The two novellas by Kanoko Okamoto I posted about this week, A Riot of Goldfish and The Food Demon, are not what you would call heavy on plot. Some stuff does happen, just not a whole lot, and most of the action occurs in the past. In A Riot of Goldfish, a middle-aged Mataichi [...]
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The Food Demon, the second novella reprinted along with A Riot of Goldfish, is also a story about art. Besshiroo longs to be an artist, above all to be called sensei by the high-born, privileged society he spends time with. He has serious talent in one area—cuisine—but in traditional Japan, cooking is not one [...] Kanoko Okamoto’s 1937 novella A Riot of Goldfish, recently reprinted by Hesperus Press along with The Food Demon, is a story of the artist’s desperate quest for beauty. Mataichi, the scion of a goldfish-raising family fallen on hard times, is able to pursue serious studies in aquaculture thanks to a wealthy benefactor whose daughter [...] Because I apparently hadn’t gotten enough stifling interiority reading The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, I thought I would follow up with Mishima’s 1950 novel, Thirst for Love. Etsuko, a Tokyo widow who has moved to the countryside to live at her in-laws’ villa, loves a servant boy from afar as [...] Ryu Murakami’s Popular Hits of the Showa Era, translated by Ralph McCarthy, is the first novel of his I’ve read since, years ago, I gave three of his older works a shot. Almost Transparent Blue, Coin-Locker Babies, and Sixty-Nine were all, as I remember, bizarre and grotesque works largely about alienation. So is this [...] Consider the subtitle of this post: “Attempting to understand Mishima, part IV of ?” If you thought the last thing I read by him was, oh, I don’t know, creepy, violent, weird, unpleasant, crazy, unsettling…The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea is probably even more so. Fusako is a youngish widow who [...] Hotel Iris is almost certain to surprise readers who know Yoko Ogawa only through The Housekeeper and the Professor, the first of her novels to be translated into English. Readers of The Diving Pool, a collection of three novellas published earlier, have had more of a hint of her dark side. But while this [...] Before The Housekeeper and the Professor was released this spring, the only other book available from Yoko Ogawa in English was The Diving Pool, a collection of three short stories. The blurbs on my Picador edition call the collection “eerie,” “psychoactive,” and “disturbing.” I found that a bit hard to believe after my previous [...] |
My Personal Canon (ongoing project) |
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