Category: contemporary literature

Astral Season, Beastly Season

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Tahi Saihate’s Astral Season, Beastly Season (translated by Kalau Almony) is a novella about toxic high school friendships and girl group fandom gone horribly wrong.

In the first half of the book, a junior in high school named Yamashiro writes a letter to an unpopular “underground idol” named Mami Aino. Mami, who is still in high school herself, was arrested on the charge of murdering her ex-boyfriend. Another boy in Yamashiro’s class, Morishita, takes the news poorly and decides to commit a series of copycat murders so that he can confess to the crime Mami committed and take the fall in her place.

Unlike Yamashiro, Morishita is attractive, popular, and a model student. Why he’s a fan of a fledgling girl group with such a small following is unclear, and it seems like an incredible coincidence that both Yamashiro and Morishita would be attracted to the same super-indie performer. Although Yamashiro doesn’t seem to be aware of this, I strongly suspect that Morishita is much more attracted to Yamashiro than he is to Mami.

Regardless of motive, Morishita’s intention to commit murders is sincere, and he wastes no time getting started on his grim task.

The second half of the book takes place several years later, when Morishita’s childhood friend Aoyama meets up with Watase, a high school classmate of one of Morishita’s victims. Watase accuses Aoyama of portraying the murderer as “an all-around good guy” in an interview he gave to a tabloid magazine, and she wants him to apologize. Before the two of them get a chance to have a proper conversation, Aoyama is contacted by the brother of another of Morishita’s victims. This young man also wants closure, but what was going on in Morishita’s head will forever remain a mystery.

I have to admit that Astral Season, Beastly Season left me cold. More than anything, this is a book about the friendship dynamics of a small group of high school students. The novella doesn’t dwell on the psychology of the criminals, nor does it offer much description of what underground idol culture is or what it’s like to participate in this sort of fandom.

Instead, the reader is inundated with inane details about who is friends with whom, and who does and doesn’t walk home together, and who ignores other people on the train, and who went to a café together, and who is and isn’t talking to whom, and who said something mean after class, who doesn’t want to be in a group together on a school trip.

Amidst the swirl of teen friendship drama, the actual murders seem like little more than an afterthought. Were it not for the second half of the book, one might even argue that Yamashiro and Morishita are just pretending to plan and commit crimes. In fact, I tend to think that the story might actually be more interesting if this were the case. None of the characters has anything particularly insightful to say after the time skip, and the reader never learns anything about what Mami or Morishita might have been thinking or feeling. It’s all a bit disappointing.

There are two points of comparison that might bring the novella’s story into sharper contrast. The first is Yukio Mishima’s classic novel The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, a psychological drama about the (heavily fictionalized) young man who set fire to the eponymous landmark in 1950. It’s a gorgeous piece of writing, and Mishima is fascinated by the mind of a teenage loner who commits a serious crime, especially with respect to how this crime results from an intense homoerotic friendship. Another interesting companion novel is Rin Usami’s Idol, Burning (which I reviewed here), which I feel offers a much more sensitive and astute portrayal of the role that pop music fandom can play in the life of an emotionally precarious teenager.

I get the feeling that Astral Season, Beastly Season might have benefitted from a translator’s afterword explaining who the writer is and what the context for her work might have been. It might be a worthwhile project to discuss this novella in a college class or an academic paper, especially given Tahi Saihate’s status as an internet-famous visual artist who uses text to create eye-catching public art installations, but I’m not sure it stands on its own as a work of fiction. 

If nothing else, the novella is painfully honest about how high school friendship drama can feel life-shattering and world-changing to the people involved. Still, whether this sort of story is worth spending time with really depends on the interests and taste of the reader. It wasn’t for me, but perhaps a younger reader might feel a stronger sense of immediacy and connection to a beautiful high school boy who commits terrible crimes.

薬指の標本

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Yōko Ogawa’s 1994 book Kusuriyubi no Hyōhon (薬指の標本) brings together two novellas that feel spiritually akin to The Memory Police, which was originally published in the same year. Like The Memory Police, the two novellas in Kusuruyubi no Hyōhon are set in a seemingly normal world haunted by a sense that something important has vanished. These stories are about ordinary people who come into contact with pockets of magic whose mundanity belies their deep strangeness.

