Info on Puella Magi Madoka Magica

Puella Magi Madoka Magica closes the Japanese themed read and I'm so happy about it. I couldn't find anything better, but to close with a manga. I won't hide from you that I'm excited to read this one since the anime series is one of my favourite. In the same time, I'm anxious if this version will do justice to Gen Urobuchi's amazing story. Despite it being a magical girl story, it's very deep and nothing like other works of this particular genre. 

Title: Puella Magi Madoka Magica Vol.1 - 3

Author: Magika Quartet

Illustrator: Hanokage 

Publisher: Yen Press

Date of Publication: 2012 (first published in Japan in 2011)

Number of Pages: 192 pages each volume

Summary

In this world, there exist strange creatures who have the power to grant one wish to a chosen girl. However, in exchange, that girl must become a magical girl and use their powers to fight against witches, evil creatures born from the darkness that are responsible for murders and suicides.

On the city of Mitakihara, a schoolgirl named Madoka Kaname and her friend Sayaka Miki are approached by a familiar Kyubey, who offers to grant each of them one wish in return for making each of them a magical girl. Another magical girl named Homura Akemi tries to prevent Madoka from making such a deal while Kyubey urges Madoka by telling her she will become the most powerful magical girl. However, contrary to the glamorous notions one would expect, a magical girl finds herself dealing with death, isolation, loss of humanity, agony over the value of her wish, and existential crisis. Madoka, following her friends, soon sees the darker side of being a magical girl, and because of knowing the truth about being a magical girl, she questions if she should become one as well.

Quick note on Magica Quartet:

Magica Quartet is the name of the group formed of SHAFT and Anipex for Puella Magi Madoka Magica franchise. Iwakami Atsuhiro as the main producer, directing by Akiyuki Shinbo, writing by Gen Urobuchi and character designs by Ume Aoki. 

Do not be fooled by this though!

Info on Kafka on the Shore

Title: Kafka on the Shore 

Author: Haruki Murakami

Publisher: Vintage

Date of Publication: 2006 (first published in Japan in 2002)

Number of Pages: 480

Summary

Kafka on the Shore, a tour de force of metaphysical reality, is powered by two remarkable characters: a teenage boy, Kafka Tamura, who runs away from home either to escape a gruesome oedipal prophecy or to search for his long-missing mother and sister; and an aging simpleton called Nakata, who never recovered from a wartime affliction and now is drawn toward Kafka for reasons that, like the most basic activities of daily life, he cannot fathom. Their odyssey, as mysterious to them as it is to us, is enriched throughout by vivid accomplices and mesmerizing events. Cats and people carry on conversations, a ghostlike pimp employs a Hegel-quoting prostitute, a forest harbors soldiers apparently unaged since World War II, and rainstorms of fish (and worse) fall from the sky. There is a brutal murder, with the identity of both victim and perpetrator a riddle - yet this, along with everything else, is eventually answered, just as the entwined destinies of Kafka and Nakata are gradually revealed, with one escaping his fate entirely and the other given a fresh start on his own.

About the Author

Haruki Murakami is one of the most popular Japanese authors, with his works translated into 50 languages and selling millions of copies outside his native country. Since childhood, Murakami has been heavily influenced by Western culture, particularly Western music and literature. He grew up reading a range of works by American writers, such as Kurt Vonnegut and Richard Brautigan, and he is often distinguished from other Japanese writers by his Western influence. His work has gathered many awards. In 1979 the Gunzo Award for Hear the Wind Sing, in 1982 the Noma Literary Prize for A Wild Sheep Chase, in 1985 the Tanizaki Prize for Hard-boiled Wonderland and the Eve of the World, in 1995 the Yomiuri Prize for The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, in 2006 the World Fantasy Award for Kafka on the Shore and in 2006 he received the Frank O'Connor Internation Short Story Award for Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman. In 2006, he was also the sixth recipient of the Franz Kafka Prize. 

Learn more about the author on his official website.

To learn more about Kafka on the Shore read what Murakami himself has to say about it in the interviews in BookBrowse and Paris Review magazine.

