Where the Wild Ladies Are by Aoko Matsuda is a winner of the 2021 World Fantasy Awards (which I bought for that reason!) and a collection of Japanese short stories that bring a new view on some traditional Japanese tales, representing a form of empowerment to the women involved in these. (Not that I knew any of them, which makes reading the new versions missing part of the subtext. Maybe the original version should have been included as well for non-local readers unfamiliar with yōkai stories. The book nonetheless contains detailed pointers to all original tales..) The title is inspired from Maurice Sendak’s Where the wild things are (#16 in Children’s Classics). And there is a short story about it, where the narrator is reminiscing his childhood reading this book while his mother’s lover (and presumably his father) is visiting. The whole collection is very good, with ghosts being almost indistinguishable from the living, sharing most of their concerns and woes, if less constrained by customs and duties. And the living accepting their intermission with no reservation or fright. This permeability of the two worlds reminded me of some Murakami short stories. (While several of the stories are connected, under the hat of a sort of ghost job agency, they can be read independently.) And wish the book would not be labelled as fantasy, given its universal message and its infinite distance from heroic fantasy or horror books.
Archive for Japanese literature
where the wild ladies are [book review]
Posted in Books, Kids, pictures, Travel with tags fantasy, Haruki Murakami, Japanese literature, Maurice Sendak, Where the wild things are, World Fantasy Awards on December 8, 2021 by xi'ana journal of the plague year² [more of the same]
Posted in Books, Kids, pictures, Travel, University life with tags 47 ronin, asparagus, COVID-19, crab, Daniel Defoe, fantasy, homecooking, hot-cross buns, Japanese literature, Jersey, Journal of the Plague Year, Kenji Mizoguchi, Korea, Korean cinema, pandemics, pasta, science fiction, serial killer, young adult books on May 29, 2021 by xi'anRead V.E. Schwab’s The Near Witch, yet another instance of a YA novel not identified as such! Conditional on this category, I found it a rather good book in that the central character (as a female teenager fighting prejudices of her village) is well-made, with depth and (almost) enough imperfections to be credible. The universe where this happens is however restricted to a village isolated in a grassy plain where strangers are so rarely seen as to be immediately an object of suspicion. On the light side, but definitely superior to her Shades of Magic trilogy.
Made hot X buns, mostly successful except for the X that tasted exactly as the dried uncooked flour it was made of!!! And tagliatelle nere agli asparagi, at the very end of the [green] asparagus short season, with more bigoli as well. And sampled a few bentô boxes from [surviving] local restaurants. During a semi-vacation trip to the Brittany coast, cooked large local crabs bought from the local fishermen (back from blockading Jersey!] and fish from the same providers.
Watched some parts of Kingdom, yet another Korean TV series that mixes historical drama with… zombies. A lot of scenes can be [and were] speed-watched as the pace is deadly slow (if not from the zombie perspective!). The end is unexpected, making it almost worth the effort. And Erased, a Japanese TV series derived from a famous manga, which I found remarkable, mostly for the performances of the young actors, as the serial killer is rather easy to spot. And the end somewhat anticlimactic. Also started 47 Ronin, which I thought was related to the book I read two summers ago. But found it so ridiculous with its cheap fantasy, its obligatory Westerner saving the day, the gross misrepresentation of the original story, the many cultural counter-representations, the absurd love story, &tc., &tc., that I gave up. The antithesis of Mizoguchi’s 1941 version.
World Fantasy Award²⁰²⁰ (reading list addenda)
Posted in Books, Travel with tags amazon associates, COVID-19, Japanese literature, lockdown, pandemic, quarantine, reading list, Tor Books, vacations, World Fantasy Award on August 17, 2020 by xi'anHere are the five nominees for the World Fantasy Award 2020, not that I am familiar with this other award, which 2019 selection does not cover my reading list. And neither does the 2018 edition. Except for the unique ravenesque Ka. At least, this year, I have voraciously read one of them, tremendously enjoyed other books by Ann Leckie, and would be most tempted by reading Japanese fantasy. Adding to my already high pile of books to take on (potential) vacations for the end of the month… or to read at home if again quarantined.
- Queen of the Conquered, by Kacen Callender (Orbit)
- The Ten Thousand Doors of January, by Alix E. Harrow (Redhook Books/Orbit UK)
- The Raven Tower, by Ann Leckie (Orbit)
- Gideon the Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir (Tor.com)
- The Memory Police, by Yoko Ogawa (trans.Stephen Snyder) (Pantheon/Harvill Secker)
夢幻花 [Dream flower]
Posted in Statistics with tags book review, Engineering, Higashino Keigo, Japan, Japanese literature, Katsuura, Kii peninsula, mystery novel, nuclear physics, Osaka Prefecture University, University of Osaka, 夢幻花 on January 18, 2020 by xi'an Another Japanese mystery novel by Higashino Keigo, which I read in French under the title La fleur de l´illusion [on a sunny Sunday afternoon, under my fig tree] and enjoyed both for its original, convoluted (and mostly convincing) plot and for the well-rendered interaction between the young protagonists. And also for having a few connections with my recent trip, from one protagonist studying nuclear physics at the University of Osaka to a visit to the back country of Katsuura. (The author himself graduated from Osaka Prefecture University with a Bachelor of Engineering degree.) Spoiler warning: the only annoying part of the plot was the resolution of the mystery via a secret society run by a few families of civil servants, which as always sounds to me like a rather cheap way out. But not enough to ruin the entire novel.