Category: novels

The Blanket Cats

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Kiyoshi Shigematsu’s The Blanket Cats collects seven stories about the clients of a service that rents cats for a period of three days. What I appreciate about these stories is that their human protagonists are messy people who are clearly the villain of someone else’s life. Will three days with a cat fix them? Probably not, to be honest, but it’s still a nice fantasy to imagine that a brief experience of caring for an animal could completely change someone’s perspective.

“The Cat in the Passenger Seat” is a frequent companion of Taeko, a woman on the verge of retirement who often rents this particular cat to accompany her on trips away from Tokyo. With no family to support her through a recent diagnosis of a serious illness, Taeko has decided to splurge on one final vacation. As for where the money has come from, it’s fair to say that Taeko is on the run from more than her worries about the future. She’s always done the right thing and made sacrifices for everyone else, so she might as well be selfish for once, right? Thankfully, Taeko’s cat companion helps her see beyond her immediate problems.

“The Cat with No Tail” is chosen by Koji, a boy in middle school whose growing pains have resulted in the first major crisis of his life. Instead of being bullied, he’s the one doing the bullying. Well, sort of. Koji tolerated an annoying classmate all throughout elementary school; and, now that he’s in a new environment, he finally found the courage to tell this kid to leave him alone. Unfortunately, he didn’t express himself in the most diplomatic way, and his former classmate was so distraught that he made a serious attempt at self-harm and almost died. That’s a wild thing to happen to a twelve-year-old, and Koji processes his guilt by talking to the cat, who responds by showing the emotions that Koji has been suppressing.

“The Cat Who Knew How to Pretend” is rented by Hiromi, a young woman who needs a stand-in for her family’s recently deceased pet in order to fool her grandmother, who’ll be visiting her parents’ house one final time before they entrust her to a facility that specializes in caring for patients living with cognitive decline. To ensure that the visit goes smoothly, Hiromi also asks her boyfriend to attend a family dinner even though she’s on the verge of breaking up with him. It’s all well and good for the cat to pretend that everything is fine, but Hiromi realizes that the time has come for her to be open and honest about what she wants.

I recently encountered the term “joyslop” as an appellation for low-effort entertainment media, and The Blanket Cats is joyslop if I’ve ever seen it. Psychological realism isn’t a concern in these stories, nor is animal welfare. Just so everyone is on the same page, “renting” an animal to any customer who walks through the door isn’t a great idea to begin with, and cats can’t be trained to accommodate different companions in the way that certain other domestic animals can. I apologize for being crude, but I imagine that the reality of a rental service like this would be cat piss everywhere. Still, The Blanket Cats is pure fantasy, like YA fiction for adults. It’s joyslop.  

I’ve been thinking about the purpose served by The Blanket Cats and other cozy cat books, and I suspect their appeal probably extends a little deeper than simple guilty-pleasure reading. To varying degrees, the short stories collected in these books address fairly serious social issues such as, for example, dealing with school bullying as a parent or growing old without a social safety net. Books like The Blanket Cats provide a way to playact various scenarios from the comfort of your armchair – again, like YA fiction for adults.

I’m tempted to take this line of reasoning a few steps farther into social analysis and argue that the popularity of bestselling cat books might have something to do with the decline of “traditional” news media like print newspapers, morning radio broadcasts, and nightly news programs. I get the sense that, back when this sort of media was more widely consumed, journalists could provide authoritative editorial opinions of social issues, thus creating consensus and catharsis. In other words, a serious issue exists, but someone is talking about, and therefore someone must be doing something about it.  

Now that our consumption of news is so fragmented, who knows what to think? People are still looking for an editorial voice to trust, and I feel like this is partially what’s behind the success of books like The Blanket Cats. The fantasy of these non-confrontational stories about normal people dealing with hot-topic social issues isn’t necessarily that a cat is going to fix you in three days, but rather that these systemic issues can be fixed, because someone is talking about them. All things considered, The Blanket Cats is much easier to consume than, say, a political podcast hosted by wealthy kids in Brooklyn or a series of inflammatory diatribes posted to YouTube.

In any case, I’d like to express my appreciation for the translator, Jesse Kirkwood, who has found himself a lovely (and hopefully fruitful) niche in translating and localizing this sort of fiction, often through the charming vernacular of light Briticisms. This style of casual prose in Japanese requires no small amount of skill to render into the sort of English suited for a mass-market bestseller. I’ve been following Kirkwood’s work since his translation of A Perfect Day to Be Alone, and I’m always impressed.

If you’re in the market for cozy cat fiction, The Blanket Cats has more of a bite than the usual fare, but it’s still sweet and hopeful. This book hopes you’re doing okay. If you’re reading this review, I hope you’re doing okay too. After all, there’s definitely a place for joyslop in the world, and there’s no shame in needing a cat and blanket sometimes.

Strange Map

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Strange Map (変な地図), published in October 2025, is the fourth book written by Uketsu, the bestselling author of Strange Pictures and Strange Houses. Unlike Uketsu’s previous books, which are collections of seemingly unrelated stories eventually connected by an overarching narrative, Strange Map is a proper novel that follows the actions of a single protagonist, Uketsu’s architect friend Kurihara from Strange Houses. Despite its more conventional narrative format, Strange Map is still filled with Uketsu’s characteristic illustrations and diagrams, which aid the reader in visualizing the uncanny spaces of its horror-themed mystery through a remarkable set of twists and turns.

