Maladies and misery: 4 new books ask existential questions

SINGAPORE - The Straits Times lines up four new titles on existential ennui and hunger - from a young woman's therapy memoir to a novel about a lonely vampire who wants sushi.

Several years ago, when Baek Se-hee was a young marketing professional in South Korea, she decided to see a psychiatrist.

"I wasn't deathly depressed, but I wasn't happy either, floating instead in some feeling between the two," she would later write in her best-selling 2018 memoir I Want To Die But I Want To Eat Tteokbokki.

The book, a record of those conversations with her psychiatrist, shines a light on Baek's struggles with dysthymia, or persistent depressive disorder.

On the surface, Lydia is like any other recent graduate.

The young artist in London is eager to be independent yet unsure about her place in the world. Except Lydia's existential crisis is amplified - she is a vampire who cannot age or die.

Turned by her vampire mother as a young baby, Lydia has pretended to be a human all her life. She has lived isolated by her mother as they consume pig's blood in their home.

Blood is the only thing Lydia's body allows her to digest even as she craves sushi, ramen, cheese, milk and Korean rice cakes. She is of Asian parentage - her mother is Malaysian, while her late father was Japanese.

Maladies Of The Soul, populated with Singaporean characters who lead lives of quiet desperation, contains 15 stories about various social and psychological ills.

Isa Kamari, a prominent figure in Singapore's Malay literary scene, received the Cultural Medallion in 2007.

His bilingual ability is impressive. He wrote nearly all the stories in this collection in Malay and translated them to English himself. Two were originally written in English.

Japanese literature is enjoying a renaissance of women writers who cast female protagonists in surreal universes at once similar and discordant to the world as people know it.

Among them are Yoko Tawada (Scattered All Over The Earth, 2022), Kyoko Nakajima (Things Remembered And Things Forgotten, 2021); and Mieko Kawakami (Breasts And Eggs; 2020).

One of the leading stars is Sayaka Murata, whose niche is deadpan absurdist fiction that upends the idea of normality.

In Life Ceremony, her third book to be translated into English, she reunites with collaborator Ginny Tapley Takemori.