Translated from the Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori, ‘Convenience Store Woman’ by Sayaka Murata tells the story of Keiko Furukura, a socially awkward woman in her mid-thirties who has been ...
https://alittleblogofbooks.com/2018/09/02/convenience-store-woman-by-sayaka-murata/
‘Men Without Women’ by Haruki Murakami is the renowned Japanese author’s first new collection of short stories to be translated into English in over a decade. Echoing Ernest Hemingway’s c...
https://alittleblogofbooks.com/2017/06/18/men-without-women-by-haruki-murakami/
Translated from the Japanese by Ross and Shika Mackenzie, ‘The Tokyo Zodiac Murders’ by Soji Shimada opens with the last will and testament of Heikichi Umezawa written in 1936. Heikichi is an...
https://alittleblogofbooks.com/2016/12/17/the-tokyo-zodiac-murders-by-soji-shimada/
My next Women in Translation Month read is ‘The Nakano Thrift Shop’ by Hiromi Kawakami, translated from the Japanese by Allison Markin Powell. I really enjoyed reading Strange Weather in Tok...
https://alittleblogofbooks.com/2016/08/21/the-nakano-thrift-shop-by-hiromi-kawakami/
Translated from the Japanese by Deborah Boliver Boehm, ‘Death by Water’ by Kenzaburo Oe tells the story of Kogito Choko, an author aged in his 70s reflecting on his long career. For many yea...
https://alittleblogofbooks.com/2016/04/10/death-by-water-by-kenzaburo-oe/
Shortly after ‘Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage‘ was published in 2014, it was announced that Haruki Murakami’s first two novellas ‘Hear the Wind Sing’ and ‘Pinbal...
https://alittleblogofbooks.com/2016/01/17/windpinball-by-haruki-murakami/
After selling more than one million copies in its first week of publication in Japan in April 2013, ‘Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage’ by Haruki Murakami has been one of t...
August is Women in Translation month hosted by Biblibio and I have recently read two works of translated fiction written by women which were both shortlisted for this year’s Independent Foreign...
Set in Tokyo, ‘Parade’ by Shuichi Yoshida tells the story of four twenty-somethings who share an apartment together. However, when a homeless teenager called Satoru moves in, nobody seems ver...
https://alittleblogofbooks.com/2014/08/02/parade-by-shuichi-yoshida/
‘Strange Weather in Tokyo’ by Hiromi Kawakami (also known as ‘The Briefcase’ in the United States and Canada) tells the story of Tsukiko, an office worker in her late thirties who meets o...
https://alittleblogofbooks.com/2014/06/15/strange-weather-in-tokyo-by-hiromi-kawakami/
Haruki Murakami is one of my favourite authors but after reading all three volumes of ‘1Q84‘ when I finished my degree, I decided to take a break from his writing for a while. Somehow, two y...
The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize is one of the most interesting literary prizes but is also, unfortunately, one of the more overlooked. It probably hasn’t helped that the announcement of ...
https://alittleblogofbooks.com/2014/04/09/the-independent-foreign-fiction-prize-2014/
Wow. What can I say? I loved it. All 925 pages of it. Haruki Murakami’s magnum opus is a crime thriller and a love story set in 1984 and a parallel world of 1Q84 (Q for question mark) ...
https://alittleblogofbooks.com/2012/06/18/1q84-by-haruki-murakami/
Touted as ‘the Japanese Steig Larsson’, Keigo Higashino manages to live up to the hype with crime thriller ‘The Devotion of Suspect X’ which is fast becoming a worldwide best-seller follo...
https://alittleblogofbooks.com/2012/05/27/the-devotion-of-suspect-x-by-keigo-higashino/
‘Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche’ is a non fiction work by Haruki Murakami about the terrorist attacks on the Tokyo subway in 1995 by members of the Aum cult. I am...
https://alittleblogofbooks.com/2012/04/26/underground-by-haruki-murakami/
Last summer, I set myself the slightly insane task of reading two novels a week purely for pleasure, in other words, not related to my degree course. Originally, this ‘project’ was only m...
https://alittleblogofbooks.com/2012/03/21/dance-dance-dance-haruki-murakami/