Since Haruki Murakami’s latest novel came out in Japan, he’s been selling over a million copies a week.
A retired Japanese couple has teamed up with an architecture firm to design “a house with a bookshop and a café where neighbors and visitors can stop by.” The result is a decidedly more spacious and well-lit version of Brazenhead Books – another domicile/bookstore.
“The book’s cover does it a disservice; that slasher typography and dirty canvas-colored background cast an impression of a much more contemporary genre of horror. In truth, one of the gifts of Revenge is its subtle psychology. While there are multiple bloody amputations — including a gruesome beheading — a couple of phantoms, a whole museum full of tools designed specifically for torture, Ogawa’s ‘dark tales’ unfold, surprisingly, without overindulging on gore. Such restraint initially scans as a tidy elegance of form, but by the middle of the book becomes a skillful and sinister instrument of disquiet in its own right.”
Our own Emily M. Keeler reviews Yoko Ogawa’s Revenge.
How to explode Tumblr in nine words or less: There’s a new Haruki Murakami book on the way.
A seventy-five-year old story writer has won Japan’s Akutagawa Prize. How’s that for a Post-40 Bloomer?
Charlie Brown is headed to Tokyo! Konnichi wa!
![It’s hard to believe that the country containing Aokigahara, or “The Suicide Forest”, has for so long ignored its abundance of clinically depressed, “overworked” citizens, but Junko Kitanaka, in her book Depression in Japan, explains exactly why that’s happened.
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It’s hard to believe that the country containing Aokigahara, or “The Suicide Forest”, has for so long ignored its abundance of clinically depressed, “overworked” citizens, but Junko Kitanaka, in her book Depression in Japan, explains exactly why that’s happened.
“This summer, as I read The Decay of the Angel, I became ever more conscious of the compositional history of the novel. My source was Paul Schrader’s film on the writer, which shows Mishima sending off the novel to his publisher before beginning his coup. It was an attempt, on Mishima’s part, to restore the emperor, but he failed miserably, with the soldiers he tried to provoke into an uprising jeering him. When he realized he’d failed, he committed seppuku.”
— Siddhartha Deb’s Year In Reading
It’s hard to believe that a country with video games like this would be slow to adopt a new technology, but a recent survey indicates that Japanese people are not keen on e-books.
Source: thebookseller.com
