Book Box: Unusual perspectives on life
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SINGAPORE – In this week’s Book Box, The Straits Times looks at three works of experimental fiction. Buy the books at Amazon
Japanese writer Hiromi Kawakami finds strangeness in the ordinary
Award-winning author Hiromi Kawakami hopes to capture the enigma of human beings and their relationships with their surroundings through her stories.
PHOTO: RINKO KAWAUCHI
TOKYO – Hiromi Kawakami, the acclaimed Japanese writer, does not hesitate for a moment to label the characters in her novels as “strange”.
This description applies to the humans in her poignant down-to-earth stories, as well as the gods and shape-shifting creatures that nonchalantly flit between animal, spiritual and human forms in her genre-bending works.
The 65-year-old, who is divorced with two adult children, says she hopes to capture the enigma of human beings and their relationships with their surroundings through her stories.
Book review: In Dragon Palace, Hiromi Kawakami delivers an absurdist take on the human psyche
Dragon Palace by Hiromi Kawakami.
PHOTOS: STONE BRIDGE PRESS, RINKO KAWAUCHI
Japanese writer Hiromi Kawakami provokes with her folkloric and mythical prose in Dragon Palace, which was first published 20 years ago in Japanese and is finally released in English.
The collection of eight short stories is downright bizarre – humans live beyond 200 years, while transmogrifying creatures can shape-shift between animal and human forms – and yet an important social commentary on issues that remain timely today.
Kawakami is a prolific award-winning veteran who has won a global following with more quotidian stories such as the wistful May-December romance of Strange Weather In Tokyo (2017) and the everyday backdrop of The Nakano Thrift Shop (2016).
Readers who may not have been exposed to the more surrealist, magical elements of her storytelling might be in for a shock.
Book review: Shy by Max Porter is a dark, poetic look into a troubled teenage mind
British bookseller and editor Max Porter's fourth book, Shy, sees him melding prose and poetry effortlessly.
PHOTOS: TIMES DISTRIBUTION, FRANCESCA JONES
This slim, strange, sad book spends a few hours in the head of Shy, a troubled teenager who is escaping Last Chance, an old mansion in the English countryside that might be haunted, but has since been transformed into a boarding school for “very disturbed young men”.
The year is 1995. Shy’s rucksack is full of ancient flints and he is headed for the pond. There, he expects, the flints will weigh him down.
Max Porter, a British bookseller and editor, shot to acclaim with his Dylan Thomas Prize-winning debut Grief Is The Thing With Feathers (2015), in which a bereaved family is visited by a crow.
He made the Man Booker Prize longlist with his sophomore work Lanny (2019), about the disappearance of a young boy in a rural village.
In Shy, his fourth book, Porter continues his freewheeling experiments with form, effortlessly melding prose and poetry in a receptacle that is not quite a novella but allows him to do kaleidoscopic work.
Book review: Erika Kobayashi’s Trinity, Trinity, Trinity taps Japan’s nuclear anxieties
Japanese novelist and artist Erika Kobayashi is the author of Trinity, Trinity, Trinity (2022).
PHOTOS: MIE MORIMOTO, COURTESY OF ASTRA HOUSE
Set nine years after the 2011 Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster, and in the run-up to the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, Erika Kobayashi’s Trinity, Trinity, Trinity is a truly surreal dive into nuclear anxieties amid a moment of national pride.
As the Olympic torch relay progresses in the novel, Japan’s inhabitants appear traumatised: A man is caught on television throwing 10,000 yen bills containing radioactive material, and seemingly everyone is holding a Geiger counter, used for detecting radiation.
Elderly people, especially, have been seen clutching mysterious dark stones in the palm: “The old people would put the accursed stones to their ears, listening intently as if to a voice coming from within them. And then they would start talking nonstop about radiation.”
The Straits Times’ Weekly Bestsellers Sept 23
Days At The Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa, The Price Of Being Fair by Sue-Ann Chia and Peh Shing Huei, Dog Man #11: Twenty Thousand Fleas Under The Sea by Dav Pilkey.
PHOTO: HARPER PERENNIAL, COURTESY OF EPIGRAM, COURTESY OF SCHOLASTIC
This week’s bestsellers include Every School A Good School by Ng Ziqin in children’s fiction.
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