厂别惫别苍迟别别苍听by Hideo听Yokoyama
Translated from Japanese by Louise Heal Kawai
368 pgs. | hc |听9780374261245 | $28.00

Review by Maggie Myers

Seventeen is a thrilling mixture of truth and fiction by Hideo Yokoyama, acclaimed author of Six Four (which has also been translated into English). Seventeen realistically portrays the turmoil engendered on both a personal and a professional level by the very real 1985 crash of Japan Airlines Flight 123, which is still the deadliest single-aircraft disaster in history. The book opens in 2003 with Kazumasa Yuuki embarking on a climb up the Tsuitate rock face of Mount Tanigawa鈥攐ften referred to as the “Mountain of Death.” As he makes the ascent, he recalls the day of the crash seventeen years ago and the week following as he worked as a reporter for the North Kanto Times, responsible for covering the tragedy. Through flashbacks, he vividly describes the events of each day and the emotions triggered within him, especially as they related to decisions about what to print about the crash.

Yuuki’s insights offer an unusual perspective on tragedy, as grief for the lives lost contends with the excitement of such a momentous scoop. Beyond his internal ethics, the broader impact of the event on the newsroom reveals the convoluted, and somewhat corrupt, power machinations within the NKT. Added to the balance are young reporters who are filled with their own self-importance, unwilling to accept that they might be wrong. Hanazawa, one of the first reporters to climb to the scene of the crash, is furious with Yuuki for passing over his article in favor of one from another reporter:

“Wajima’s account is fake. What I described鈥攖hat’s the true accident scene. The corpses, the entrails, shouldn’t we write about everything? Isn’t it a newspaper’s mission to make sure this never happens again? If we don’t paint a true picture of the full fucking misery, then what’s the point? If you say you won’t publish my article, I’ll take it somewhere else. I can’t do this anymore. It was horrendous. There were corpses everywhere. Literally as far as the eye could see. There was not one decent, normal thing about it. Scattered all over鈥�”

His voice was cut off by Yuuki’s hands around his throat. Yuuki pushed until Hanazawa’s head touched the wall behind him. Even then the man was still trying to speak.

“Just remember this,” Yuuki said through clenched teeth. “Those five hundred and twenty people didn’t lose their lives for you to get off on it.”

Yokoyama himself was a reporter who covered the JAL123 crash, which lends an undeniable authenticity to his writing. He uses Yuuki’s fictitious perspective to remove himself from his memories and reexamine everything that happened. Unlike Yuuki, Yokoyama climbed to the crash site immediately after the disaster and, because the trek was so long and arduous, he had to “spend the night on the mountain, surrounded by body parts that no longer resembled anything human.” Yokoyama wrote this novel in part to “escape” his memories of the crash, seventeen years afterward鈥攍ike Yuuki, who is reliving his experience seventeen years later.

Kawai’s translation brought the emotions and concepts behind Yokoyama’s words into English without any residual awkwardness. Even without familiarity with Japanese culture, readers can pick up on certain cultural details, like the respect for age and social status, which is made apparent in the translation as well. At one point, Yuuki receives a reliable tip about the cause of the crash, but decides not to print it before receiving confirmation, which leads to another paper beating the NKT to the scoop. Despite derision from most of the office, a fellow (but younger) reporter calls Yuuki to tell him he made the right decision and refers to him as “Yuu-san” instead of the normal “Yuuki-san.” The difference seems slight until Yuuki, thinking back to the phone call, draws attention to it regrets not thanking him for using the appellation, making clear the close bond of respect and friendship implied by the nickname.

Yuuki’s recollections of that week in 1985 are interwoven with chapters detailing his progress up Tsuitate, providing a break from the fast-paced action in the newsroom. As he climbs up with Rintaro Anzai, the son of his colleague Kyoichiro Anzai, information about present circumstances invites many questions about the past鈥攚hy did Kyoichiro collapse and go into a coma on the same night as the crash? In what capacity is Yuuki now working for the NKT, and why did it change? How did he end up acting as Rintaro’s second father? The evolving mysteries set the book within a broader framework, beyond just the week of the disaster. Tidbits of information provide a welcome distraction from news of the flight.

The author’s candor in describing Yuuki’s reasoning makes him quite relatable. Some of his choices are incredibly frustrating because he considers better options but is too cowardly to see them through. Power machinations within the NKT clearly have a huge impact on what gets printed, and from his position Yuuki can see everyone’s political alignments. Trying not to pick a side, as we all know, only gets him so far. His moral compass seems to be relatively well aligned, but he often lacks the nerve and willpower to fight for what he believes to be right. Eventually he gains both confidence and courage and begins to make more controversial decisions鈥攔isking the wrath of his superiors and forcing him to decide between his integrity and his job.