Strange Map opens with the written confession of an elderly woman named Kimiko Okigami. In her youth, she writes, she took the lives of countless people. Before she dies, she wants to tell the story of the village where she was born and its neighboring mountain, which was supposedly inhabited by demons.

The next section raises the stakes even higher. In the present day of July 2015, Kōsuke Ōsato wakes up after a night of drinking to find himself lying in a train tunnel. He recognizes the tunnel immediately, as he’s the president of the railway company that constructed it. The tunnel has emergency exits, of course, but there’s just one problem – he’s right in the middle between two of them, and the first train of the morning should be coming any second now.

After thoroughly grabbing the reader’s attention, Strange Map shifts to the perspective of its main narrator, a 22yo college student in Tokyo named Fuminobu, who usually goes by his family name of Kurihara. Kurihara is an architecture major who’s currently on the job market, but he hasn’t had any luck so far. This is likely because, as he readily admits, he’s terrible at interviews. When asked why he’s interested in architecture, for instance, he can’t quite bring himself to admit that he wants to follow in the footsteps of his mother, who once played games with him involving engineering problems but died when he was still a child. 

After yet another unsuccessful round of interviews, Kurihara’s sister asks him to come home and visit his father, who needs to talk with him. This conversation ends up being about the house left behind by Kurihara’s grandmother – the woman who wrote the letter that opens the novel. Before his father sells the house, Kurihara asks to see it for himself, and he discovers a notebook containing a set of burned photos alongside the “strange map” of the title, which depicts a seaside village below a mountain filled with monsters. 

Like his late mother, Kurihara can’t sleep easy until he’s solved the problem in front of him. His father gives him permission to investigate, but only on the condition that he solves the family mystery in time to return home and do practice interviews with his sister before his next real interview, which is only a week away.

Interspersed between chapters, his grandmother’s letter continues. She writes of her hometown of Kasōko, an isolated village surrounded by the sea on one side and forest on all others. While the men caught and sold fish, the women handled the business of maintaining the village itself. Among other things, this maintenance involved carving stone statues to ward off the demons of Mojōyama, the mountain looming over the village.

Kurihara, who doesn’t know any of this history, nevertheless manages to ascertain the location of the village. He travels to the rural seaside only to find that the village was completely abandoned decades ago. To complicate matters, he finds himself smack in the middle of a scandal surrounding the succession of Kōsuke Ōsato, the president of the local railway company who was mysteriously run down by one of his own trains.

Was the death of the railway president truly an accident, or was it murder? What happened to Kasōko village? Who exactly did Kurihara’s grandmother kill – and what are the demons on the mountain?

To help the reader visualize the specifics of the story, Uketsu has provided all manner of simple diagrams illustrating how the space of the narrative is laid out. These visual inserts were necessary in Strange Pictures and Strange Houses; meanwhile, in Strange Map, they’re largely superfluous. The reader probably doesn’t need a visualization of the concept that “there are five equidistant emergency exits in the train tunnel,” for example. Uketsu has also provided slightly silly diagrams of various social relationships, such as an illustration of the railway company president wearing a suit and sitting at a desk while his second-in-command wears a construction helmet and manages a job site.

Still, I’m not complaining. Regardless of whether they’re necessary, I love all of these illustrations. I find their lo-fi clunkiness charming, and the space they create on the page helps to set the pace of the story. It would be all too easy to fly through this book, but the illustrations helped me slow down and focus on details. In addition, I found that the “unnecessary” illustrations help to reveal the inner workings of the narrator’s mind.

To me, Kurihara reads as being on the autism spectrum, an aspect of the character that contributes to the distinctive narrative style of the story. The closest comparison I can make is to Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman, but there are echoes of Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time as well. Although he doesn’t identify as autistic, Kurihara understands that he needs to work on his people skills, and the secondary B-plot of the novel involves his carefully considered approach to teaching himself to behave “normally” instead of immediately saying something that’s true but will hurt other people’s feelings.

I’m used to Uketsu’s characters behaving like chess pieces on a game board, so this added depth of character came as a pleasant surprise. Also, while I usually read mystery novels for the pleasure of watching fictional characters die in ridiculous ways, I found myself feeling invested in Kurihara’s safety, as well as his emotional wellbeing. This attachment to the character adds yet another layer of tension to the story as Kurihara becomes personally involved with the family that runs a local inn.

Strange Map is a super fun and fantastically clever mystery novel, and its elements of gothic horror are as darkly brilliant as anything written by Edgar Allan Poe or Arthur Conan Doyle. Jim Rion has done a marvelous job with the translations of Strange Pictures and Strange Houses, and I’m looking forward to what he does with Strange Map. For the time being, the sequel to Strange Houses, which is titled Strange Buildings in English, is scheduled to be published in March 2026, so that’s something to look forward to as well.