The narrator of the first story, Kusuriyubi no Hyōhon, has moved to the suburbs after losing a portion of her ring finger in an industrial accident. While walking through the neighborhood, she encounters a handwritten “help wanted” sign taped to the front door of a “specimen museum” (標本室) operating in a building that once served as a dormitory during the postwar period. With no connections and no other job prospects, the young woman interviews for and accepts a position as a receptionist.

It’s not entirely clear what exactly the museum’s “specimens” are, and their method of manufacture is a mystery. Regardless, anyone is welcome to bring an object representing a traumatic experience to the museum, where it will be registered, cataloged, and preserved. Through each object’s transformation into a specimen, the pain of its associated memories disappears.

The narrator becomes the focus of the intense gaze and possessive interest of the artist who creates these specimens. Though she loves him, he forbids her to enter his underground workshop. Given the apparent disappearance of the people who requested that specimens be made from parts of their own bodies, the narrator can’t help but wonder what would happen if she entered the artist’s forbidden underground chamber and asked him to work his magic on what remains of her severed ring finger.

The narrator of the second story, Rokkakkei no Kobeya (六角形の小部屋), is a nurse at a large hospital where she recently ended a serious relationship with one of the doctors. She becomes fascinated by two middle-aged women she encounters in the locker room of a local sports club; and, with little else to occupy herself during the long winter evenings, she trails them to a semi-abandoned danchi housing complex.

One of these women, Midori, operates an odd service in the former apartment manager’s office. The “Katari Kobeya” (語り小部屋) is a small, self-contained room with six soundproof walls. Anyone who enters this room can speak to their heart’s content, thereby relieving themselves of the psychological burden of their secrets.

The narrator has no secrets to speak of, but she becomes friendly with Midori and her handsome son. In order for the magic of the Katari Kobeya to remain effective, however, it can’t remain in one place for long. If the narrator comes too close to this strange liminal space, she runs the risk of another heartbreak.

In her monograph The Pleasures of Metamorphosis, Lucy Fraser describes Ogawa’s stories as having a fairytale-like quality, and this is certainly true of the two novellas in this book. In Rokkakkei no Kobeya, the narrator follows two women through the trees of a snowy park at night and thereby finds herself in a warm and comforting sanctuary that can be found only by those in need. Meanwhile, Kusuriyubi no Hyōhon has echoes of Bluebeard, with an older man forbidding an inexperienced young woman from entering a special room in his gothic mansion.

In addition to the subtle inclusion of fairytale tropes, the ethereal quality of Ogawa’s writing is partially due to what Elena Giannoulis, in her article “The Encoding of Emotions in Ogawa Yōko’s Works,” calls the writer’s “mood tableaux.” Giannoulis argues that Ogawa generally doesn’t reveal much below the surface of her characters’ placid demeanors, nor do her characters go out of their way to offer psychologically perceptive commentary on the world around them. Instead, Ogawa creates a “mood” by describing what the narrator perceives with their senses. By thus crafting a vivid picture of a setting unimpeded by value judgments, Ogawa invites the reader to associate their own feelings with the cinematic tableaux they see in their mind’s eye.

Giannoulis’s argument makes perfect sense to me, especially in relation to Kusuriyubi no Hyōhon. I find the texture of Ogawa’s writing to be similar to the visual style of Hirokazu Kore’eda, who allows the camera to linger on the small details of his characters’ environment while the characters themselves remain silent. These settings tend to be mundane in the extreme, and Kore’eda luxuriates in the interiors of older structures that have become dirty and dilapidated. As in Kore’eda’s films, the combination of nostalgia and neglect lends a subtle touch of pathos to the quiet drama of Ogawa’s stories.

Kusuriyubi no Hyōhon is a meditation not on what has vanished, necessarily, but rather on what remains behind. In these two novellas, Ogawa speaks to the dignity of people, places, and objects that are in danger of being forgotten. No one would notice if anything in Ogawa’s stories disappeared – but she has noticed, and now the reader has noticed, too. Still, though there’s a certain tonal warmth and narrative coziness to Kusuriyubi no Hyōhon, Ogawa never allows the reader to relax. As in any fairytale, there’s always a sense of danger, as well as the intriguing strangeness of half-remembered liminal spaces.

がらんどう

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Asako Ōtani’s novella Garandō (がらんどう), which won the 46th Subaru Literary Prize in 2023, follows two 40yo women as they settle into a cozy life as adult flatmates.