The Great Passage by Shion Miura
translated from the Japanese by听Juliet Winters Carpenter
222 pgs. | pb |9781477823071 |听$14.95听

Reviewed by Talia Franks

听

Shion Miura鈥檚 The Great Passage chronicles the construction of a dictionary also called The Great Passage, which is a comprehensive catalog of the Japanese language, the completion of which is a defining moment both professionally and personally for all involved. Yet, more than any other narrative thread, this book is centered around how words affect the human experience.

Written in third person limited, the character upon which the narration is focused changes throughout the text. This makes each character more individually accessible since the reader is allowed into the minds of multiple people and thus sees the story through the many perspectives that shape the work into a cohesive whole despite the shifting focus. Where one character might misinterpret the actions of another, and readers can see both perspectives of the exchange, which allows for a fuller narrative. This falls in line with a major theme of the book: that words enable mutual understanding of complex ideas and emotions. For example, multiple characters reflect on how the protagonist, Majime, has trouble expressing himself, as can be seen when reading Majime鈥檚 own perspective.

The split narration provides an advantage in many places throughout the book, as there are places where time skips. This switch in perspective to each new character’s internal reflections indicates this passage of time to the reader, and enables them to contextualize themselves in regard to how the narrative takes shape.

The book actually starts not with Majime, but with Kohei Araki, who wants to find someone as passionate as he is about dictionaries to replace him when he retires from the Dictionary Editorial Department. Not only does he want to leave the department in good hands, but Araki seeks someone who will continue to work on The Great Passage, which is a massive undertaking.

Aside from Araki, the characters who are most alive in the text are Nishioka and Midori Kishibe. Nishioka, an employee at the office who seems to simply do the bare minimum, is at first portrayed as careless and a bit of a womanizer before the reader is allowed into his perspective, and slowly, a hidden depth is revealed as Nishioka matures and the reader spends more time within his mind. In contrast to Nishioka, who is developed through viewing snippets of his consciousness from near the beginning of the text, readers are introduced to the character of Midori Kishibe late in the book and spend an entire chapter (out of five total) inside of Kishibe鈥檚 mind. Kishibe鈥檚 observations are meant to supplement Majime鈥檚 narrative, but in the process, readers are taken in to her world, and at the end I found myself much more invested in her story than that of Majime.

The plot of the book is mostly concerned with the making of the dictionary, with the aforementioned dips into the personal lives of the characters鈥攑rimarily the development of Majime鈥檚 relationship with Kaguya, who works as a chef at a frequently visited restaurant and is the granddaughter of Tak茅, Majime鈥檚 landlady. That said, the romantic relationships are, while important to the plot of the text, not nearly as engaging as the friendships and bonds created through the construction of The Great Passage, and the commentary that the book itself makes on the power of words.

As a non-speaker of Japanese, I would have been hopelessly lost when reading a text about the making of Japanese dictionaries were it not for the thoughtful explanations that I can only assume are the work of the translator, Juliet Winters Carpenter. Each time the use of a particular word had a special significance that would inform a character’s actions or intentions, there was a short expansion of the utterance that explained the use of the word and the implications of its use. These expansions fit so well into the English text that it was only because I was paying particular attention to these parts of the story that I even noticed them, they so little affected the narrative flow.

More than any other book I’ve read, The Great Passage has made me consider the cause and effect that words have on a person through every waking and dreaming moment, and its focus on the effect of dictionaries as keepers of a culture, able to either build bridges or build walls between the past, present, and future of a language and therefore community, took my breath away when reading. The Great Passage is interwoven with romantic love stories, but ultimately it is the passion of the characters, their friendship and their devotion to their task that direct and complete the narrative and turn it from simply a good book to a great one.

Death by Water听by Kenzaburu Oe
translated from the Japanese听by Deborah Boliver Boehm
432 pgs. | pb | 9781101911914 | $16.00

Reviewed by Will Eells

Death by Water, Kenzaburo Oe鈥檚 latest novel to be translated into English, practically begs you to read it as autobiography. Like The Changeling, as well as many other works not yet released in English, Death by Water is narrated in the first person by Kogito Choko, a septuagenarian writer with published works including The Silent Cry and The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away. If those titles sound familiar to you, it鈥檚 because those actually are real-life titles by Oe, The Day He Himself in particular being a part of the collection Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness.

As a matter of fact, Death by Water is in many ways a direct response to The Day He Himself, and few pages go by without it being mentioned. The reason? Death by Water is essentially the story of Choko (our Oe stand-in) trying to re-write the same dramatic event of his childhood as fictionalized in The Day He Himself, i.e. the sudden drowning of his father. However, while The Day He Himself is a deliberately grotesque and stylized dramatization of the event, Death by Water is a sort of metafiction, a writer writing about the act of writing.