It’s a great time to be a fan of Japanese mystery novels, and I’m interested to see how Uketsu’s work in translation might influence other authors. Do I want to see Uketsu copycats? Sure! Absolutely. But do I also want to see a generation of writers raised on YouTube creepypasta take inspiration from Uketsu and translate that sort of multimedia textual fragmentation into a new style of fiction? Hell yes. Let’s go.

At the Edge of the Woods

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In the woods, there is a castle. The castle was once the residence of the landowning family that ruled the area. During the war, it was the headquarters of a resistance movement. Now it sits empty and abandoned. The castle is so deep in the woods that most people couldn’t find it if they tried. No one tries, however, as the woods are filled with child-snatching imps. Strange noises come from the woods, and occasionally strange people as well.

Masatsugu Ono’s At the Edge of the Woods is a novel about dread and anxiety. There’s no plot, nor is there any sort of story. Instead, Ono presents four episodes in the life of a father left alone with his young son while his wife is away. There’s no chronological order to the four chapters, which all occur at roughly the same time, and there’s no meaningful change in the personalities of the characters. Rather, the story development involves the slow intensification of an atmosphere of foreboding.

The nameless father who serves as the narrator is Japanese, as is his wife, who is pregnant with their second child. The wife has flown back to Japan to visit her parents, leaving her husband and son in an unspecified European country that reads as Germany-coded. The family has taken up residence at the eponymous edge of a vast forest in a rural area dotted with small towns.

The country is now at peace, but its neighbors are not so lucky. Long lines of refugees stream across the borders, seemingly unhindered by local authorities. It’s entirely possible that some of these refugees have camped out in the woods next to the narrator’s house, but it’s difficult to say for sure. It’s equally difficult to specify the origin of the odd sounds constantly emerging in the forest.

Characters drift in and out of the narrative, leaving behind very little of themselves save for strong emotional impressions. The disabled daughter of a bakery owner has good intentions but struggles to make herself understood. The postal worker who delivers the mail relates grotesque stories to the father, who suspects the man might be reading and discarding his wife’s letters. A neighboring farmer has always been kind to the narrator’s family, but his son reports that he once saw the man tie a dog in a burlap sack and beat the poor creature to death.

Perhaps the most striking of these characters is an elderly woman that the narrator’s son invites into the house. She appears seemingly from nowhere, and she vanishes just as mysteriously. While she’s in the house, though, she becomes a living symbol of the narrator’s anxieties regarding his ill-fitting role as the solitary caretaker of a young child in a foreign land:

Overcome, the old woman buried her face in her hands. She trembled violently, and a sob escaped her. I looked up. The kitchen windows were all closed. And yet in the air there hovered the sour smell of decayed leaves from deep in the woods, leaves that would never dry out. Steam rose from the old woman. The steam was not from her tea. A puddle spread at her feet. (20)

In his “Introduction” to The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales, Chris Baldick neatly summarizes the genre as an expression of the fear that the horrors of prior eras will not remain comfortably in the past. At the Edge of the Woods presents the readers with a range of Gothic tropes to heighten the sense of uneasy suspicion that, even in the most progressive of European countries, there is no escape from misery and cruelty. While the back-cover copy of At the Edge of the Woods calls the novel “an allegory for climate catastrophe,” this feels like a bit of an interpretive reach. Instead, Ono seems to be suggesting more broadly that, even in our bright society sustained by futuristic technologies, we’re never that far away from the edge of a large and unknowable forest.

At the Edge of the Woods can be difficult to read, and it’s probably not for everyone. Speaking personally, though, I love this book, and I’ve read it on the winter solstice every year since it was published in 2022. Ono’s writing is gorgeously atmospheric, and the legendary Juliet Winters Carpenter has done a dazzling job with the translation. If you appreciate the sort of quiet, eerie, and darkly suggestive Japanese Gothic writing typified by Yoko Ogawa’s short story collections Revenge and The Diving Pool, I’d recommend At the Edge of the Woods as the next step on a shadowed path into the liminal spaces in the penumbra of modern civilization.

Silent Singer

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Yōko Ogawa’s 2025 novel Silent Singer (Sairento Shingā) is a bittersweet story about a woman named Ririka who lives alone in a mountain forest near a community of people devoted to silence. Ririka is a professional singer, but she never makes a name for herself, only taking freelance jobs that require a performer with an anonymous voice. Though the singer and the silent community eventually fade into obscurity, Ogawa celebrates the beauty and dignity of their lives, as well as the significance of creativity that never finds an audience.

On an isolated mountain in the countryside, a group of people calling themselves “The Introverts’ Club” have bought a parcel of land and formed a community named Acacia Fields, which is devoted to quiet and simple living. The Acacia Fields community isn’t a religious organization; rather, they’re normal people committed to the philosophy that “silence soothes the soul.” Anyone can join as long as they’re content never to speak in the presence of others.

Ririka lives in an old house next to a forest adjoining Acacia Fields, where her grandmother is employed as the gatekeeper. The gatekeeper’s job is to communicate with people from the outside world while also managing a small store that sells produce, pastries, and other items produced by the community, which raises livestock and maintains extensive gardens.