Hirai recently moved in with her friend Suganuma, who suggested that they live together so they can afford a nicer apartment. The two women met as adults through their shared fandom of the boy band KI Dash, and they managed to remain friends during the pandemic despite drifting away from their other friends and family members.   

Hirai works in an office, while Suganuma is a self-employed artist who uses a 3D printer to create custom memorial figurines of her clients’ deceased pets. The two women share chores and meals, sometimes cooking for each other and sometimes going out to eat. Although they’re not romantically involved, they often fall asleep together in the living room while watching KI Dash performances on DVDs that they play on an old PlayStation 2.

When Suganuma’s star idol suddenly marries an adult video actress, Hirai takes her flatmate to the beach for a breakup vacation. Afterward, Suganuma begins dating a married man she met at the hotel bar. Hirai is jealous but understands that this is simply the way of the world.

In resignation, Hirai signs up for a dating app, but this goes poorly. Her lack of success is partially because she’s aggressively targeted by someone involved in a multi-level marketing scam, but it’s mostly because Hirai is about as asexual and aromantic as someone can be. She has a vague aspiration of having a child one day, but is that really what she wants?

For Hirai’s birthday, Suganuma ends her relationship with the sleazy married man and uses her 3D printer to manufacture a baby as a gift for her flatmate. The story closes in much the same place it began, with the two women happy and secure in one another’s company. The title of the novella, Garandō, means “empty,” and it most directly refers to the hollow centers of Suganuma’s 3D-printed figurines. This title might at first be taken to refer to the relationship between Hirai and Suganuma as well, but their friendship is anything but hollow.

Because really, what’s to stop two adult women from spending their lives happily together as flatmates? Why do two people need to be married or related in order for it to be “normal” for them to live together? Is your life really “empty” if you don’t get married and have children?

More than anything, Garandō reminds me of Banana Yoshimoto’s bestselling 1988 novel Kitchen, which presents alternate models of modern families while comforting the reader that, even if you’re not “normal,” life is still well worth living. Granted, Hirai and Suganuma are older than the characters in Kitchen, and they’re not living in the lap of Japan’s bubble-era luxury. In addition, Ōtani’s writing style is relatively sardonic and dry, especially when compared to the bubblegum pop of Kitchen. Still, Garandō is a positive story about two weirdos who manage to find happiness. Even if their lives don’t follow the standard model, they’re doing okay.

At a slim 112 pages, Garandō is a quick read. Ōtani has a wonderful sense of pacing, juxtaposing scenes of comfort inside the home with scenes of (highly relatable) social awkwardness in the outside world. I really enjoyed this book, which pulls off something I appreciate – the normalization of “difference” without resorting to sentimentality or melodrama.

What Ōtani demonstrates in this meticulously crafted novella is that people like Hirai and Suganuma are less uncommon than you might think, and that’s cool. And honestly, given that a house and a nuclear family have become distant dreams for many of us, why not join them? 

Someone to Watch Over You

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Kumi Kimura’s 2021 novella Someone to Watch Over You is a subtly unnerving story about the strangeness of the Covid pandemic.

46yo Tae lives alone in her deceased parents’ house in a small town in northern Japan. She formerly worked as a middle school teacher, but she left the job after the death of one of her students. Now she lives on her inherited savings while leaving the house as infrequently as she possibly can.

Tae’s solitary lifestyle is unaffected by the onset of the Covid pandemic, but the “stay home” orders were followed by three unpleasant incidents in quick succession. An older man who’d just retired is found dead in an apartment on Tae’s street, and someone paints graffiti on the front wall of Tae’s house. Tae also receives an odd message from the father of the deceased student on her answering machine. These three incidents blend together into a paranoid fantasy that convinces Tae that she’s being stalked.

After a handyman named Shinobu treats Tae with kindness while cleaning her bathroom drain, Tae asks him to guard her house. Shinobu, who desperately needs the cash, readily agrees. During the pandemic, he’s been forced to live in the garden shed of his parents’ house, which is currently occupied by his brother’s family. Shinobu’s sister-in-law won’t talk to him, and his niece is weird and creepy in a way particular to young teenage girls.

Tae eventually asks Shinobu to move into her house so he can keep watch full-time, but this arrangement is supremely awkward. Both Tae and Shinobu are deeply damaged people, and Tae’s insistence on maintaining social distancing rules inside her own home stunts the development of any sort of friendly relationship between them. By the end of the novel, the reader wonders if Shinobu is any better off at Tae’s house than he would have been living rough.