The plot, such as it is, finds Oe鈥檚 stand-in Choko aware of the coming end of his writing career. Besides a monthly opinion piece for the newspaper, he hardly writes anymore. Ten years after his mother鈥檚 death, he suddenly gets the chance to retrieve his late father鈥檚 old, red leather trunk, containing his notes, diary entries, and evidence of his failed coup attempt after World War II and his escape from perceived authorities leading to his death by drowning. Choko feels he can finally write a definitive version of this turn of events, as in his old age he finds his previous effort, the aforementioned The Day He Himself, to be 鈥渁n embarrassingly immature piece of work.鈥� At the same time, he becomes involved with an avant-garde theater company The Caveman Group, who in the past has dramatized Kogito鈥檚 work for the stage, and is hoping to create a new work in tandem with the 鈥渄rowning novel鈥� Kogito now wants to write. The thing is, about a third of the way through the novel, Kogito discovers his mother has already destroyed most of the trunk鈥檚 contents, and Kogito finds himself unable to continue his work.

And yet, Death by Water continues to amble on for another three hundred or so pages, the ponderous middle section a more generous reviewer might call 鈥渞eflective,鈥� as Oe reconnects with his past, and reflects on the act of writing itself. The novel is absurdly self-aware, as Kogito/Oe reflects on his own quirks and failures as a writer. He even poses the question directly in a conversation with a friend, who complains:

鈥淎t some point, doesn鈥檛 it become overkill? I mean, can these serial slices of thinly veiled memoir really be considered genuine novels? . . . Why do you choose to write about such a solipsistic and narrowly circumscribed world?鈥�

鈥淓verything you say is true,鈥� I said. 鈥淚 admit that freely . . . but I always seem to come back to the sobering realization that if I hadn鈥檛 used the quasi-autobiographical approach I wouldn鈥檛 have been able to write anything at all. In other words, I鈥檝e had to maintain this narrow focus out of sheer necessity.鈥�

And while it鈥檚 true that there seems to always be a pretty strong basis of fact in even Oe鈥檚 early work, anyone who has read said work would know that Oe is capable of some fantastic, bizarre, and unreal stories. The contrast between Kogito/Oe鈥檚 early and late works becomes a major question of Death by Water, one that even Oe doesn鈥檛 seem to know how to answer. So what is better: youthful expressionism and raw creativity or the maturity, wisdom, and hindsight of experience?

It鈥檚 hard to say what Oe the writer or Kogito the character thinks on the matter. Are the late works, as Adorno says, catastrophes? Or, in the more hopeful interpretation of Edward Said, are the late works: 鈥渢hrillingly catastrophic work that manages to overturn and surpass all the creations that went before?鈥�

Oe seems to be hopeful of the latter, but I wouldn鈥檛 say that Death by Water is a successful example. The novel is overly long, disjointed, and aimless, particularly once the narrative thread suddenly revs up in the last hundred pages, and a more compelling story emerges when Unaiko, Kogito鈥檚 main liaison and friend in The Caveman Group, attempts to dramatize her own painful past via an abandoned script of Kogito鈥檚 to a conservative audience unwilling to deal with the issues it presents.

Oh, Unaiko, the true star of this show! One of the few characters in the novel who feels like a character and not simply a soapbox for Kogito to argue with, Unaiko has a story that needs telling, and a version of Death by Water two hundred pages shorter and more evenly split between Kogito and Unaiko鈥檚 creative relationship to their respective past histories seems like it would鈥檝e made these questions of life influencing art and art influencing life much more entertaining and thought-provoking. Perhaps a younger writer would鈥檝e dramatized her story directly. But even that raises the question: who gets to tell it; who is allowed to tell Unaiko鈥檚 story? Is Oe being respectful by not appropriating a woman鈥檚 more powerful and engaging story, one that could very well be more or less 鈥渢rue鈥� for his own dramatic ends? Or is Oe, with his limitations as a writer, simply incapable of writing the story any other way?

Death by Water raises these interesting questions about mortality, political correctness, art cannibalizing life, and frankly, art cannibalizing itself, but comes up with few satisfactory answers. It is appropriately ambitious for a late work, but by being overly long, digressive, and didactic, Death by Water is more the bad catastrophic than the good. This doesn鈥檛 make Oe suddenly a bad writer鈥攂ut a novel addressing your flaws as a novelist does not absolve you of said sins. Maybe just write a different novel.

Here’s the beginning of Will’s review:

Like any good potboiler worth its salt, Fuminori Nakamura’s The Gun wastes no time setting up its premise: “Last night, I found a gun. Or you could say I stole it, I’m not really sure. I’ve never seen something so beautiful, or that feels so right in my hand. I didn’t have much interest in guns before, but the moment I saw it, all I could think about was making it mine.”

The “I” here is a young man named Nishikawa. He’s probably in his 20s, because he’s a university student, but beyond that, there’s not much to glean from his personal life, because he’s not one for introspection. Much more fascinating is his new object of obsession, and like a man sleepwalking through life, Nishikawa finally seems to have a purpose: to use that gun.