Info on Kitchen

Title: Kitchen

Author: Banana Yoshimoto

Publisher: Grove Press

Date of Publication: 2006 (first published in Japan in 1988)

Number of Pages: 152

Summary

This book contains two stories, Kitchen and Moonlight Shadow, both told through the eyes of a pair of contemporary Japanese women.

In Kitchen, a young woman named Mikage Sakurai struggles to overcome the death of her grandmother. She gradually grows close to one of her grandmother's friends, Yuichi, from a flower shop and ends up staying with him and his transgender mother, Eriko.

In Moonlight Shadow, a woman named Satsuki loses her boyfriend Hitoshi in an accident. She becomes friendly with his brother Hiiragi, whose girlfriend died in the same crash. On one insomniac night out walking she meets a strange woman called Urara who has also lost someone.

About the Author

Banana Yoshimoto, born as Mahoko Yoshimoto, is a Japanese contemporary writer. She is the daughter of Takaaki Yoshimoto, a famous Japanese poet and critic. Her sister Haruno Yuiko is a well-known cartoonist in Japan. While in Nihon University Art College she took the pseudonym "Banana" after her love of banana flowers. Yoshimoto was awarded the 39th edition Best Newcomer Artist Recommended by the Minister of Education in August 1988 for Kitchen and Utakata/Sankuchuari. In 1989, she was awarded the 2nd Yamamoto Shugoro Prize for Goodbye Tsugumi. In 1994, her novel Amrita was awarded the Murasaki-shikibu Prize. She was also awarded several prizes in Italy while in 2011 her novel The Lake was longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize.

To learn more about Banana Yoshimoto visit her official page or read her interviews on Bookslut and Banana Writers.

Info on The Woman in the Dunes

After reading The Gracekeepers, I'm now ready to continue with the Japanese literature themed read. The next book on the list is The Woman in the Dunes, a book that is considered a classic. 

Title: The Woman in the Dunes

Author: Kobo Abe

Publisher: Vintage

Date of Publication: 1991 (first published in Japan in 1962)

Number of Pages: 256

Summary

After missing the last bus home following a day trip to the seashore, an amateur entomologist is offered lodging for the night at the bottom of a vast sand pit. But when he attempts to leave the next morning, he quickly discovers that the locals have other plans. Held captive with seemingly no chance of escape, he is tasked with shoveling back the ever-advancing sand dunes that threaten to destroy the village. His only companion is an odd young woman. Together their fates become intertwined as they work side by side at this Sisyphean task.

About the Author

Kobo Abe was a Japanese writer, playwright, photographer and inventor. He studied medicine at Tokyo University, although he never practiced it. His style of writing is often compared to that of Franz Kafka and Alberto Moravia for his surreal explorations of individuals in contemporary society. In 1951, he was awarded the Akutagawa Prize (the biggest literary prize in Japan) for The Crime of S. Karuma. In 1962, he received the Yomiuri Prize for The Woman in the Dunes while in 1967 he was awarded the Tanizaki Prize for his play Friends. He was nominated several times for the Nobel Prize and Kenzaburo Oe (who has already won it) declared that he deserved it. 

The Woman in the Dunes was turned into a movie in 1964, directed by Hiroshi Teshigahara. This is only a small scene.

Info on The Gracekeepers

Although I'm in the middle of the Japanese theme, I received this book via NetGalley and it seems so amazing that I simply had to read it straight away. So I will make a small exception and review The Gracekeepers first and then I will continue with The Woman in the Dunes.

Title: The Gracekeepers

Author: Kirsty Logan

Publisher: Harvill Secker

Date of Publication: May 7th, 2015

Number of Pages: 304

Summary

The sea has flooded the earth. North lives on a circus boat, floating between the scattered islands that remain. She dances with her beloved bear while the rest of the crew trade dazzling and death-defying feats for food from the islanders. However, North has a secret that could capsize her life with the circus.

Callanish lives alone in her house in the middle of the ocean, with only the birds and the fish for company. As penance for a terrible mistake, she works as a gracekeeper, tending the graves of those who die at sea. What drove her from home is also what pulls her towards North.