To speak personally, a sudden change in employment forced me to scramble to move to a different city in April 2020. Due to social distancing, I had no opportunity to form and renew social connections, and the following two years were intense and unpleasant.

Someone to Watch Over You doesn’t reflect my individual circumstances, but it perfectly conveys the sense of displacement and alienation I experienced during the pandemic. It’s validating to see this sort of surreal experience taken seriously, especially since I definitely wasn’t alone in having a bad time during the lockdowns. I don’t think it’s healthy to dwell in past trauma; but, at the same time, the cultural expectation to pretend that all of this didn’t happen four years ago can sometimes feel maddening.

The back cover of Someone to Watch Over You promises “an unlikely connection” and asks if Tae and Shinobu can “become one another’s refuge,” thus suggesting the possibility of a heart-warming conclusion to the story. This does not happen, not by a long shot. While I fear that some readers may be disappointed by the weirdness of the ending, I appreciate that the author didn’t pull her punches. The Covid pandemic was indeed strange and unpleasant, and Someone to Watch Over You is one of the truest fictional accounts of the pandemic I’ve encountered.

Someone to Watch Over You is well-written and carefully translated, and I found myself fascinated by the dysfunctional characters and pulled along by the downward momentum of their story. This disturbing little book is compelling in its use of the pandemic as a stage for exploring the darker mysteries of mundane life, and I admire how Kimura revisits this particular moment of history without the comforting lens of nostalgia.

Strange Houses

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Strange Houses is a four-part horror mystery novel about houses with strange and uncanny floor plans.

Each of the four chapters takes the form of a series of conversations between the narrator, their architect friend, and various people who have been involved with the houses. The first three chapters explore three different houses with extra rooms and inexplicable gaps in the walls. These explorations are liberally illustrated with diagrams in which certain sections of the floor plan are highlighted and annotated to clarify the text.

Each of these stories is like a locked room mystery. Over the course of the chapter, the narrator’s architect friend performs a close reading of a floor plan while gradually building a theory concerning what sort of upsetting behavior that type of strange space might enable.

In the final chapter, it’s revealed that these houses are connected to an old and wealthy family with a terrible secret. I have to admit that I found this situation highly improbable, so much so that it comes off as almost cartoonish. The author is great at architectural walkthroughs but skimps on the character development, which contributes to the conclusion of the book feeling somewhat hollow. Still, there’s a lot of fuel for the reader’s imagination, and fans of gothic horror will have a lot to play with here.

I flew through Strange Houses and loved every page. The speculative conversations between characters are easy to follow; and, thanks to the diagrams, the spaces are easy to visualize. I enjoyed the slow build of the overarching mystery, and the revelations about the bizarre family at the center of the strangeness were beyond anything I expected.

It’s worth noting that the first story in Strange Houses was originally written as a script for a twenty-minute video on YouTube, which you can find with English subtitles (here). There’s also a manga adaptation, which has been scanlated and is available to read (here). And finally, I’d like to share a more substantial review of the original Japanese book that was posted on one of my favorite blogs (here).

I tend to think that Uketsu’s earlier novel Strange Pictures (which I reviewed here) is somewhat more successful as a work of fiction with three-dimensional characters whose bad behavior stems from understandable motives. In comparison, Strange Houses feels more like a puzzle box than a novel. Strange Houses is less a character-driven story than it is an imaginative architectural mystery, but its eerie atmosphere and clever narrative structure make it a fascinating read for fans of speculative horror and uncanny design.

She and Her Cat

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She and Her Cat collects four interlinked short stories about women and their cats. Though these stories are bittersweet, their gentleness is a source of comfort and encouragement.

The stories in She and Her Cat were written by Naruki Nakagawa, who’s mainly known as a screenwriter for science fiction anime from the mid 2000s, and the concept is based on the 1999 short indie film (which you can watch on YouTube here) created by the international superstar anime director Makoto Shinkai. I think it’s fair to say that the original short film is a representative example of the iyashikei “comfort” genre of anime, which Patrick Lum describes as “designed to be as comfy and mellow as can be.” This book, which Nakagawa wrote in his late forties, similarly uses young female characters to create a sense of living in a world where a brighter future is always possible.