For a debut novel, there is a lot to like here. Despite some clunky and repetitive prose, Nakamura knows how to ratchet up the tension, as we slowly progress from Nishikawa simply owning the gun, to taking care of the gun, to bringing the gun around with him, until finally, feeling like he needs to shoot that gun, at something or someone. Even as readers we know this is a foregone conclusion, but Nakamura, particularly as we barrel into the climax, knows how to employ multiple bait and switches to keep us guessing as to Nishikawa’s ultimate fate.

For the rest of the review, go here.

The “I” here is a young man named Nishikawa. He’s probably in his 20s, because he’s a university student, but beyond that, there’s not much to glean from his personal life, because he’s not one for introspection. Much more fascinating is his new object of obsession, and like a man sleepwalking through life, Nishikawa finally seems to have a purpose: to use that gun.

For a debut novel, there is a lot to like here. Despite some clunky and repetitive prose, Nakamura knows how to ratchet up the tension, as we slowly progress from Nishikawa simply owning the gun, to taking care of the gun, to bringing the gun around with him, until finally, feeling like he needs to shoot that gun, at something or someone. Even as readers we know this is a foregone conclusion, but Nakamura, particularly as we barrel into the climax, knows how to employ multiple bait and switches to keep us guessing as to Nishikawa’s ultimate fate.

What’s most satisfying about The Gun, though, is how fully realized Nishikawa is as a character for whom self-analysis is not only difficult, but pointless. Where The Gun really succeeds is as a portrait of a young sociopath, vaguely aware of traditional morality but ultimately succumbing to his own desires against all else. His obsession with the gun is chilling simply because of how easily he can justify his own compulsions, and treat them as practically mundane:

I rarely yearned for anything out of the ordinary. It didn’t much matter to me if everyone else had the same things as I did. The thing was that I had found it. The same way that, for instance, some people found pleasure drawing pictures or making music, or they relied on work or women, drugs or religion, I felt like I had discovered what I was passionate about. And for me, that thing was nothing more than the gun. There was nothing wrong with me. That’s what I realized. And I started to relax.

So what makes a sociopath? Nakamura gives us no easy answers, but simply a number of clues that might lead in one direction or another; perhaps it’s a combination of all of them, or none at all.

Written initially in 2002, The Gun, despite being written in Japan, is a thoroughly post 9-11 novel, and one that still hold weight in today’s America, a country divided between the threat of ISIS and terrorism and the homespun problems of domestic gun laws. In one section, Nishikawa goes to the library to find news stories about the missing gun, and glazes over a litany of issues that still resonate eerily today:

The vast majority of the articles were completely irrelevant to me. Whether the Americans had dropped a bomb somewhere in Afghanistan, or whether their strategy would succeed-these kinds of things had nothing to do with me right now. What Japan’s reaction would be, or whether Japan would become entangled with it-such questions did not interest me at the moment either. A kid had died after being bullied, and his parents had sued the school and the bully. There was a fire somewhere, and it was difficult to say whether it had been arson or an accident. There was a festival. Funds were embezzled, and the culprit had fled. There was a scientific discovery. Two trucks had collided. Someone had been run over. An intellectual whose name I didn’t recognize gave his opinions about the United States, offering advice to the Japanese government. Politicians quarreled, talking earnestly about something or other. Two entertainers died. It seemed like the information I was looking for was not to be found in any of these newspapers.

The descriptions above are vague, yes, but in its blandness the reader sees how very little progress the world has seen in the last fifteen years.

One thing that’s not made explicit, but tacitly alluded to (why would it, in a book written initially for Japanese readers) is that the whole reason finding this particular gun is extraordinary is because guns are illegal in Japan, and not 鈥渏ust a part of everyday life, nothing particularly unusual about them鈥� like they are in the United States. So is Westernization to blame, influences from a violent, external cultural force?

Not quite, or probably not entirely (Japan certainly has its share of crime, murder, and suicide). Is it instead, perhaps, a lack of culture? Nishikawa is constantly referencing the boredom and monotony of his existence, and is essentially a person with no particular passions or desire for the future, until, at least, he finds the gun. But Nishikawa is far from the only character affected by ennui. All of Nishikawa’s friends and acquaintances are of dubious moral standards or at the very least, not particularly driven. There’s Toast Girl, a nameless, casual sex partner who doesn’t mind sleeping with Nishikawa as long as her boyfriend doesn’t find out; Keisuke, his sex-driven, womanizing 鈥渇riend鈥�; his neighbor, who it becomes clear is beating her son; and finally, Yuko, a classmate for whom Nishikawa may have some deeper feelings for, but who is equally apathetic about her future and why she even bothers with university in the first place. Is perhaps The Gun a criticism of meaningful opportunity and engagement for Japan’s Millennial generation?

