Category: contemporary literature

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.

Under the Eye of the Big Bird

Kathryn4 Comments

Hiromi Kawakami’s Under the Eye of the Big Bird is a book about the quiet end of the world. Despite its postapocalyptic setting, the story is gentle. The author’s background as a biology teacher shines through her writing as she imagines the diverse forms that humans and their societies might take in the far distant future.

Under the Eye of the Big Bird is structured as a collection of fourteen stand-alone stories that gradually form a larger narrative, and the reader is encouraged to put together a history from bits and pieces of individual lives. We never see the full picture, however, and I imagine that assembling a concrete timeline would take careful detective work.

This isn’t a plot-driven story that can have “spoilers,” necessarily, but any description of the book’s premise is going to contain analysis and speculation. Under the Eye of the Big Bird is one of the most intriguing works of speculative fiction that I’ve read in years, and this is partially due to its fragmented structure. You may want to venture into the collection on your own before reading any reviews, this one included.

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Still with me? Let’s go!

Over the millennia, the number of people on the planet has steadily decreased, and the last remaining humans live in isolated settlements of various sizes. In order to ensure harmony, the settlements are discretely managed by “watchers” who have been cloned and genetically engineered to fulfil their duty. Unlike regular humans, watchers grow up in small communities with “mothers” that are all physical manifestations of the same AI.

Everyone takes this arrangement for granted, but their “normal” is not the same as ours. Whether a story is told from a first-person or third-person point of view, the reader can only see the world from a limited perspective. It can be difficult to understand what’s going on at first, but the opportunity to surf successive waves of strangeness is a major part of this book’s charm.     

My favorite story is “Testimony,” which is delivered as a statement to a watcher by one of the new phenotypes of humans to emerge from centuries of genetic isolation. A small number of people are born with the ability to photosynthesize, and the joy they take from the sunlight and changing seasons affects their behavior in surprising ways. If enlightenment exists, these people have attained it; and honestly, it sounds really nice.             

Not all of the future human phenotypes are so peaceful or self-assured, however, and other stories have a bit more conflict. Still, with one notable exception, there’s no violence in this book. If there are wars and explosions, they happen entirely offscreen. Like the watchers and mothers, it’s the reader’s job simply to observe the biology, ecology, and culture of the future.

On the front cover of the American edition, Kawakami is billed as the author of People from My Neighborhood, a loosely connected series of magical realist flash fiction that’s an excellent comparison for Under the Eye of the Big Bird. To me, Under the Eye of the Big Bird also feels like a natural development of Kawakami’s debut short story, Kamisama, in which the narrator has a lovely afternoon picnic with a literal bear. The bear, being a bear, is clearly nonhuman, but no one seems to be bothered by this. The same casual acceptance of difference pervades Under the Eye of the Big Bird, which invites the reader to imagine the mundane everyday reality of the final days of the human race.

I’ll admit that I felt the chilling touch of existential dread at a few points during the book; but, as in any encounter with real difference, this initial sense of discomfort is important. The gentle strangeness of Under the Eye of the Big Bird encourages the reader to confront their biases, and it also lends weight to the narrative theme of human extinction. Instead of presenting the apocalypse as a standard dystopian superhero story, Kawakami allows the reader to take all the time and space they need to consider whether it would really be so horrible if the people we currently think of as “human” were to slowly disappear from the earth.

Under the Eye of the Big Bird is a book about the end of the world, but it’s also one of the kindest and most hopeful works of speculative fiction I’ve had the pleasure to read. Reading this book for the first time was a unique experience, but the impact of its stories linger even after their novelty fades.

A Hundred Years and a Day

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In October 2024, Matt Alt published an article in Aeon titled “The Joy of Clutter.” Instead of decrying the unsightliness of visual complexity, Alt argues that clutter has its own unique beauty, “an ecstatic, emergent complexity, born less from planning than from organic growth, from the inevitable chaos of lives being lived.”

Alt’s essay is illustrated with photos contributed by Lee Chapman, who captures evocative images of the chaotic interiors of tiny family-owned restaurants located in shopping arcades lined with shuttered storefronts. Chapman’s photos coincide with a trend on social media that expresses nostalgia for the Japan of the late twentieth century, with posts often tagged as “Shōwa Retro.”