The first story is a direct adaptation of Shinkai’s original short animation. A young office worker named Miyu brings home a kitten who’s been left outside in the rain in a disintegrating cardboard box. Miyu is growing apart from both her boyfriend and her best friend, and she feels as though she’s no longer able to understand the nuances of other people’s feelings. Thankfully, her new cat Shiro loves her unconditionally, and he’ll always be there for her.

The second story is about an art student who can’t find the motivation to apply to a university-level Fine Arts program, and the third is about an aspiring manga artist who was unable to make her debut and became a hikikomori after the death of her writer, who also happened to be her childhood friend. Both women find the courage to pull themselves out of their depression and take the first few steps forward – with the help of their cats, of course.

In the last story, a childless middle-aged woman finds herself alone after caring for her husband’s parents only to be left by her husband himself. As she gets older, so too does the boss of the neighborhood stray cats, and she ends up adopting him. Around the same time, her nephew has a quiet breakdown at his first job out of college, and the woman ends up sheltering him too. In return, he eagerly learns the non-corporate life skills she shares, and he naturally begins to help her manage the household. While it’s always rewarding to nurture a mutually loving and beneficial relationship with a cat, this story reminds the reader that kindness can exist between humans as well.

The narrative viewpoint of these stories alternates between the cats and their human companions. When the cats aren’t expressing their undying love for the human ladies in their lives, they’re off on their own adventures in the neighborhood, doing as cats do. Even more than the human characters, the cats have strong personalities and know what they’re about.

Comforting Japanese books about cats are currently enjoying a small cultural moment, and She and Her Cat is among the best of them. As you might expect from a book written by a professional screenwriter, each “scene” is fairly short, which makes for a quick and engaging read. Nagakawa maintains the distinctive narrative voice associated with Makoto Shinkai’s films, and Ginny Tapley Takemori conveys this straightforward gentleness perfectly in translation. In the English edition, each story is prefaced by a gorgeous full-page illustration by Rohan Eason, which only adds to the book’s charm. Exactly like the creatures it celebrates, She and Her Cat is light, nimble, and filled with character. 

或るバイトを募集しています

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Aru baito o boshū shite imasu (或るバイトを募集しています) is a collection of eight short horror stories conveyed in the form of documentary-style found footage. Each story is prefaced by a listing for a part-time job that seems a little strange, or perhaps too good to be true.

The most representative of these jobs is a request to make an offering of flowers at a certain empty lot between midnight and 1:00am every night. An aspiring comedian who needs the money and keeps late hours takes the job and carries it out faithfully. He never sees anything strange, but something about the job still feels off.

When he does research about the location, he can’t find anything out of the ordinary. Another entertainment industry professional explains that the job is probably a strategy to lower the land value. The comedian’s employer wants to buy the land and assumes they’ll be able to get it at a steep discount if it becomes known in the neighborhood as a “stigmatized property” (as explained by Business Insider here). 

The comedian does his best not to think about it too hard. When he finally gets a gig and fails to make his nightly offering, he leaves the studio only to find that an unknown number has called several times. When he checks his voicemail, a mysterious woman speaks to him through static, saying, “The flowers from yesterday have withered. Why didn’t you come tonight? Can I still stay here? Can I still stay here? Can I still stay here?”

Slightly outdated media and technology are a recurring theme in the collection, and this isn’t the only story about creepy messages left on an answering machine. Other stories revolve around physical media like VHS tapes, DVDs, and handwritten letters. When it comes to creepy found objects, I get the sense that there’s a certain air of uncleanliness that clings to the physical media of a prior century.  

Along with the spookiness of the stories, I enjoyed the rationalizations for why each strange job might exist. If I had to guess, I’d say that this collection is partially inspired by the recent discourse surrounding yami baito, or “shady part-time jobs” (which the BBC did a podcast about here). In real life, yami baito involves organized crime organizations using aboveground job postings on social media to recruit young people for illegal activities such as cash withdrawal fraud and stripping copper wiring from abandoned houses. Still, it’s not too difficult to imagine an entirely different shadow world seeking to prey on the living with the offer of easy money.