When a storm creates a chance meeting between the two girls, their worlds change. They are magnetically drawn to one another, and the promise of a new life. But the waters are treacherous, and the tide is against them. 

About the author

Kirsty Logan is a writer based in Glasgow. Her first book, The Rental Heart and Other Fairytales, is a short story collection and The Gracekeepers is her first novel.

Learn more about her on her personal site.

Info on Hotel Iris

After reading The Housekeeper and the Professor, I was very impressed with Yoko Ogawa and I've been meaning to read her other novels as well, the translated ones by the way. So I'm so happy that I get the chance with the Japanese theme to read another of her novels, Hotel Iris.

Title: Hotel Iris

Author: Yoko Ogawa

Publisher: Picador

Date of Publication: 2010 (first published in Japan in 1996)

Number of Pages: 164

Summary:

In a crumbling seaside hotel on the coast of Japan, quiet seventeen-year-old Mari works the front desk as her mother tends to the off-season customers. When one night they are forced to expel a middle-aged man and a prostitute from their room, Mari finds herself drawn to the man's voice, in what will become the first gesture of a single long seduction. In spite of her provincial surroundings, and her cool but controlling mother, Mari is a sophisticated observer of human desire, and she sees in this man something she has long been looking for. The man is a proud if threadbare translator living on an island off the coast. A widower, there are whispers around town that he may have murdered his wife. Mari begins to visit him on his island, and he soon initiates her into a dark realm of both pain and pleasure, a place in which she finds herself more at easy even than the translator. As Mari's mother begins to close in on the affair, Mari's sense of what is suitable and what is desirable are recklessly engaged.

About the author:

Yoko Ogawa was born in 1962 and still lives in Japan. Since 1988, she has published more than forty works of fiction and nonfiction. She was introduced to the west with her short story The Cafeteria in the Evening and a Pool in the Rain, which was published in 2004 on The New Yorker. Ogawa was nominated and won many awards, more notably the Akutagawa Award in 1990. Her other works include The Housekeeper and the Professor, The Diving Pool and Revenge.

As an introduction to this author, you can read two of her short stories here. 

Info on Battle Royale

Title: Battle Royale

Author: Koushun Takami

Publisher: Viz, LLC

Date of Publication: 2003

Number of Pages: 617






Summary:

Battle Royale, a high-octane thriller about senseless youth violence, is one of Japan's best-selling and most controversial novels. As part of a ruthless program by the totalitarian government, ninth-grade students are taken to a small isolated island with a map, food, and various weapons. Forced to wear special collars that explode when they break a rule, they must fight each other for three days until only one "winner" remains. The elimination contest becomes the ultimate in must-see reality television.

Info on The Buried Giant

Title: The Buried Giant

Author: Kazuo Ishiguro

Publisher: Knopf

Date of Publication: March 3rd 2015

Number of Pages: 336

Summary:

The Romans have long since departed and Britain is steadily declining into ruins. But at least, the wars the once ravaged the country have ceased. Axl and Beatrice, a couple of elderly Britons, decide that now is the time, finally, for them to set off across this troubled land of mist and rain to find the son the have not seen for years, the son they can scarcely remember. They know they will face many hazards - some strangw and otherwordly - but they cannot foresee how their journey will reveal to them the dark and forgotten corners of their love for each other. Nor can they forsee that they will be joined on their journey by a Saxon warrior, his orphan charge, and a knight - each of them, like Axl and Beatrice, lost in some way to his own past, inexorably toward the comfort, and the burden, of the fullness of a life's memories.

Listen to Kazuo Ishiguro discuss his new novel:

And hear an extract of The Buried Giant:

Info on The Bone Clocks

The sixth novel of David Mitchell was published in 2014.

Summary: 

One drowsy summer's day in 1984, teenage runaway Holly Sykes encounters a strange woman who offers a small kindness in exchange for "asylum". Decades will pass before Holly understands exactly what sort of asylum the woman was seeking...