Finally, and somewhat less successfully, is a rather humdrum Nature vs. Nurture question. It turns out Nishikawa was more or less orphaned when his real father abandoned him (being raised instead by foster parents), and whom Nishikawa visits on his deathbed in the course of the novel. The connection is more or less made explicit when Nishikawa suddenly remembers how at the orphanage, he had trained himself with a coping mechanism of: 鈥渋f I didn’t think about things, then I wouldn’t be unhappy.鈥�

Nakamura seems content to let all these factors influence the reader’s perception, and it ultimately works because, instead of an easy answer, what the reader gets is a surprisingly complex character study of a very unreliable narrator. In his writing career, Nakamura would also go on to receive great acclaim for another character study disguised as run-of-the-mill thriller with The Thief, the first of his novels to come out in English from Soho Press. The Gun is an admittedly rough genesis of what would become Nakamura’s ultimate strength, and why he’s more Patricia Highsmith than James Patterson: a literary bias toward character over plot machinations. And despite his penchant for the darkness in his character’s souls, in the end, Nakamura betrays his slightly more optimistic outlook for humanity: the fascination and impulse for destruction is human, but the act is not. The problem is that the line dividing the two is awfully thin.

Robert Anthony Siegel is the author of two novels, All Will Be Revealed and All the Money in the World. Recent work of his has been in Tin House and the New York Times, and is forthcoming in The Paris Review. More information on him and his work can be found at his .

Here’s the beginning of Robert’s review:

The Crimson Thread of Abandon is the first collection of short fiction available in English by the prolific Japanese writer and all-around avant-garde trickster Terayama Sh奴ji, who died in 1983 at the age of 47. This collection would be important even if it wasn鈥檛 as good as it is: an introduction to the work of a creative colossus who helped define the Japanese counterculture in the 1960s and 鈥�70s, leaving his mark not only on fiction and poetry, but also on photography, film, TV, radio, and the theater.

As it happens, Crimson Thread is thin but lovely, a gathering of very short wisps of stories that read sometimes as cracked postmodernist fables, sometimes as bemused and irreverent prose poems 脿 la James Tate (Terayama actually started out as a tanka poet, bent on upending that most self-consciously refined of ancient aristocratic traditions). Terayama鈥檚 work thus anticipated both the rise of flash fiction and the resurgence of the fairy tale as a medium for serious writing. In his fictive world, puppets fall in love and make their owners jealous, lovers turn into birds at the wrong time, and pictures jump out of magazines to warn readers about the perils of desire. It is a world of chance and unintended consequences, where the boundaries between imagination and reality are porous, and wishes are both beautiful and dangerous.

For the rest of the review, go here.

As it happens, Crimson Thread is thin but lovely, a gathering of very short wisps of stories that read sometimes as cracked postmodernist fables, sometimes as bemused and irreverent prose poems 脿 la James Tate (Terayama actually started out as a tanka poet, bent on upending that most self-consciously refined of ancient aristocratic traditions). Terayama鈥檚 work thus anticipated both the rise of flash fiction and the resurgence of the fairy tale as a medium for serious writing. In his fictive world, puppets fall in love and make their owners jealous, lovers turn into birds at the wrong time, and pictures jump out of magazines to warn readers about the perils of desire. It is a world of chance and unintended consequences, where the boundaries between imagination and reality are porous, and wishes are both beautiful and dangerous.

In 鈥淢emory Shot,鈥� a man visits a memory doctor for a shot of happy memories, gets a dose of bad ones instead, and then ends up living with a woman whose own memories seem to include some earlier, perhaps mistaken, version of him. In 鈥淭he Eraser,鈥� a jealous lover uses a magic eraser to make his rivals disappear, rubbing them out as if they were words on a page鈥攐nly to accidentally eliminate the woman he loves, too. And in the 鈥淩ibbon of the Sea,鈥� a beautiful yellow ribbon passes from one girl to another by way of a bird, causing blindness and suicide. By the story鈥檚 conclusion, there is no one left but the writer himself, who ends with a poetic conceit worthy of a narrator from an Edo period tale:

No one can write a sequel to this story. This is because I have sealed it up in a cardboard box and thrown it out to sea with all the rest of the troubles in this world. Perhaps the sequel and the yellow ribbon will encounter each other at sea on a moonlit night. So, farewell. If you chance upon a cardboard box tied up with a yellow ribbon on a seafaring voyage, do not pick it up. If you do, the sequel to this story will begin.

鈥淎 tear is the smallest ocean in the world . . .鈥�

In fact, Terayama鈥檚 stories declare their stubborn Japaneseness over and over again, perhaps most interestingly in the way they repeat key elements in a playful, hall-of-mirrors way. The pieces in the first half of the volume were written as linked short stories (they come from a collection called Stories Sewn Up with a Red Thread), but feel less like the current version of that genre as practiced in the West and more like traditional Japanese linked verse, in which a group of poets collaborate on a single long poem together. Linked verse has long cultivated a slantwise aesthetic, resisting the pull of narrative in favor of improvisation and surprise: characters reappear but meet new fates, and images repeat, but are put to new uses. The novelist Ogawa Yoko took something like this approach in her collection Revenge, which came out in English in 2013. It is one of the pleasures of Terayama鈥檚 work as well.