Tomoka Shibasaki’s A Hundred Years and a Day delights in the aesthetic of gentle decline exemplified by Shōwa Retro, and the 34 stories in the collection express nostalgia for people and places left behind in the past. Shibasaki invites the reader to walk through depopulated residential neighborhoods and stroll along abandoned shopping arcades. Half-empty cityscapes are dotted with buildings filled with clutter. Aging adults sift through the belongings of their deceased parents. Siblings who’ve drifted apart make clumsy attempts to reconnect by alluding to half-forgotten memories. Students study and then discard the small artifacts of the people who came before them.

Even reading through the book’s Table of Contents is like flipping through a card catalog in an old library, with each story’s title being a concise description of its premise. To give an example, the first story is titled:

“One summer during a long rainy spell, student number one from class one and student number one from class two discover mushrooms growing in a flower bed next to a covered walkway at their school; two years after leaving school they bump into each other, but after that, ten years pass, twenty years pass, and they don’t meet again”

“One summer” is a translucently beautiful piece of writing with imagery so clean and clear that I could almost feel the seasonal humidity on my skin. The story conveys the delicate specificity of a single moment captured in time. The moment dissipates and disperses as the world moves on, but the memory lingers.

An intriguing play on this theme is in the nineteenth story…

“I feel like I want to see the places that someone else saw, he said; I like thinking about places I’ve been to once but no longer know how to get to, or places that you can only access at certain times, I feel like there must be some way of visiting the places that exist only in people’s memories”

…which is about a woman who travels to a small seaside town to give a presentation at an academic conference. While walking back from the local shrine, she has a brief conversation with a child who will be the last ever student to graduate from the municipality’s junior high school. Years later, the child (now grown) encounters an artistic diorama that recreates a fictional version of their hometown that appeared in an old novel written by the academic’s deceased mother. While studying the artwork, this person (referred to by the story as “the last child”) is surprised by the liveliness of the reconstructed memory:

The last child crouched down and peered into the alley running between the wooden houses. It looked a lot like the alleyways that they knew from their childhood. They felt as though it was a path they’d been down before. As the last child was still staring down the passage, a cat ran across the alleyway where the stone steps were. The last child gasped in surprise, and stood up. A cicada flew in through the window, attached itself to the wall, and began to screech.

“I feel like I want to see” is a wandering ramble across time and memory, but most of the vignettes in A Hundred Years and a Day are much more focused on the history of a specific place. One of my favorites is the twenty-second story…

“A man opens a café in a shopping arcade, dreaming that it will become like the jazz café he used to frequent as a student; the café stays open for nearly thirty years, then closes down”

…which, despite the title, is about the young woman who takes over the original café by the university. The interior of the café is almost comically outdated, as are the records left behind by the previous owner. The new owner isn’t familiar with the musicians whose posters still hang on the walls. Regardless, the café is still lively, and the new owner finds herself thinking, at the end of the story, that “this is what I wanted to do.”

If I had to guess, I’d say that the reason why this sort of Shōwa Retro story has such a strong appeal is because it rejects the performative glossiness of mass media while embracing the beauty of real, everyday settings. The aesthetic also disrupts the modern myth that progress is not just desirable, but inevitable. Things don’t always get “better,” Shibasaki demonstrates, nor do endings always happen with a bang. 

A cursory reading might suggest that Shibasaki is trafficking in low-effort cultural nostalgia, but I don’t think that’s the case. The imagery presented by each story in A Hundred Years and a Day feels very deliberate, like it’s smashing a smartphone screen with a hammer. This is fiction to be enjoyed slowly, and I appreciate the contemplative space Shibasaki has opened for the reader.

When discussing the texture of Shibasaki’s writing, it’s important to acknowledge the artistry of Polly Barton’s English translation. Japanese literary writing is notorious for its nested sentence structure, which can feel unintentionally Proustian if translated literally. It takes a keen eye and a delicate touch to understand whether Japanese sentences are interminably lengthy because the language is simply written like that; or whether a sentence like one of Shibasaki’s story titles is a deliberate stylistic choice. Barton has done truly amazing work with A Hundred Years and a Day at a sentence-by-sentence level, allowing the reader to enjoy Shibasaki’s distinctive style while still maintaining a casual, conversational tone.

