manage a llama farm. I highly recommend checking out his website (here), which is the most charming and wholesome thing I’ve encountered on the internet in a long time.
Shinya Tanaka’s prizewinning novella Cannibals is a harrowing story of how poverty enables a cycle of abuse and assault. The writing and translation are beautiful, but the book is often difficult to read.
In the brutally hot summer of 1988, a 17-year-old boy named Toma is forced to confront the blood he’s inherited from his father, who beats his stepmother and sleeps with various women in their working-class neighborhood along the banks of a polluted river.
To his disgust, Toma realizes that he, too, receives gratification from physical violence, and he struggles to process what this means. Meanwhile, tensions at home threaten to reach a breaking point when Toma’s stepmother confides that she intends to leave his father.
The neighborhood river is never far from the story, and Tanaka’s virtuoso description of its eventual flood is incredible; the violence of the rushing waters is a necessary cleansing and catharsis.
The damage caused by the flood also serves to deny any complacency with violence that the reader may have developed through identification with the narrator. Still, I can’t help but feel that perhaps the author may have taken this violence too far for my own taste, especially as a reader who tends to be critical of how visceral depictions of assault often obfuscate thematic resonance through shock.
Cannibals is a prime example of what feminist scholar Chizuko Ueno has termed “men’s literature” (as opposed to the more commonly used expression “women’s literature”), which delves into specifically gendered issues that may not by sympathetic to a wider audience. The problem I once had with books like Cannibals is that there were so many of them in translation, especially in relation to the exclusion of similarly disturbing stories written by women. Now that there’s a greater diversity of Japanese fiction in English translation, it’s easier to read something like Cannibals on its own terms instead of seeing the explicit misogyny of the characters as a reflection of the implicit sexism of the publishing industry.
In the end, I think Cannibals might be better suited to a college-level literature class than pleasure reading, at least for most people. Without the context of the masculinity narrative of the 1980s that Tanaka is pushing back against in a frankly heroic style, there’s a danger of Cannibals coming off as almost voyeuristic of working-class poverty and sexual violence. Regardless, I appreciate this novella, and I’m grateful it’s been skillfully translated and lovingly published in a beautiful paperback edition with a striking cover design.
Seichō Matsumoto’s Tokyo Express is a slim mystery novel from 1958 whose crime is largely dependent on train schedules. Although two apparent victims of suicide appear to have traveled together to a lonely seaside town, were they in fact being pursued…?
The officer assigned to the case, a young detective named Mihara, suspects the involvement of the president of an industrial manufacturer with close ties to the government. Mihara assumes that his prime suspect, an affable middle-aged gentleman named Yasuda, was attempting to cover up an illegal collusion.
As Mihara pursues various train schedules across the Japanese archipelago, he learns that Yasuda’s elaborate system of alibis checks out. But, if Yasuda didn’t murder the two victims, who could have been helping him?
For me, there were far too many timetables in Tokyo Express, and I found myself skimming to avoid getting bogged down in the numbers. No one in the story has much of a personality, and Mihara is mostly a cipher for the reader. Despite the plot’s emphasis on travel, the locations that Mihara visits don’t really have a sense of place or setting.
I’m given to understand that there are many mystery fans who appreciate this style of writing, namely, just the facts with little by way of atmospheric description. If you’re looking for a puzzle box in book form, Tokyo Express has a lot of fun moving parts to play with. If you read mysteries more for the story, however, it might be better to take a pass on this particular ride.
Takeshi Murase’s linked short story collection The God of Nishi-YuigahamaStation is about four people who lost members of their family in a tragic train derailment. For a year after the accident, the ghost train still makes its fatal run at midnight, giving those who grieve its passengers an opportunity to speak to the loved ones they lost.
The God of Nishi-YuigahamaStation is meant to make the reader cry, and it does so primarily through its improbably melodramatic situations. This short book is relatively light reading, and the level of catharsis it allows you to experience will depend on your tolerance for sentimentality.
Still, as far as this type of fiction goes, I enjoyed The God of Nishi-YuigahamaStation much more than similar titles (such as Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s Before the Coffee Gets Cold). Murase’s stories are grounded in the social realities of contemporary Japan, and the characters are messy and complicated enough to be interesting.
My favorite story is “To My Father, I Say,” which is about a young man named Sakamoto who leaves his rural hometown to work at a large finance corporation after graduating from a prestigious university in Tokyo. Sakamoto is forced to attend mandatory drinking sessions after work, and he’s bullied by his supervisor. He’s tired all the time, and his relationship with his girlfriend has gone stale. Meanwhile, he’s ignoring the calls from his father, who comes from a humble background.
Sakamoto finally snaps and quits his job, but he can’t bring himself to tell his family as his living conditions grow more precarious. Thankfully, he gets a second chance to talk to his father on the ghost train, which is the exact opportunity he needs to reevaluate his life and goals.
Like a lot of contemporary Japanese popular fiction aimed at young adults in their twenties, The God of Nishi-YuigahamaStation is brutally honest about the emotional damage caused by bullying, which can extend far beyond grade school. Like other authors, Murase doesn’t shy away from stating that the main problem lies with the people who tolerate this behavior, while the solution is for one brave person to step up and offer support to the target.
This is an important and wholesome message, of course, but it’s a little depressing to me that this support can only exist in the form of a magical ghost train. Then again, the purpose of The God of Nishi-YuigahamaStation is not to offer deep insights and critique, but rather to make the reader cry and feel gratitude for their own family and friends. And who knows? This might just be the support you need.
Shōji Morimoto’s Rental Person Who Does Nothing is probably the most chill autobio essay collection I’ve read, and it’s also one of the more interesting. Morimoto, who makes himself available to strangers through Twitter, offers encouragement and support simply by being present.
Don Knotting’s translation does an excellent job of conveying Morimoto’s distinctly casual voice as he explains the situations in which someone might need an impersonal companion – when filing divorce papers, for instance, or when arriving to the airport after a visit with aging relatives. Morimoto doesn’t pass judgment, nor does he offer any sort of advice or therapy. Rather, he serves as a companion for tasks that are difficult to accomplish alone.
Generally speaking, Morimoto is asked to accompany people on relatively mundane tasks. A common request (that I found extremely relatable) comes from people who need someone to sit next to them while they write a difficult email. Although some requests are awkward, most are surprisingly wholesome. My favorite anecdote is about the person who asked Morimoto to express happiness and excitement when he greeted their dog in a public park.
To me, the most interesting thing about Rental Person Who Does Nothing is not the type of requests people send, but rather Morimoto himself. Like Marie Kondo (whom I wrote about here), Morimoto has a very distinct personality that comes with a story.
Morimoto was bullied at work by his supervisor, who told him that it didn’t matter whether or not he was there at all. Morimoto’s aggressively chill affect comes off as a weapon of resistance against the assumption that someone’s worth is dependent on how productive they can be for an impersonal institution. It fits the theme that there are no life lessons in these essays, just people being people.
To me, this memoir serves as a record of how social media has enabled a new type of ephemeral interpersonal relationship that can be psychologically healthy in its own way. Rental Person Who Does Nothing also inspires introspection regarding how a companion might help you on your own journey, as well as speculation about what sort of request you might make to Morimoto yourself.
Contemporary Japanese Literature 