Elizabeth L. Armstrong has translated Terayama鈥檚 stories with sensitivity and skill, dealing gracefully with his puns and word play (my personal favorite: she names the melancholy attendant at the clinic in 鈥淢emory Shot鈥� Cotton Bawl). Her short introduction has smart things to say about the stories and the 鈥渋nterstitial webbing鈥� that binds them together. If I have a regret, it is that she doesn鈥檛 give a clearer sense of Terayama鈥檚 outsized importance to post-war Japanese culture, or of his powerful impact on Japanese film and theater. Readers who want to know more should look at Steven C. Ridgely鈥檚 Japanese Counterculture: The Anti-Establishment Art of Terayama Sh奴ji, which focuses on the way Terayama鈥檚 political thought shaped his work across multiple media, and Carol F. Sorgenfrei鈥檚 Unspeakable Acts: the Avant Garde Theater of Terayama Sh奴ji and Postwar Japan, which focuses on his subversive work as a playwright and theater director.

Hopefully, The Crimson Thread of Abandon will trigger a wave of interest in Terayama, with Ms. Armstrong or another talented Japanese-English translator bringing us some of the poetry, or perhaps the boxing novel. Till then, we can enjoy this glimpse into the strange and beautiful world of Terayama鈥檚 short fiction, with its devious talking birds and lovers carried around in suitcases, and its belief that the red thread of desire links everything, real or imagined.

But anyone attempting to play Murakami Bingo with his latest novel, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, is going to lose. There are no parallel worlds, talking animals, or mysterious women. There鈥檚 only one passing reference each to wells and cats, both only as metaphors, and there鈥檚 really only one piece of music that鈥檚 talked about at any length. And it鈥檚 not even jazz.

This is Murakami at his most straightforward and subdued, the likes of which we鈥檝e really only seen鈥攊n novels, at least鈥攊n Norwegian Wood and South of the Border, West of the Sun. It is a relatively straightforward tale of friendship, depression, and memory. As such, it sheds a beacon on both Murakami鈥檚 core strengths and weaknesses as a writer, some thirty odd years into his career.

In this latest novel, the eponymous Tsukuru, a middle-aged train station engineer, reflects on his high school days, when he belonged to a group of friends so close that its importance to his life has become essentially mythic. Each of their names even contain a color鈥擜ka (red), the temperamental brainiac; Ao (blue), the cool people-person; Kuro (black), the sarcastic comedian; and Shiro (white), the quiet beauty鈥攅xcept for Tsukuru, who they joked was 鈥渃olorless.鈥� This moniker takes on a whole new meaning for Tsukuru when the group unceremoniously and without explanation excise him from their circle after he leaves their hometown for Tokyo and college. Tsukuru鈥檚 sudden exile sends him into a wretched depression, from which he clearly did not come out entirely intact. Sixteen years later, in the present day, a casual girlfriend prompts Tsukuru to try and figure out just what exactly happened, in the hopes that he might be able to finally heal, and perhaps commit more fully to his present relationship with her.

Peel away the usual pseudo-magical realist trappings, and this is the template for the 眉ber-Murakami story: an average, lonely man embarks on a quest. But time changes both the man and the world around him. An adventure like this, thirty years ago, involved research and a cross-country trek into parts unknown, 谩 la A Wild Sheep Chase. In Colorless, his girlfriend suggests he checks Facebook.

This epitomizes what makes Colorless both compelling and frustrating in equal measure: it is, essentially, drama-free. The conflict, such as it is, takes place entirely in the past, waiting quietly to be unearthed. Tsukuru systematically contacts each friend, one by one, and slowly comes to learn the truth. And while there is a conspiracy of a sort, and twists and turns along the way, the universe does not fracture in two in response; there is no McGuffin to set it all right. The only thing Tsukuru can do is to push forward and engage with his old friends, and finally be able to come to terms with the contents of his present existence. It is perhaps the best novel I have read where nothing actually happens.

If that sounds like damning with faint praise, well, it is and it isn鈥檛. The novels that Murakami is best known for鈥�The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Kafka on the Shore, 1Q84鈥攁re bombastic in their everything and the kitchen sink approach to writing. They’re weird, messy, digressive, splashy, about seemingly everything and nothing at the same time. They succeed and suffer in their attempts at a fractured 21st century “total novel,鈥� the kind that Doestoevsky and Victor Hugo used to write. Stripped down to just an emotional core, Colorless is outwardly less ambitious, but a lot more personal. Without the distraction of the typical Murakami weird, however, it is a lot easier to spot Murakami鈥檚 weaknesses.