While her grandmother manages in the gatehouse, Ririka has the run of Acacia Fields. She spends hours with the aging doctor of the community’s small clinic, who isn’t bound by a vow of silence and reads to her while teaching her “finger language,” a simple form of sign language used by the community. Though her mother committed suicide after being abandoned by her father, Ririka enjoys a happy childhood divided between the public school in the town below the mountain, the doting care of her loving grandmother, and the quiet but genuine affection of the people living at Acacia Fields.

Ririka discovers her path in life during a sheep shearing session at Acacia Fields, when she’s asked to sing a simple lullaby to help keep the animals calm. She performs beautifully and enjoys herself immensely. A town official who attended the event is impressed by Ririka’s singing, and he asks her to record a similar song to be played over the municipal loudspeakers every evening at 5pm. Though no one knows the singer is Ririka, the song is so well-received that the tradition continues indefinitely.

Shortly after she graduates from high school, Ririka’s grandmother passes away. Ririka remembers her grandmother by visiting her Puppet Garden, which the old woman created after a child went missing in the mountain forest one summer. To soothe the boy’s spirit, Ririka’s grandmother fashioned five dolls from discarded household objects and placed them at the center of a small grove. For Ririka, the Puppet Garden serves as a place of quiet meditation. 

Ririka takes over her grandmother’s position as the Acacia Fields gatekeeper while supplementing her income through various freelance jobs passed along by her voice instructor. In each case, Ririka is recommended because of her relative anonymity. Ririka sings jingles for television commercials, performs anime theme songs, records vocal tracks for idol groups, and even provides the voice of a talking children’s toy. Though she doesn’t seem to realize it, Ririka is quite successful as a professional singer, but she never leaves her home on the mountain.

As an adult, Ririka strikes up a romance with the security guard at the parking lot where she keeps her car. On their first date, Ririka takes him to the Puppet Garden, whose dolls are in a severe state of decay. Instead of being creeped out, the security guard is charmed. He’s a good match for Ririka, as he has an odd hobby of his own – piecing together carefully curated scrapbooks devoted to the lost works of famous authors.

The only shadow over the relationship is that Ririka finds herself unable to sing for her boyfriend. She can only sing, she explains, if her audience isn’t a living human. Meanwhile, with few young people moving to the mountain, the Acacia Fields community is in danger of being claimed by entropy and senescence.

Silent Singer resonates with echoes of the Studio Ghibli charm of Mina’s Matchbox; but, as is often the case with Yoko Ogawa’s work, a major theme of the novel is the gentle beauty of decay. Ririka’s house is slowly falling apart, as are the dolls in her grandmother’s Puppet Garden. The agricultural holdings of Acacia Fields are gradually diminishing, and the members of the community are growing old. Regardless, the village remains peaceful, as does the surrounding forest, especially in contrast to the absurdities of the freelance work Ririka takes as a singer. 

In many ways, Silent Singer reminds me of Haruki Murakami’s 2023 novel The City and Its Uncertain Walls, especially in its aggressive refusal to engage with contemporary technology. It could be the case that the nostalgic settings of the two novels are simply a product of the preoccupations of two aging writers, but that’s not how these stories feel to me.

At this point in the death spiral of our capitalist hellworld, I’m bone-tired of “progress” that dehumanizes everything it touches. Meanwhile, Murakami’s narrator leaves his corporate job to work in a small-town library in Fukushima prefecture, while Ririka remains loyal to her home in a quiet mountain forest, which provides a refuge from the profit-driven demands of the entertainment industry. And good for them! I am here for characters who do not give a single fuck about social media or self-branding.

While it might be a stretch to call Silent Singer “anticapitalist,” this is a story about the value of creativity at the margins, as well as the beauty of art without an audience. Ogawa’s obsession with the decay that creeps in at the edges of isolated communities and individual lives can sometimes feel uncomfortable, but let it be uncomfortable! There’s nothing cozy about the richness of human experience, and the care and attention Ogawa devotes to the slow endings of her stories is one of the great pleasures of her work. The work of Ogawa’s “silent” creatives may be unremarked, but it’s far from unremarkable.

Sympathy Tower Tokyo

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Rie Qudan’s short novel Sympathy Tower Tokyo, which was awarded an Akutagawa Prize in 2023, is a story about language, generative AI, and the culture war discourse surrounding the construction of a fictional prison facility in a high-rent area of Tokyo’s Shinjuku district. 

Sara Machina is an artist and architect who wants to win the bid to design and build the eponymous “Sympathy Tower Tokyo,” a prison right in the middle of metropolitan Tokyo that will operate according to a utopian vision of providing state-mandated shelter to “homo miserabilis,” or people driven by economic precarity to commit crimes because they had no other options, Les Misérables style.

The main problem, in Sara’s eyes, is the name of the building, which is written in English and a mouthful to pronounce: Shinpashii Tawaa Toukyou. It’s also somewhat meaningless, Sara reflects, as are a number of other politically correct English terms that have replaced native Japanese expressions. Amusingly, she provides a list that includes examples such as negurekuto (neglect), which has replaced the formal term ikuji hōki (child abandonment) in public discourse.

Most of these loanword expressions don’t really change the meaning or public perception of the concept itself, but some do. “Homo miserabilis” is one such (fictional) example, having replaced the word hanzaisha, meaning “criminal.” Which is all well and good, Sara admits, but she still can’t envision a structure called “Sympathy Tower Tokyo.” If the building were to have a name that was more euphonic in Japanese, that would be a different story.

