「嫌いなら呼ぶなよ」　綿矢りさ、 河出書房新社、2022 “Don’t Invite Me If You Dislike Me!” by Risa Wataya, Kawade Shobo Shinsha, 2022 In an interview, Risa Wataya said that she did not set out to write short stories about the pandemic or masks or social media, but when she put the characters she had thought up into our present, these aspects just naturally pushed their way through. Her characters are all self-centered and strong personalities who go after what they want, even if those around them do not understand or even reject them. Sometimes I wanted to cover my eyes so I didn’t have to see the car wreck that I fel ..read more

「出会い系サイトで70人と実際に会ってその人に合いそうな本をすすめまくった1年間のこと」、花田菜々子 My Year of Meeting 70 People in Real Life via an Online Matching Site and Recommending the Perfect Book, by Nanako Hanada I read this book when it was first published in 2018, drawn by the title and the fluorescent yellow cover, and read it again this year when it was made into a TV drama in Japan. You can read this book on many different levels—as a field journal of one woman’s experience on a matching site, a list of book recommendations, a primer on the bookselling industry—but it’s also just a great story of how roughly 70 strangers gave N ..read more

『推し、燃ゆ』宇佐見りん Idol, Burned, by Rin Usami Rin Usami won the Akutagawa Prize for 『推し、燃ゆ』 (“Idol, Burned”) at the age of 21, as a second-year university student. In 2019, she won the Mishima Yukio Prize for her debut novel 『かか』(Kaka), becoming the youngest person ever to win this award. “Idol, Burned” is narrated by Akari, a high school student when the story begins. This first-person narration thrusts the reader into the uncomfortable position of having to see the world through the lens of her fixation on an idol and its mental and even physical effects. But the brilliance of this book is that, i ..read more

With「本心」, Keiichiro Hirano (平野 啓一郎) has written a big, old-fashioned novel of ideas. It is set in the 2040s in a Japan in which a tenuous daily life is dominated by AI, and “voluntary death” has been legalized. Through the efforts of Sakuya, his main character, to create a virtual reality version of his mother, Hirano plays with his theory of “dividualism,” the idea that we are different depending on who we are with and the environment we are in. These unique selves make up who we are, without a single “true” self at our core. But this novel is not simply scaffolding for Hirano’s theories or s ..read more

「高円寺古本酒場ものがたり」狩野俊 Story of Koenji Books & Sake, by Suguru Karino The “Story of Koenji Books & Sake” is Suguru Karino’s account of how he started a bookstore and guided it through several transformations until it reached its current status as a combination bookstore, izakaya and event space. The first part of the book consists of diary entries in which Karino describes his working days, which often seem to be more about massive amounts of alcohol and his tendency to skip out on work than actual day-to-day operations. The reader could be forgiven for wondering if he even has many custome ..read more

I love reading; it’s my favorite thing to do. I know I’m not alone in this—luckily, there is a whole tribe of us out there, people who understand the complicated calculus our brains go through to figure out what book(s) to bring along while we brush our teeth and wash our faces and take baths (it must be light enough to hold but also lie flat). And surely I’m not the only who has hidden from my children, hoping no one will ask for dinner until I finish my book (that book, by the way, was 「ナミヤ雑貨店の奇蹟」by 東野圭吾, an otherwise forgettable novel but a great example of addictive plot structures ..read more

「メゾン刻の湯」　小野美由紀, 2018 Maison Toki no Yu, by Miyuki Ono, 2018 In my quest for books set at sento or onsen, I ran across 「メゾン刻の湯」by Miyuki Ono. When Ono had a mental health breakdown and had quit her job, she lost out on the human interaction it had provided. She was living in a cheap apartment without a bath at the time, so every day she went to Hachimanyu Sento in her Yoyogi neighborhood. There she found a different kind of society, one in which people from all ranks of life soak in the bath together. Realizing that everyone is the same once they strip off their clothes gave Ono a real sense of ..read more

高円寺純情商店街　ねじめ正一 Koenji Junjo Shopping Street by Shoichi Nejime This novel, first published in 1989, won the 101st Naoki Prize that year, and has proved so  popular that the name of the shopping street Nejime wrote about was officially changed from Koenji Ginza Shotengai to Koenji Junjo (Pure Heart) Shotengai after the title of his novel. The arch at one end of the Koenji Junjo Shotengai Source: kosugiyu.co.jp Writing in the third person, Nejime describes his parents’ store and their neighbors in Koenji in the early 1960s, and although the six stories are told with great humor, this is no ..read more

「自転しながら公転する」　山本文緒 Spinning while revolving, by Fumio Yamamoto [no English translation available] It takes real skill to write a novel that draws the reader (at least this reader) so completely into the preoccupations of a character who is often petty, self-involved and boring—in other words, completely ordinary. Yamamoto succeeds with her creation of Miyako, a person I found so real that she followed me around in my head all day, where we could endlessly hash out her problems. And Miyako certainly has problems. Now in her 30s, she has quit her job managing a high-end clothing store in Tokyo an ..read more

The end of the Christmas and New Years holidays don’t seem such a letdown because I have both the announcement of the Naoki and Akutagawa Awards and the nominees for the Japanese Booksellers Award to look forward to. This year, I woke up to the news of the Naoki and Akutagawa awards and waited up for the Booksellers Award announcement, with the US presidential inauguration sandwiched in between, so it was a banner day. As one bookseller said, bookstore employees are supposed to nominate books that are not necessarily selling well but deserve more readers. This year, I would happily read just a ..read more