More than social commentary, however, Aru baito dwells in the realm of internet creepypasta. The collection’s author, Kurumu Akumu, has spent the past several years sharing short and spooky stories on various platforms, including YouTube (here), Note (here), and Twitter (here). Aru baito reflects the found footage nature of creepypasta by presenting its stories in a variety of formats, such as interviews, screenshots of text conversations, blog comments, and so on. The unusual formatting is a lot of fun, making the book feel like a file folder of cursed printouts.

Kurumu Akumu’s work reminds me of the mockumentary-style horror of Uketsu’s Strange Pictures, but Aru baito has no connecting narrative, nor does it make any attempt at portraying psychological realism. Instead, the reader feels as if they’re encountering real urban legends in the wild, and the lack of context heightens the eerie feeling of looking at something that shouldn’t be seen. Aru baito is an unsettling collection that blends the horror of cursed analog media with the eerie plausibility of urban legends, leaving readers with the lingering sense that some part-time jobs are better left unfilled.

ツミデミック

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Michi Ichiho’s Tsumidemic (ツミデミック), which won the prestigious Naoki Prize for popular fiction in 2024, collects six stories about the atmospheric strangeness of the Coronavirus pandemic. While everyone’s attention was focused elsewhere, Ichiho wonders, what sort of intriguingly antisocial behavior might have been enabled by isolation?

The opening story, Chigau hane no tori (違う羽の鳥), has all the grim fascination of a viral urban legend. Yūto moved to Tokyo only to drop out of college, and now he works as a barker for a bar in Shinjuku. Unfortunately, business isn’t going well due to the pandemic. During another eerily quiet night, Yūto sees someone he knew back from middle school in Osaka, Nagisa Inoue. This is a shock, as Nagisa is supposed to have committed suicide by jumping onto the train tracks. As she and Yūto get drinks together, Nagisa explains her devious plot to flee from the grasp of her overbearing mother, which was far from a victimless crime. Yūto is no saint himself, and he inadvertently reveals why he immediately recognized someone he never talked to when they were classmates.

Romansu (ロマンス☆) is about a bored housewife named Yuri who develops a serious online gambling addiction of an unusual nature. Yuri hasn’t been able to find a new job since she left her previous position to give birth to her daughter, and the pandemic isn’t helping. She channels her frustration into a food delivery app called Miideri, which she treats like a gacha game. Will the person who makes her next delivery be one of the handsome men rumored to be employed by the service? While gambling on the slim possibility that a prince will arrive at her door bearing a bag from McDonald’s, Yuri attracts the unwanted attention of an unhinged delivery driver who has read exactly the wrong message into her frequent orders.

Rinkō (憐光) is narrated by the ghost of a high school student named Yui who, strangely enough, can’t recall how she died. Having materialized back into the world fifteen years after her death, Yui finds herself confused and alienated by the loneliness of the Tokyo streets and train stations during the pandemic. She therefore returns home to her mother’s house in the country. Her arrival coincides with a memorial visit from her friend Tsubasa, who is accompanied by their old homeroom teacher, Sugita. As Yui eavesdrops on their conversation, she learns that she died after mysteriously falling into a river during a rainstorm. Sugita knows what Yui was doing and where she was going, and Tsubasa wants him to know that she knows, too.

The collection takes a slightly more positive turn in the fourth story, Tokubetsu enkosha (特別縁故者), in which Kyōichi, the unemployed and impecunious father of a young son, attempts to weasel himself into the good graces of an elderly man whom he suspects is a money hoarder. Kyōichi, an affable himbo who has no business scamming anyone out of money, volunteers for the daily task of picking up a takeout lunch from one of the many bentō stores in the neighborhood. The old man knows exactly why Kyōichi approached him, and he resents him for not pursuing his ambition to enter the food service industry. Harsh words are exchanged; but, when push comes to shove, even a relationship built on ulterior motives is better than living alone as an elderly shut-in during a pandemic.

Shukufuku no uta (祝福の歌) is about a happily married middle-aged man facing a new direction in his life. Despite being a high school student, his daughter is pregnant, and she intends to keep the baby. Meanwhile, the man’s mother seems to be entering the permanent brain fog of senile dementia. His daughter, who has been gossiping with the other mothers in her grandmother’s apartment building, gets the sense that there’s something else going on. With any luck, it’s a problem that can actually be solved.

Sazanami Drive (さざなみドライブ) follows the IRL meetup of five people who connected on Twitter after their lives were disrupted by the pandemic. As they drive out to the country in a minivan, they share their stories of abandonment and alienation. Little do they know that one of their number has a secret agenda. He’ll do whatever it takes to disrupt the group’s grim plan for the trip – and hopefully save their lives in the process.