An appropriate name is provided by a beautiful young man who goes by “Takt,” a loanword from German used for an orchestra conductor’s baton. Takt became Sara’s casual boyfriend after she saw him through the display window of a luxury fashion store in Aoyama and point-blank asked him out; and, despite the difference in their ages, he does genuinely care for her.

While Sara frets over the intricacies of language, Takt has no qualms about using AI-built, the novel’s version of ChatGPT, to address any questions he might have. Despite his casual use of AI to understand the world and communicate with other people, Takt naturally and organically comes up with the expression Tōkyō-to Dōjō-tō (Tokyo City Sympathy Tower), which rolls off the tongue “like a spell from Harry Potter” and turns out to be exactly the inspiration Sara needs. 

Sara’s design wins, and the tower is built on prime real estate for everyone to see. It is, she says, “the answer to the question posed by Zaha Hadid’s Olympic Stadium.” 

Sara narrates the first and fifth chapters of the novel, while Takt narrates the second and fourth. The third chapter belongs to Max Klein, an American journalist covering Japan who’s gone freelance after being accused of making racist cultural generalizations. Takt is charmed by Max and begins adopting his speech patterns, while Sara (bless her heart) is mainly concerned about Max being fat and stinky and sweaty.

Max himself is a budget version of Hunter S. Thompson who seems to want to “tell it like it is” but unfortunately doesn’t possess the political acumen to make it as a mainstream reporter. In particular, Max is frustrated by what he sees as the tendency of Japanese officials (and Japanese people in general) to use smooth and politically correct language to mask their actual views and agenda.

While Max’s tirade is admittedly gauche, it seems to partially echo the author’s own views regarding excessive linguistic masking, which she expressed succinctly in an interview with The Guardian (here):  

“There are people all around you who you would never think hold discriminatory views but actually do hold those views. A lot of Japanese people, on the surface, they know how to act in a way that makes them seem welcoming of diversity. And this discrepancy between what people think on the inside and what they say is a very distinctive feature.”

In other words, language is political, but the degree to which “correct” language can shape or reshape society is debatable. This question calls to mind the online conversations in 2022 surrounding Tetsuya Yamagami, the man who assassinated Shinzō Abe and attracted immediate widespread sympathy. While the murder itself was shocking, Yamagami’s motives were faultless. How, then, would it be appropriate to talk about him? Is someone like Yamagami truly a “criminal,” or rather a “homo miserabilis”? Regardless, the language we use to refer to people who commit crimes doesn’t change the fact that we feel compelled to incarcerate them, “Sympathy Tower Tokyo” though their prison may be. 

Sara Machina was the victim of an assault that was never punished or even acknowledged, and she can’t quite reconcile herself to rhetorical towers built with politically correct language. Max goes five steps farther and expresses open disdain for the sort of wokeness that dictates that people who caused so much suffering to others aren’t properly treated like criminals but are instead allowed to live rent-free in a gorgeous luxury tower.

In the middle is Takt, the son of a high-profile “homo miserabilis” who ultimately decides to become a PR representative for the tower. Perhaps because he’s so used to consulting AI-built, his speech soon becomes just as smooth and beautiful as his face. When he begins to write about Sara Machina’s architectural genius, however, he finds that AI is insufficient, yet he can find no words in himself. This is fine with Sara, who (relatably) doesn’t wish to be perceived after becoming the target of sustained abuse on social media. 

The plot summary I’ve given here doesn’t begin to do justice to the actual conflict of Sympathy Tower Tokyo, which revolves almost entirely around language. Both English-language and Japanese-language journalists have made a big deal about how “a portion of this award-winning novel was written by ChatGPT,” but this description is painfully misleading. When characters in the novel engage with AI-built, the program’s text was in fact generated by AI, as is appropriate. Although Qudan never has her viewpoint characters make a definitive statement about LLMs, the “smoothness” of machine-generated text is positioned as a mirror to the sort of “politically correct” language used by public officials to disguise and downplay critical issues in contemporary Japanese society.  

In any case, Jesse Kirkwood’s translation is brilliant, and I very much appreciate the brief and informative “Translator’s Note” at the beginning of the book. Also, for what it’s worth, though the diegetic AI-built text may have been generated by an LLM, I didn’t get the sense that it was translated by one. If there’s any criticism to be directed at Sympathy Tower Tokyo, it’s that its emotional core is ephemeral and difficult to pin down. Perhaps ironically, the characters aren’t sympathetic; rather, their role is to serve as viewpoints along a spectrum of opinion. Still, Sympathy Tower Tokyo is a remarkably playful and intellectually stimulating book, and you can’t help but admire Qudan’s boldness in standing up and speaking to the current moment of culture war discourse.

The Place of Shells

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Mai Ishizawa’s short novel The Place of Shells, which was awarded an Akutagawa Prize in 2021, follows a Japanese woman pursuing her PhD research in European art history at a university in the German town of Göttingen. For a year and a half, she’s shared an apartment with a fellow grad student named Agatha, as well as Agatha’s dog Hector.

