Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami 400 pp.

This early, award-winning novel is two parallel stories presented in alternating chapters with none of the characters named. Hard Boiled Wonderland involves Calcutec, a human data processor and encryption system who uses his subconscious as an encryption key.  He works for a secretive scientist in an underground Tokyo. End of the World involves the Narrator who has had his shadow removed thus removing his memory of his former life. He is tasked with reading the dreams housed in the skulls of dead animals with the assistance of the Librarian. Those descriptions don't even begin to cover Murakami's work. The best I can do is say you need to read it because I can't explain it to you.  

Tokyo travel sketchbook

Toko travel sketchbook: Kawaii culture, Wabi sabi design, female samurais and other obsessions / Amaia Arrazola, 192 pgs.

Arrazola had a month long artist-in-residency stint in Tokyo where she was tasked with creating a drawing every day.  This book is an expanded version of her work completed on the trip, adding more drawings, commentary and some photos. She casts an artist eye on the culture and digs into some topics that aren't significant in the way of history or importance but are the types of things you really want to know. Fun from start to finish.

The Emissary

The Emissary by Yoko Tawada, 138 pages

In Tokyo in the future, adults of a certain vintage are seemingly immortal, yet the toxic environment has rendered their great-grandchildren fragile, weak, and sick beings. It is against this backdrop that we find the energetic centenarian Yoshiro caring for his weak but wise great-grandson Mumei, worrying about Mumei's safety and diet, doing everything he can to create a comfortable and caring cocoon for the child, who seems destined to die well before his time. It may seem a depressing tale from this description, but somehow Tawada's quirky sense of humor brings a lightness to this dystopian tale. It's an odd little book, but I very much enjoyed it.

Newcomer

Newcomer: a Mystery / Keigo Higashino, trans. by Giles Murray, 342 p.

I don't remember Higashino's The Devotion of Suspect X very well, except that I was impressed by it.  So when Kara blogged favorably about this one, I took notice.  When a newcomer to the Nihonbashi precinct of Tokyo is found murdered, another newcomer, Detective Kyochiro Kaga, is charged with finding her killer.  Higashino cleverly constructs a coherent mystery from a series of lightly linked short stories, each containing its own small mystery.  Not quite cozy, and with a strong sense of a unique Tokyo neighborhood, known for its independent merchants and local handicrafts.

Newcomer

Newcomer by Keigo Higashino, 342 pages

A woman is found strangled in her apartment in Tokyo. Nobody in the neighborhood really knows her, and she hasn't spoken to her son or ex-husband in ages. So how do you figure out who killed her and why? That's the job of Kyochiro Kaga, a police detective who is, like the murder victim, a newcomer to the area. Detective Kaga sets about retracing the woman's routines, visiting the same shops she did, going on the same walks, and getting to know the neighbors. Kaga's unorthodox sleuthing is told in an equally unorthodox way — through short vignettes that focus on the shops and restaurants in the neighborhood, with Kaga solving their smaller mysteries along the way. Kaga is a charming character, one that is kind, unassuming, and undoubtedly brilliant. There's something of Agatha Christie in this story, and I enjoyed watching how it all wove together in the end.

Convenience Store Woman

Convenience Store Woman: a Novel / Sayaka Murata, 163 p.

In Graeme Simsion's The Rosie Project, a young man "on the spectrum" meets and falls in love with a "typical" woman who complements his amusing yet poignant idiosyncrasies.  I loved the book, and recommended it far and wide.

The convenience store woman, Keiko, is also somewhere on the spectrum.  Her loving family has never known how to help her, but when she lands a full-time job at a neighborhood convenience store, stocking shelves and greeting customers according to the company's cheery stock phrases, her life seems to take a positive turn.  She loves her job and feels adrift when she's away from work.  But Keiko's life shifts again when a moody, disaffected young man takes a job at the store.  Will Keiko grow and change in response?  Is a happy ending possible?

Just as funny in its way as The Rosie Project, but far darker in tone and outlook, Murata's novel felt extremely realistic psychologically.  Insightful, sad, and recommended.

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage / Haruki Murakami, trans.. Philip Gabriel, read by Bruce Locke,  386 p.

Tsukuru leads a placid life in Tokyo designing railway stations.  But his present life is marred by an incident from his past, in which he was cast out from his group of intimate friends.  The novel tells the story of his coming to terms with that long-ago incident.

I wanted to like this, my first Murakami, but I found it dreary and depressing.  I suspect that my feelings would be different if I had read the print version; next time I will try that.

The Gun / Fuminori Nakamura, translated by Allison Markin Powell, 198 pp.

A short, strange, and affecting novel.  Nishikawa, a young university student, happens to stumble across a crime scene and finds himself a gun owner as a result.  The novel tracks his slide into complete obsession with the weapon, to the detriment of his personal relationships, and, ultimately, his sanity.

Told in a disturbingly flat first-person narrative style, Nakamura seems to have hit on something I've talked about with friends but that I don't hear much about in the wider culture: gun love as a form of idolatry.  Frequent uneasy references to American cultural hegemony round out a disturbing, if not entirely pleasurable, read.