Tag: novel

Books: Days at the Morisaki Bookshop, Novel by Satoshi Yagisawa

What is the appeal of a Japanese novel of 150 pages that makes it an international bestseller? The novel is very unpretentious and uneventful with a very light plot and still a page-turner.

The narrative takes you through the ordinary lives of ordinary people with a low horizon of expectations from life – nothing beyond love, work, and family. A hike in the mountains is described so simply and effortlessly that it has the effect of a still-life painting. It focuses your gaze and sucks you into the reality of the everyday made to look mysterious and strange through the power of language. It makes the coolness of the night breeze or the fatigue and excitement of a mountain climb acquire a fresh deep meaning.

There is a lot of melodrama but it is so mellow and tender that creates a sub-genre of its own. Let us call it – the mellow-drama. The painful is combined with hope, death is not an end.

Books: All the Lovers in the Night, a Novel by Mieko Kawakami, 2022, originally published in Japanese 2011

My first experience of Mieko Kawakami’s writing, a novelist and poet from Osaka. Very impressive talented prose! The first half of the novel is a fascinating in-depth description of excruciating loneliness.

A socially awkward Fuyuko, the protagonist, a proofreader by profession, finds it extremely hard to communicate with people. She discovers that having a drink helps. Slightly ironic and hurtfully honest, the narrative progresses through the daily ordeals of being alone. Proofreading becomes a metaphor for a specific attitude to life – reading without really getting into the content of the book but just looking for the errors in it… Another topic that is developed intricately to reach metaphorical power is the physical aspect of light and color. Kawakami’s descriptions of the mundane sometimes reach Knausgaardian dimensions.

The “female condition” is represented in several well-written scenes – the protagonist examining the shelves of a modern bookstore self-help section, her first sexual experience, her conversations with two female friends – the “happily married with children” one, and the “sleeping around fashionista.” Kawakami is not interested in making judgments, she is recording the female tragi-comedy in a cool incisive style.

The second half of the novel, with the appearance of a love interest, is more banal as a story because it is seasoned with the hope of happiness for the main character. And the hope of happiness takes a trivial form, promising the reader an American rom-com finale. But no, Kawakami is not providing one. An appropriate ending for a novel like this is finding strength to triumph over disappointment.