Around the late-summer Obon festival, when the spirits of the dead visit the world of the living, the narrator talks to her old classmate Sawata, who studied art history with her as an undergrad at a university in Sendai and currently works as a museum curator. Over Skype, Sawata tells her that their friend Nomiya will be visiting Göttingen for a brief period. This is odd, the narrator admits, as Nomiya disappeared during the March 2011 tsunami and has been presumed dead for nine years.

Nomiya’s sudden appearance isn’t the only strange thing happening in Göttingen. One of the town’s landmarks is its Planetenweg, where memorials representing the sun and planets are placed according to scale. Now that Pluto is no longer a planet, however, its memorial has been sighted in odd places, seemingly at random. In addition, Agatha’s dog Hector has been digging up mysterious bits of rubbish in the forest, and each discarded item is connected to the secret memories of the people in the narrator’s circle of friends. To make matters even more bizarre, the narrator painlessly begins to grow a set of human teeth on her back.

The Place of Shells doesn’t really have a plot, and none of these surreal occurrences are mysteries to be solved. Instead, the narrator reflects on the nature of memory as she comes to terms with the March 2011 tsunami and what she lost in the disaster, as best illustrated by this passage toward the end:

What I had been afraid of was the distortions of memory caused by emotions and the passing of time. That was where forgetting began. What my feet had felt as they went tramping around that seaside town, the scenes my eyes had taken in, the smell of the sea that rushed into my nose – these memories didn’t remain with me as raw sensations, but morphed into a distant narrative. That oblivion concealed more than just the dead who hadn’t returned to land.

As the narrator comes to terms with the constructed nature of her memories of trauma, she encounters a number of ghosts that manifest in cozy apartments and relaxed strolls through the beautiful German town. For most of us, the ghosts of the past have little to do with darkness or shadows; rather, they walk casually beside us during the day. While giving the reader a beautiful environment to explore through careful and attentive prose, Ishizawa encourages reflection on grief as refracted through the passage of time.

I’d also like to mention an aspect of this novel that was immensely appealing to me personally. For various reasons, my frame of intellectual reference is skewed away from Europe, and I’ve always wanted someone who doesn’t assume a thorough knowledge of Christianity to teach me about Western art history. The Japanese narrator (and, I suppose, the academic author speaking through her) presents an accessible discussion of her research on German artistic portrayals of Christian saints that I found fascinating. The Place of Shells is a meditation on art as much as it is on memory, and I feel as though I gained a more grounded and relatable perspective on the sort of medieval European art that I always passed by without understanding in museums.

In doing a bit of research of my own, I realized that each of the women in the narrator’s circle of friends has a connection to her saintly namesake that Ishizawa communicates through imagery both mundane and fantastic. Over the course of the story, the narrator makes something of a pilgrimage through overlapping systems of symbols in a way that mirrors her own academic study of religious art. If a reader were to draw a map of these symbols, I imagine that the constellations would be quite dense, but I found it satisfying simply to follow that narrator’s meanderings without imposing a definitive sense of meaning.

Mai Ishizawa reminds me of Yoko Ogawa in her ability to create a subtle sense of atmosphere through mundane descriptions of calm and lovely places that gradually become eerie through an accumulation of otherworldly imagery. I’m also reminded of the quiet and gentle surreality of Haruki Murakami’s 1982 novel A Wild Sheep Chase, especially in terms of the narrator’s time in the woods and proximity to historical palimpsests overlaid onto daily life.

The Place of Shells is a slow novel to be savored. A spiraling shell is an apt analogy for the style of narration, which only gradually approaches its central theme through ever-smaller circles. Ishizawa’s writing, which Polly Barton has translated with pitch-perfect clarity, is gorgeous and well worth taking a page at a time as the reader, like the narrator, softly explores a world made beautiful and strange through art and memory. 

When the Museum Is Closed

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Emi Yagi’s 2023 novel When the Museum Is Closed is a refreshing work of magical realism about a shy young woman who falls in love with a statue of Venus. The twist is that the statue loves her back, and – even more miraculous! – their love story has a happy ending.

Rika is a recent college graduate who works in the freezer department of a warehouse for processed food. She sees this as the perfect job for three reasons. First, she never has to talk to anyone. Second, she can take pre-prepared food home from her job, so she rarely has to cook. And third, an invisible yellow raincoat suddenly appeared over her clothing in elementary school, and she’s found it almost impossible to remove in public. The heavy vinyl fabric keeps her body temperature high, but that’s not a problem in an industrial freezer.

The only variation in Rika’s days comes from her part-time job. Once a week, Rika takes the bus to a local museum to have an hour of conversation with a statue of Venus. Venus only speaks Latin, but Rika enjoys a freedom with the dead language that she’s never found in Japanese. Though Rika is shy at first, she and Venus become friends, and they eventually fall in love.

Unfortunately, there’s a bit of a situation with a man named Hashibami, the museum curator in charge of the statue. He wants Venus all to himself, and he never wants her to change – he doesn’t want her to learn modern languages, and he certainly doesn’t want her to learn about the world outside the museum.

Venus therefore makes a deal with Hashibami. If he can get Rika to fall in love with him, she’ll allow him to fire Rika from the conversation job. Regardless, Rika isn’t interested in men, nor does she allow Venus to push her away. What Rika wants is something else entirely, and her relationship with Venus has given her the courage to chase their mutual joy.