For one, Tsukuru is boring. Like every Murakami protagonist, Tsukuru is the consummate everyman. He is average in just about every way, as we鈥檝e been told over and over in one story or another. In other novels, it is pretty easy to get past this鈥攖he narrator is a cipher, our surrogate, the straight man in a cast of weirdos, holding our hand as we bemusedly come to terms with a strange new reality. Colorless has no such distractions, and there are no other characters that stick around long enough for us to get interested in, like the vivacious Midori in the similarly somber Norwegian Wood. Tsukuru trots from one friend to the next, knowing that despite the amicable, nostalgic peace that comes with reconnecting with an old friend, things will never be the same, and it鈥檚 time to be moving on.

Murakami has always had a straightforward yet quietly elegant way with words, but the language in Colorless is so undemanding it frequently comes across as repetitive. (Translator Philip Gabriel has always been more than up to the task in previous translations; it seems unfair to throw him under the bus now.) When tasked with illustrating a character鈥檚 feelings, Murakami generally has no qualms with telling instead of showing鈥攁 big no-no any Intro-level creative writing class will teach you鈥攂ut in Colorless it feels like this has become a bigger problem than ever before. While reading I even came up with a drinking game: a shot for every time you read some variation of Tsukuru wanting or needing something 鈥渕ore than anything.鈥� Spoiler alert: you鈥檙e going to blackout.

So, to tally up so far: a boring narrator, facile language, clich茅d characters, and a conflict-free narrative. Sounds pretty dismal.

And yet, there鈥檚 something about Colorless that works despite all these obvious flaws, something that makes all these seemingly egregious sins click into place. It is still just so damn readable. And while this subtle propulsion certainly doesn鈥檛 make the work transcendent, it makes it a far cry from the mess that I make it sound to be. Murakami is a workman, a writer in some tangibly fundamental way鈥攊n short, a professional. He can鈥檛 help but get a few things right.

One of the ways in which Colorless is much cleverer than at first glance is the way Murakami so deftly and subtly illustrates the fallibility of memory. Tsukuru is reflecting on events that happened sixteen years ago, the aftermath of which has colored his perspective of himself and the world around him. He frequently remarks that nothing is interesting or remarkable about him because that鈥檚 fundamentally how he sees himself. He has carried the feeling of being 鈥渃olorless鈥� for years; he is someone who seems himself, essentially, as someone who is very easily abandoned. His friends are described practically with only one characteristic each, as if stock characters right out of the Breakfast Club. But memory orders our lives by both exaggerating and obliterating the truth. Each friend had their role to play, as we all do during those formative years, and the distance of time amplifies those impressions even more. It鈥檚 telling that with every friend Tsukuru reconnects with, Tsukuru can鈥檛 help but notice how they seem both exactly the same and inexplicably different.

So while the language itself is perhaps shallow, its simplicity belies a complex and satisfying narrative thread of a man who is taking his first steps toward self-actualization. A man who learns he has self-worth, and value, and that his friends, his history, his fundamental self, are not what he assumed they were. They are simple but powerful truths about what it means to grow older and wiser, and to be able to look back at the past without letting it define you. Anyone who has suffered, and survived, episodes of depression or trauma will easily relate.

Murakami moves deftly back and forth between past and present in the beginning of the novel, so while it takes nearly a hundred pages for the 鈥減lot鈥� to begin, in the meantime we get to enjoy another common but more welcome Murakami-ism: the story within the story. Here, it comes courtesy of a friend named Haida (another colorful name, this time gray), whom Tsukuru meets in his traumatic college years. The tale concerns Haida’s father, who, after suddenly dropping out of college, meets a pianist at a secluded hotel who claims to be able to predict his own imminent death. Haida similarly drops out of college soon after, another colorful friend who suddenly abandons the colorless Tsukuru.

The reader will have to decide whether the sum of the novel is equal to more or less than its parts. At times it feels both simultaneous too long, with a hundred-odd pages just to feel like something is happening, and too short, with that niggling sense that characters aren鈥檛 as fleshed out as they could be. On this issue I might perhaps place blame on the presentation of the book itself. Chip Kidd has designed the book beautifully, as he always does, but the font and margins are absolutely gigantic, making what should be a relatively concise 200-odd page character study feel like a sloppy mess at 400. Perhaps Knopf wanted to hedge their bets and make readers feel like they are getting “their money鈥檚 worth鈥� or, 鈥渁 real page-turner”; I hope the paperback will adjust the layout so I won鈥檛 feel like I鈥檓 reading a large-print young adult book.

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage will not go down as Murakami鈥檚 masterpiece, but it certainly won鈥檛 go down as his worst either. I absolutely cannot imagine it will change the minds of Murakami detractors, and even amongst his fans it will be a pleasurable read that might leave some feeling hollow by the end. But, as perhaps befitting of the old saw, still waters run deep. Strip all the metaphysical nonsense away, and Colorless is Murakami to the very core, fault lines and all.