As indicated by the book’s title, the two themes guiding this collection are “crime” and “the pandemic.” Each of the characters is hiding something, and the reader never knows where anyone’s true intentions lie. Michi Ichiho, who began her writing career as an author of BL romance novels, isn’t unduly focused on creating mimetic fiction, and the scenarios are improbable at best. Still, the twist at the end of each story is a lot of fun, and the fantastical plot elements accurately convey the feeling of just how weird and unreal everything felt during the pandemic.

It appears that the English-language publication rights for this collection are currently up for grabs (more info here). Tsumidemic is a fast-paced and emotionally cathartic book, and it would benefit from a tone-sensitive translation that renders Ichiho’s dialogue-filled writing into snappy, Stephen King style prose. I hope someone picks it up.

Hunchback

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Saou Ichikawa’s 2023 novella Hunchback is a striking work of fiction and a major contribution to the literature of disability. Ichikawa’s brutally honest depiction of her disabled protagonist’s physicality is magnetically compelling and thrusts the reader into a world where the conveniences of the able-bodied cannot be taken for granted.  

Shaka is a resident of Group Home Ingleside, a private care facility established by her wealthy parents. Shaka owns the facility, and she collects income from several rental properties in the investment portfolio she’s inherited. In addition, she’s sitting on a trust fund so large that it has to be distributed across several banks.

Despite her wealth, Shaka’s disability confines her to a small studio apartment. While working on a PhD in Disability Studies, Shaka amuses herself by vent-posting on Twitter in between sessions of writing hardcore pornography. She donates her income to the food banks that serve unhoused people, sometimes directly and sometimes in the form of bulk orders of seasoning. Even homeless people deserve food that tastes good, she reasons.

Even as she emphasizes with the disadvantaged, Shaka describes the reality of her own physicality in painstaking detail. Because of muscular atrophy, she’s unable to breathe on her own. Due to social distancing during Covid, leaving the care facility is out of the question. Her PhD coursework is entirely online, and she digitizes academic texts with the aid of a book scanner, as it’s impossible for her to hold heavy books for long periods of time.

And why shouldn’t we have digital copies of books, Shaka demands. When the literati bemoan the digitalization of the written word, who does that benefit, exactly? Shaka’s litany of complaints against the ableism of academia is one of the many currents of anger that drive Hunchback forward. Shaka’s anger breaches the surface at regular intervals, forcing the reader to think critically about the entrenched ableism of the world many of us take for granted.

Despite being engaged in a life of the mind, Shaka has one dream – to become pregnant and then get an abortion. While she’s not particularly interested in the fantasy sex she narrates in her shallow and disposable smut stories, there’s something about the particular physicality and “human-ness” of pregnancy that she finds intriguing.

A golden opportunity falls into Shaka’s hands when a young male caretaker named Tanaka reveals that he’s been stalking her on Twitter and secretly reading her erotic fiction. Unfortunately, Tanaka is the worst sort of incel. Not only can he not get a girlfriend, he only became a caretaker because he couldn’t cut it in the corporate world. In his eyes, he’s just as failed by society as Shaka – who, he snaps, enjoys wealth most people could never dream of.

Out of mutual hatred, Shaka and Tanaka orchestrate a tryst. As you might imagine, it doesn’t end well. Suffice it to say that, if you’re looking for an uplifting message, you won’t find it here.

The end of Hunchback mirrors its beginning, with a prolonged description of a sexual encounter. The book’s closing scene is ostensibly narrated by Tanaka’s sister, who takes on a sense of personal responsibility for her brother’s crime of murdering a disabled woman in a care facility by literally choking her to death with his cum. 

I can’t help but suspect that this is once again Shaka writing erotica, albeit with a slightly more literary bent. The scenario is still improbable, but now she’s writing more for herself, fleshing out the characters (so to speak) by imbuing them with personalities and backstories.

Her encounter with Tanaka may have been an abject failure, but Shaka still desires “human” experiences and contact with the broader world. After all, writing – even writing erotica – is about so much more than coming up with a story and posting it online. Shaka never becomes a softer or kinder person, nor would I want her to. What she gains is motivation to be more present in the outside world as she sharpens her insight and hones her craft. 