The fantastic elements of When the Museum Is Closed are presented as entirely mundane, and it’s easy to take them at face value. At the same time, the love story between Rika and Venus resonates at an allegorical level with the experience of having a queer crush on someone who’s friendly and flirtatious yet seemingly unattainable. It’s the crush you have on an older coworker, or the crush you have on an internet friend, or the crush you have on the gayest girl you’ve ever met who is, inexplicably, married to a man. It doesn’t really matter that Venus is a statue, as anyone who’s experienced queer longing can relate to Rika’s situation. At the same time, Emi Yagi’s Venus is animated by her own distinct personality and undeniably lovely.

I’m sure that When the Museum Is Closed could also be read as an allegory for how women tend to be treated in male-dominated artistic and curatorial spaces, but the story is far more concerned with Rika’s subjective experience of her own individual life. I especially enjoyed the subplot involving Rika’s friendship with her landlord, a quirky but kind elderly woman who needs home care assistance, and I appreciated the understanding Rika develops with the neglected young boy who lives next door. Though Rika’s invisible yellow raincoat is unique to her, she’s far from the only person carrying unseen baggage, and it’s not necessarily the case that this is a problem that needs to be fixed.

When the Museum Is Closed is a short but expertly paced novel that moves quickly yet still allows the reader enough time to appreciate each scene. Its premise is intriguing and well-executed, and Yuki Tejima’s delightful translation captures the author’s tone perfectly, both in Rika’s deadpan observations and Venus’s mature flirtations. Readers who enjoyed Emi Yagi’s novel Diary of a Void will be pleasantly surprised by When the Museum Is Closed, which features the same sharpness and clarity of writing augmented by lovely moments of sweetness.

Lost Souls Meet Under a Full Moon

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Lost Souls Meet Under a Full Moon brings together five interconnected short stories about people seeking to contact the dead. Though this book falls firmly into the category of “relaxing” fiction, it’s more plot-driven than most, and it distinguishes itself through its worldbuilding, especially its willingness to test the parameters of its magic system.

The central character of the novel is a handsome and stylishly dressed teenage “go-between” named Ayumi who can facilitate meetings between the living and the dead. The catch is that a person can only have one of these meetings in their lifetime, and each dead person is only allowed to return once. 

This is why the choice of the focal character of the first chapter, “The Rule of the Idol,” is so unusual. Manami asks the go-between to connect her with, of all people, a performer named Saori who made her living as a tv personality appearing on various talk shows and quiz games. When Manami was at the lowest point in her life, alone in Tokyo and bullied by her coworkers, she had a random encounter with Saori, who encouraged her to get back on her feet. Manami wants to use Saori’s death as an opportunity to thank her personally, which she never would have been able to do while Saori was still alive.

The third chapter, “The Rule of the Best Friend,” is far less wholesome. A first-year high school student named Arashi wants to be cast into leading roles in the plays performed by her school’s drama club, and she’s not shy about making her intentions known. Her biggest supporter is her best friend Misono, who joins the drama club in solidarity. Misono’s introverted grace has an alluring appeal that Arashi overlooks in her brash ambition, and she ends up losing a starring role to her best friend.

Arashi takes this poorly and stops talking to Misono. She assumes this will be a punishment, but she quickly realizes that her friendship was holding Misono back from achieving her own dreams. When Misono dies in a cycling accident, Arashi desperately wants to apologize, but she hasn’t yet developed the maturity to say what really needs to be said. I have to admit that I was surprised by the final meeting between the two friends, which is steeped in a complexity otherwise absent in these stories, and “The Rule of the Best Friend” ended up being my favorite part of the book.

In the final chapter, “The Rule of the Go-Between,” we see the characters from the previous stories from Ayumi’s perspective as he goes on his own journey during the process of inheriting the role of go-between from his elderly grandmother. Ayumi’s parents died under mysterious circumstances when he was a child, and his grandmother has carried a sense of guilt for years. Unlike his unfortunate classmate Arashi, however, Ayumi is able to break the barrier of silence and offer comfort and closure to his grandmother while they’re both still alive.

Despite a few brief moments of darkness, Lost Souls Meet Under a Full Moon presents little emotional challenge to the reader. There are very few subversive or self-reflective elements in these stories, and the characters occasionally behave like two-dimensional constructs who act solely in service to the plot. This isn’t a bad thing, of course. Lost Souls moves quickly and follows its internal logic so impeccably that the reader’s suspension of disbelief is never broken. As a result, each of the chapters is great fun to read.

Mizuki Tsujimura has taken the five-chapter cozy fiction formula and polished it to a high sheen. As far as the genre goes, Lost Souls Meet Under a Full Moon is as good as it gets, largely thanks to the author’s willingness to explore the more nuanced implications of the stories’ premise. Yuki Tejima’s translation is lovely and uses a light touch to bring the energy of Tsujimura’s prose to English-language readers. I’d recommend Lost Souls Meet Under a Full Moon to anyone looking for a good comfort read, not to mention a welcome reminder of the importance of saying what needs to be said while you’re still alive.