Most of the stories in A Hundred Years and a Day occupy fewer than ten pages, and they read like accounts passed from one person to another by word of mouth. Spending time with this collection feels like calling an elderly relative and listening to them talk about a restaurant closing in your old neighborhood, or about how they saw someone that you once knew as a child in the newspaper. There’s no real beginning or end to the stories, nor is there any discernible sense of structure. Still, the theme of human connection runs through Shibasaki’s work like a gentle current, drawing the reader forward along on the steadily flowing stream of time.

I’d like to extend my gratitude to Stone Bridge Press, which provided an advance review copy of this book. A Hundred Years and a Day will be published on February 25, 2025. You can learn more and read a preview on the book’s webpage (here).

Mimi ni sumu mono

Kathryn2 Comments

Yoko Ogawa’s 2024 short story collection Mimi ni sumu mono (耳に棲むもの) is about quiet endings and the unremarked deaths of small things. The tone of these five stories ranges from gentle and elegiac to genuinely shocking.

I’d like to begin with the latter, as Kyō wa kotori no hi (今日は小鳥の日) is one of the most subtle yet surprising horror stories I’ve read in some time. The nameless narrator of this story addresses the reader directly as she welcomes us to the annual gathering of the Small Bird Brooch Society. Small bird brooches can be made in a variety of ways, she explains, but she crafts hers using the real beaks and talons of dead birds. There’s something truly sublime about watching their tiny bodies decay, she muses.

The narrator then explains how her predecessor, the first president of the Society, met his untimely end. His death involves the still-living bodies of small birds, but I dearly wish it did not. After recounting one of the more gruesome scenes I’ve encountered in literary fiction, the narrator cheerfully invites the reader to sit down and enjoy the banquet. She then points out a few notable members of the Society, each of whom has their own method of constructing small bird brooches. Perhaps you, dear reader, will feel right at home in their company.

The collection’s final story, Senkōsho to rappa (選鉱場とラッパ), is about a young boy who lives with his mother in the company housing of a rural ore processing plant. His mother works both the day shift and the night shift at the plant’s cafeteria, leaving him to his own devices. During the summer festival at a local shrine, the boy becomes enamored with a toy bugle offered as a prize at a carnival game. Without any money to play, he’s reduced to lurking at the corner of the tent and praying that, if he can’t win the bugle, then no one else does either.

The next day, the boy takes out his frustration on a stray dog begging for scraps near the back entrance of the cafeteria where his mother works. He kicks the poor animal so hard that he ruptures its stomach, and it dies. Later he returns to the festival, where he witnesses the sudden death of the old woman running the carnival game. He steals the bugle in the confusion and returns home only to realize that the toy is nothing more than cheap plastic that has been spraypainted gold. In his shame, the boy buries the bugle in a closet, just as he buried the dog he killed between the roots of an old tree.

Still, as he sits on the apartment balcony while waiting for his mother to come home, the boy fashions constellations from the lights of the processing plant and imagines the songs he would play in their honor if his bugle were real.

Mimi ni sumu mono reminds me of Ogawa’s first work to appear in English translation, The Diving Pool (2008). Although it’s difficult to classify these stories as “horror,” they’re all subtly but effectively unsettling. When we’re exposed to the small cruelties that hide in the hearts of normal people, we begin to see reflections of their inner darkness in the details of the world that surrounds them. Ogawa’s characters are people who have lost their sense of belonging. The world has moved on without them, leaving a quiet air of desperation and neglect in its wake.

Mimi ni sumu mono is twenty-first century gothic fiction at its finest, but it’s not all bleak. Like the boy in Senkōsho to rappa and the president of the Small Bird Brooch Society, Ogawa remains fascinated by the beauty that gleams through the horrors. At 132 pages, Mimi ni sumu mono is relatively slim, but I believe this collection’s brevity is to its credit. The book is like an art gallery that encourages the reader to take their time with each piece, lingering as long as they like without any pressure to rush forward.

Mimi ni sumu mono was written in collaboration with Koji Yamamura, an Academy Award nominated animator. Yamamura created the companion piece My Inner Ear Quartet, which is described as “a literary VR animated film with an interactive storyline” on its page on Steam (here). This interactive animation was showcased at a number of international animation festivals and won several awards in Japan and abroad. As Yamamura’s animation requires a VR headset to view, I can’t offer any comments, but its trailer on YouTube (here) and the expanded excerpt (here) suggest that Yamamura was successful in capturing the eerie tone and uncanny beauty of Ogawa’s stories.