Ichikawa writes based on her own experience as a disabled person, and Shaka’s voice is focused, specific, and driven. Shaka’s narration pulls the reader through the story with sharp observations and darkly comedic drama, and the steady forward momentum is just as entertaining as it is compelling. In many ways, Hunchback reminds me of Convenience Store Woman, and I’d recommend this book to readers who are receptive to unexpected charm and aren’t afraid to have their comfortable perceptions of reality challenged.

May You Have Delicious Meals

Kathryn5 Comments

Junko Takase’s 2022 novella May You Have Delicious Meals is a small human drama about workplace bullying. It’s also a critique of Japanese corporate culture that simultaneously pokes holes in the iyashikei “comfort” reading meant to help people deal with stress. Contrary to what bestselling Japanese novels about cats and coffee shops would have you believe, it turns out that lovingly prepared homemade food cannot, in fact, fix a toxic workplace environment.

Ashikawa is a sweet young woman who transferred to a branch office in Saitama, a suburb of Tokyo, after facing harassment at her previous post. Due to her lingering trauma, Ashikawa has requested a reasonable accommodation – that she not be expected to work overtime. To make up for the inconvenience to her coworkers, she regularly brings homemade desserts to share with the office.

Ashikawa is not the hero of this story. In fact, her perspective is entirely absent.

The majority of the novella is narrated from the point of view of Nitani, Ashikawa’s secret boyfriend. Nitani has allowed Ashikawa to latch onto him, but he has no respect for her at all. He hates sweet food, and he thinks Ashikawa’s baking hobby is annoying. The only reason he tolerates her is because she seems like the sort of attractive and agreeable woman that a man in his position should be dating.

Nitani is friendly with an older female colleague named Oshio. Oshio resents Ashikawa, whom she feels gets special treatment. Why should Ashikawa have a lighter workload and be spared stressful job responsibilities just because she bakes cookies?

During a late-night drinking session, Nitani and Oshio decide to bully Ashikawa, resolving to throw away her desserts uneaten in trash cans that everyone can see. Oshio gives up on this bullying fairly early on, but she still ends up taking the blame when other people at the office surreptitiously start to join in. No one ever suspects Nitani, least of all Ashikawa herself.

I get the feeling that Penguin might be attempting to market May You Have Delicious Meals as a social comedy, but this is misleading. All of the characters are unpleasant, and the situation is deeply awkward. Takase’s story contains sharp social critique, but it’s not funny. Perhaps this novella might be described as cringe comedy, except without the comedy; it’s just cringe.

Nitani is a piece of work, and I hate him. He’s super gross. If you’ve ever worked in an office, you’ve probably encountered this exact type of guy – someone who hates women but still expects them to sleep with him. Takase’s portrayal of this species of greasy slimebag is immaculate.  

Oshio is much more relatable. Even though she’s not the primary viewpoint character, I still feel that this is her story. Oshio is critical of Japanese workplace culture, but she grits her teeth and deals with the unpleasantness of overtime, useless paperwork, angry phone calls, and branch office transfers. If she weren’t doing the work, she reasons, it would be unfair to the person forced to pick up her slack. Still, her coworkers aren’t her family, and she resents Ashikawa for cluelessly attempting to blur the necessary line between personal and professional.   

In the end, Oshio has the right of it. No matter how friendly a workplace pretends to be, the pretense of comradery isn’t going to stop the bullying and scapegoating that arise from stress and overwork. The ice-cold “fuck all y’all” speech Oshio gives at the end of the book isn’t quite theatrical enough to be cathartic, but still. Good for her.

Meanwhile, Ashikawa’s “happy ending” is chilling. I’m sure that circumstances seem rosy from her perspective. The person whom she assumes is the office bully has been vanquished, and her romantic relationship with her coworker is openly acknowledged by everyone in the office. Since the reader has seen these developments through Nitani’s hateful eyes, however, we’re painfully aware that Ashikawa is delusional about how the people around her actually feel.

May You Have Delicious Meals is the polar opposite of feel-good books about food and friendship. Reading Junko Takase’s prickly little workplace drama makes you feel awful, and that’s the point. It’s bleak, it’s disheartening, and it’s a brilliant piece of writing. I have nothing but appreciation for May You Have Delicious Meals, which is a much-needed antidote to the mindlessness and absurdity of the current trend of cutesy Japanese comfort novels.