The Bone Clocks follows the twists and turns of Holly's life, from a scarred adolescence in Gravesend to old age on Ireland's Atlantic coast as Europe's oil supply dries up - a life not so far out of the ordinary, yet punctuated by flashes of precognition, visits from people who emerge from thin air and brief lapses in the laws of reality. For Holly Sykes - daughter, sister, mother, guardian - is also an unwitting player in a murderous feud played out in the shadows and margins of our world, and may prove to be its decisive weapon.

The author discusses the book

David Mitchell reads an extract from The Bone Clocks:

Info on The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

In 1799, Jacob de Zoet disembarks on the tiny island of Dejima, the Dutch East India Company’s remotest trading post in a Japan otherwise closed to the outside world. A junior clerk, his task is to uncover evidence of the previous Chief Resident’s corruption.

Cold-shouldered by his compatriots, Jacob earns the trust of a local interpreter and, more dangerously, becomes intrigued by a rare woman—a midwife permitted to study on Dejima under the company physician. He cannot foresee how disastrously each will be betrayed by someone they trust, nor how intertwined and far-reaching the consequences.

Duplicity and integrity, love and lust, guilt and faith, cold murder and strange immortality stalk the stage in this enthralling novel, which brings to vivid life the ordinary—and extraordinary—people caught up in a tectonic shift between East and West.

David Mitchell on Bookworm 2010

Info on Black Swan Green

Black Swan Green is the fourth novel by David Mitchell and it was published in 2006. 

Black Swan Green tracks a single year in what is, for thirteen-year-old Jason Taylor, the sleepiest village in muddiest Worcestershire in a dying Cold War England, 1982. But the thirtheen chapters, each a short story in its own right, create an exquisitely observed world that is anything but sleepy. A world of Kissingeresque realpolitik enacted in boys' games on a frozen lake; of "nightcreeping" through summer backyards of strangers; of the tabloid-fueled thrills of the Falkland War and its human toll; of the cruel, luscious Dawn Madden and her power-hungry boyfriend, Ross Wilcox; of a certain Madame Eva van Outryve de Crommelynck, an elderly bohemian immigrant who is both more and less than she appears; of Jason's search to replace his dead grandfather's irreplaceable smashed watch before the crime is discovered; of first cigarettes, first kisses, first Duran Duran LPs, and first deaths; of Margaret Thatcher's recession; of Gypsies comping in the woods and the hysteria they inspire; and, even closer to home, of a slow-motion divorce in four seasons.

David Mitchell on Bookworm, 2006

Info on Cloud Atlas

The third novel of David Mitchell is Cloud Atlas, published in 2004.

A reluctant voyager crossing the Pacific in 1850; a disinherited composer blagging a precarious livelihood in between-the-wars Belgium; a high-minded journalist in Governor Reagan's California; a vanity publisher fleeing his gangland creditors; a genetically modified "dinery server" on death-row; and Zachry, a young Pacific Islander witnessing the nightfall of science and civilisation - the narrators of Cloud Atlas hear each other's echoes down the corridor of history, and their destinies are changed in ways great and small.

In his captivating third novel, David Mitchell erases the boundaries of language, genre and time to offer a meditation on humanity's dangerous will to power, and where in may lead us.

David Mitchell in Bookworm (2005) discussing Cloud Atlas.

Info on number9dream

The second novel of David Mitchell is number9dream, published in 2001.

Summary of the book: In outwardform, number9dream is a Dickensian coming-of-age journey: Young dreamer Eiji Miyake, from remote rural Japan, thrust out on his own by his sister's death and his mother's breakdown, comes to Tokyo in pursuit of the father who abandoned him. Stumbling around this strange, awesome city, he trips over and crosses -through a hidden destiny or just monstrously bad luck- a number of its secret power centers. Suddenly, the riddle of his father's identity becomes just one of the increasingly urgent questions Eiji must answer. Why is the line between the worls of his experiences and the worlds of his dreams so blurry? Why do so many horrible things keep happening to him? What is it about the number 9? To answer these questions, and ultimately to come to terms with his inheritance, Eiji must somehow acquire an insight into the workings of history and fate that would be rare in anyone, much less in a boy from out of town with a price on his head and less than the cost of a Beatles disc to his name.  

David Mitchell discusses number9dream on Bookworm