But perhaps I had embarked on this line of thought merely to distract myself from my own anger and grief. It鈥檚 not as if I was actually prepared to waste my time attempting to perform triangular surveying. I was merely seeking comfort in the thought that something as serenely transparent as an ancient surveying method might be applicable to this place of loss and bewilderment where I now found myself.

Having published numerous books of poetry, Hiraide鈥檚 poetic experience shines through in his prose as well. His language is gentle and deliberate, pulling the reader in with meticulous details, a style that fits perfectly with the generally peaceful course of the characters鈥� lives. While focused on one clear plotline, Hiraide鈥檚 storytelling, translated to English by Eric Selland, incorporates smaller transformations and events along the way that give The Guest Cat even more depth. The narrator鈥檚 description of fate at the beginning foreshadows the set up of the novel, both stylistically and contextually:

As it surges forward people flee, but ultimately they succumb to the water鈥檚 momentum. Nothing鈥攏o one escapes.
Living beings, in turning a corner, or in producing the movements required to enter the crack in a certain partially opened door, are endowed with certain properties, something which produces its own little river. These daily movements are repeated, and a certain tendency鈥攁 certain current if you will鈥攊s generated. Then this minor current, because it is a current, must at some point flow into a larger river.

The seemingly minor subplots of Hiraide鈥檚 The Guest Cat merge throughout the novel to create a forceful narrative that will captivate any reader.

We are very pleased to award the 2013 Best Translated Book Award for fiction to Seiobo There Below by Laszlo Krasznahorkai, translated by Ottilie Mulzet. Fans of the award will no doubt note that this is the second year in a row that it has been given to Krazsnahorkai, with last year’s honors going to his first novel, Satantango, translated by George Szirtes. This fact was taken into account by the judges, as was our desire to honor writing from a wide range of geographies, cultures, and languages, and these are all things that we hope will be continued to be accounted for going forward. But in the end one thing was clear: out of a shortlist of ten contenders that did not lack for ambition, Seiobo There Below truly overwhelmed us with its range鈥攖his is a book that discusses in minute detail locations from all around the globe, including Japan, Spain, Italy, and Greece, as well as delving into the consciousnesses and practices of individuals from across 2,000 years of human history. The book also takes bold steps forward in terms of how we think of the form of the novel, and our expectation of how a novel works and what it can attempt to do. In its scope, its depth, and its amazing precision, we found Seiobo There Below to be a work of rare genius. We were likewise very enthusiastic about Mulzet’s translation, which is astonishing for its beauty and its technical skill. In this book of nearly 500 pages, filled with sentences that range on for pages at a time, as well as all sorts of specialized jargon and obscure details, Mulzet doesn’t hit a false note, a truly amazing accomplishment. We must give due congratulations to her great work, as well as register our appreciation to her editors at New Directions, who surely must share in the credit.

As much as we admire Seiobo There Below, it was not an easy decision to elevate this book above our two runners-up, and there was much in-depth discussion and passionate arguments in favor of all three finalists. Although there can only be one winner, it is important to us to honor the range of styles, geographies, languages, and cultures that made it so challenging to select the 2013 honoree. Thus we offer these words of praise for our two runners-up:

We found Rodrigo Rey Rosa’s short novel The African Shore, masterfully translated by Jeffrey Gray, to be almost the perfect counterpoint to Seiobo There Below. In its sonnet-like perfection, even a single out-of-place word would have marred this novel’s hypnotizing effect, so due praise must be given to Rey Rosa and Gray for presenting us with this seamless, engrossing story. We also admired the strange logic by which Rey Rosa’s book functions, telling two parallel narratives that are connected by that strange symbolic creature, the owl. The African Shore felt very much to us like a story that only Rey Rosa could have told, a small, perfectly cut jewel that we can stare into endlessly. It is emblematic of the very rich exchange between Rey Rosa’s native Guatemala and the Morocco in which he lived for a decade, and its minimalist aesthetic points us toward an interesting new direction for Latin American literature to follow in the new century.

We were equally enamored of Minae Mizumura’s work in adapting Emily Bront毛’s Gothic classic Wuthering Heights to contemporary Japan, translated most spectacularly by Juliet Winters Carpenter. As the novel continues to evolve as an art form, it is essential that it take stock of its legacy and find ways to rejuvenate its classics. Mizumura does not only this but also interrogates the idea of the “true novel“鈥攖he Western novel in the tradition of Flaubert, Dickens, et al.鈥攁gainst the traditional Japanese novel. As have many great Japanese writers before her, she reaches into the rich intersection between East and West to create something distinctly Japanese yet global in scope, a satisfying investigation of individual characters, the landscape of her nation, and various novelistic traditions. This wonderful novel marks the entry of a major talent into the English language, and we are proud to honor Mizumura’s long overdue arrival.