一橋桐子の犯罪日記

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Hika Harada’s 2020 novel Hitotsubashi Kiriko (76) no hanzai nikki, which I’ll refer to as “Kiriko’s Crime Diary,” is the story of the eponymous Kiriko Hitotsubashi, who has found herself alone and in trouble at age 76. After her closest friend dies and her life savings are stolen, Kiriko decides that her best option is to spend her remaining years in prison. The only problem is that, before she goes to prison, Kiriko first needs to commit a crime.

Kiriko has been single all her life, but she jumps at the chance to share a house with her best friend Tomo, whose husband has died of a heart attack. Unfortunately, after two years of friendly companionship, Tomo dies of cancer, and Kiriko’s signature seal, bank passbook, and account holdings are stolen by a young man who asks to enter her house to pay respects to Tomo’s memorial. To add insult to injury, Tomo’s two sons treat Kiriko like garbage as they remove the furniture and cookware she shared with Tomo from her house.

Kiriko is left destitute, and she’s forced to use the last bit of money she has left to rent a subsidized apartment in a privately owned building for the elderly. She can barely afford groceries, and her new neighbors are difficult and unpleasant. Despite her age, Kiriko is as healthy as a horse, and she doesn’t seem to be in any danger of dying soon. She decides that being in prison would be preferable to becoming homeless, so she resolves to live a life of crime.

For the most part, Kiriko’s Crime Diary is a comedy that follows a sweet-natured and sensible woman as she does her best to get arrested. Kiriko has standards, and she doesn’t want to commit any sort of crime that might cause actual harm. She tries shoplifting from a chain grocery store, counterfeiting money with a convenience store photocopier, and scouting targets for a dubiously legal moneylender – all to no avail.

Over the course of her attempts to solicit advice regarding how to commit a crime, Kiriko ends up befriending all sorts of people, from the owner of the office building where she works as a janitor to a high school girl who volunteers to be kidnapped to punish her negligent parents. Between one thing and another, Kiriko ends up attracting the attention of a semi-retired yakuza boss, who uses intermediaries to contact Kiriko before finally meeting her in person.

One of the major subplots of the novel involves a man around Kiriko’s age who becomes entrapped in an elaborate “marriage scam” by a younger woman who drains his finances and then disappears. The man is crushed by disappointment, and the members of the poetry club Kiriko once attended with her friend Tomo have to band together to figure out how to help him. Along with Kiriko’s own troubles, this episode highlights the lack of a social safety net for many elderly people in Japan.

The theme of elder precarity becomes especially critical with the approach of Kiriko’s 77th birthday, which marks the start of her formal age of retirement. The janitorial company that employs Kiriko forces her to quit, depriving her of her only means of supporting herself. If Kiriko has no job and no one to serve as a guarantor for her rental contract, what is she supposed to do, exactly? Is her only recourse to start working with the yakuza?

Thankfully, Kiriko’s Crime Diary has a happy ending. All of Kiriko’s friends show up during a climactic scene to offer support and advocacy, and Tomo’s daughters-in-law apologize for the way she was treated by her late friend’s sons. All the loose ends are neatly tied, and Kiriko might even get to have a lovely winter romance with the handsome yakuza boss. I usually shy away from this sort of sentimentality, but why shouldn’t Kiriko have the best of all possible endings?

When I was working on one of my dissertation chapters about Natsuo Kirino’s gritty crime novel Grotesque, one of my readers asked me why Kirino’s characters all have to be so miserable. That was a fair question, and my answer was something along the lines that Kirino’s novels express the reality of the despair faced by many older adult women who find themselves completely devalued by society.

While I still believe that the tonal bleakness of Kirino’s style of critique is necessary and important, I also think that the happy ending of Kiriko’s Crime Diary is a welcome counterpoint. What Harada archives through this gentle comedy is to model one possible solution to elder precarity. Namely, if the neoliberal Japanese state is so utterly useless in providing social welfare, people must aggressively resist twentieth-century social conventions to form communities for mutual aid.

This support benefits not just elderly people, but also multigenerational networks. As much as Kiriko gains from her friendships with the owner of the building she cleans and the teenage girl she “kidnaps,” these characters also benefit from having Kiriko in their lives. It would be a shame, Harada suggests, not to have at least one friend like Kiriko.

Relearning how to make friends while relying on the kindness of strangers isn’t going to be a feasible solution for everyone, of course, but it’s a damn sight better than going to prison. And, if someone like Kiriko is considering prison, what are we even doing as a society? Even with a marvelously happy ending, Kiriko’s Crime Diary offers a social and political critique that’s difficult for even the most conservative reader not to agree with.

Hika Harada has enjoyed a productive career, and she’s won numerous awards for her fiction and screenplays. It’s no surprise that Kiriko’s Crime Diary was a bestseller that has found a place on all sorts of recommendation lists. This story will definitely appeal to readers outside of Japan, and it’s perfect for the same readership that enjoyed Killers of a Certain Age (which is fantastic, by the way).

Harada’s novel Dinner at the Night Library is going to be released in English translation in September 2025, and I’m looking forward to reading it. Kiriko’s Crime Diary is a genuinely fun and charming story, and I’d love to see it appear in translation too.

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.