Category Archives: Japanese

May 24, 2013 · 9:00 am

Limit (vol. 5) by Keiko Suenobu, translated by Mari Morimoto

Limit 5So we’ve arrived at the penultimate volume of one of the most hair-raising manga series I’ve ever read – because a resemblance to reality is always more disturbing that any dystopic sci-fi for sure! Bullying, domestic abuse, high school caste systems, the careless power of popularity – that’s all in here … stripped down, laid bare, in a life-and-death situation of nightmarish proportions (most especially for parents!). Creator Keiko Suenobu’s never-still panels also seem to have picked up in pace, as fatal danger readies for another strike.

The six survivors of the fatal bus crash that opened volume 1 are down to just four: One of the children has turned into a serial killer … initially by accident, but now ready to purposefully carry out a diabolically simple plan. In the name of survival, the three girls have reached an uneasy truce. Hinata, the only boy and newbie of the leftover foursome, is remembered by Konno as the supportive all-around nice-guy at school. His initial encouragement of “Let’s all go home together” is now a tragically impossible dream … especially with the body count threatening to rise yet again. The desperate rescue mission continues, but can help arrive in time?

The final volume (shudder, shudder) debuts this summer: Who will be left standing? Parents, you’ve been duly warned …!!

Readers: Young Adult, Adult

Published: 2013 (United States)

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May 14, 2013 · 9:36 am

A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki

A Tale for the Time BeingYou might choose to read Ruth Ozeki‘s latest novel as another engrossing, original story – because it clearly is. And if you decide to stick the novel in your ears, you’ll be thrilled and grateful to know that Ozeki herself reads to you – her recitation is crisp, measured, and exacting.

The novel’s dual protagonists take turns revealing the eponymous ‘tale’: Nao, short for Naoko, is a bullied Tokyo teenager dealing with her suicidal, unemployed father while whose closest confidante is her 104-year-old Buddhist nun great-grandmother; Ruth is a hapa Japanese American novelist living on a tiny island off the coast of Canada’s British Columbia. The two women are connected via the vast Pacific waters when a Hello Kitty lunchbox containing mementos of Nao’s life – including a journal retrofitted inside the cover of an aptly chosen Marcel Proust classic, À la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrances of Things Past) – washes up on the island’s shoreline, quite possibly a vestige from Japan’s 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. [Note to self: Tale pubbed exactly two years and one day after the tragedy, and a full decade minus two days after Ozeki's last novel, All Over Creation.] While Ruth attempts to reconstruct Nao’s past from the lunchbox remnants, she also works desperately to find Nao’s present.

All that is reason enough to read the novel and be done. But I dare you NOT to keep thinking long after you reach that final cover. The names will surely keep you challenged: just for starters, might I mention Nao/now, ‘Naoko’ meaning honest child in Japanese and the ‘truth’ she writes or doesn’t write in a work of fiction, her last name Yasutani (which might mean ‘peaceful valley,’ the ironic opposite of Nao’s complicated young life) which also happens to be the name of renowned Zen Buddhist priest Yasutani Haku’un, not to mention the fictional and real-life Ruths, both with husbands named Oliver.

If the names don’t spark further interest about reliable narrators, notions of reality, the art of fiction, the cover could inspire further volumes. Allow me to share a couple of the multi-layers to consider. In the third line down of the story’s opening page is this description: “A time being is someone who lives in time, and that means you, and me, and every one of us who is, or was, or ever will be.” That explanation transforms the title into at least a double entendre, as in ‘a story for now,’ or ‘a story for Nao.’ Add the subtitle, “a novel,” and the author’s name, and you’ve grown a labyrinth of meanings, from ‘a novel story for now by Ruth,’ to ‘Ruth’s novel about Nao,’ and so much more.

I might quibble that by the final pages, a few of the narrative threads were a bit too ‘deus ex machina‘-ly resolved, but I also find myself insisting that sometimes endings just need to be happier than not. That sort of magical thinking perhaps doesn’t make for a perfect novel, but it’s a small price to pay for attempting to redeem humanity through the healing power of sharing words and telling stories.

Readers: Adult

Published: 2013

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May 10, 2013 · 8:53 am

Thermae Romae II by Mari Yamazaki, translated by Stephen Paul

Thermae Romae 2To get to know our time-traveling bather, start with Volume I. When in Thermae Romae, you need to do as this Roman does and find out how he journeys back and forth between far-spanning centuries and cultures with one thing in common – an obsession with the bath.

If the cover looks familiar, Osamu Tezuka Cultural Prize-winning creator Mari Yamazaki explains how she risked marital peace to parody “one of the greatest works of ancient Roman sculpture,” Laocoön and His Sons. In spite of her husband’s angry reaction, she insists that her version of Laocoön “wearing a shampoo hat to keep the shampoo out of his eyes” is not such a far stretch: “I’m sure Laocoön washed his fair from time to time, and if he did massage his scalp, he certainly must have struck poses like the one on the cover.” You’ll find that sort of goofy humor on almost every page, all the while learning quite a bit about ancient Roman history, and modern Japanese bathing culture. Yamazaki will entertainingly convince you how such two seemingly disparate topics are actually quite related.

As Volume II begins, Lucius is a favorite of Emperor Hadrian, renowned as the innovative bath architect. In an act of potentially fatal jealousy, Senate members plot to get Lucius out of Rome with a ruse about a creating a new thermae in an area overrun by violent bandits. What happens instead is a bit of brilliant marketing, inspired by Lucius’ timely visit to a Japanese hot spring town where he wins big at a game booth, discovers kitschy souvenirs, and tastes his first bowl of steaming ramen and juicy gyoza. With further unpredictable forays into the land of the “flat-faces” (the phrase still bugs me, but not quite as much this second time around), Lucius learns to build a wooden barrel single bath shippable to the hinterlands, and how to balance the most gaudiest demands with just enough elegantly-tempered details.

Then half-way through the volume, Hadrian’s adopted heir (profligately portrayed by Yamazaki with apologies later – artistic license, right?) dies. With Hadrian’s own health less than robust, Lucius becomes determined to create something soothingly rejuvenating for his Imperator. His search magically sends him to meet “such a beautiful flat-face” as he’s never seen before … who just happens to be an ancient Roman scholar who speaks perfect Latin! Talk about back to the future … in centur-ion leaps!

Readers: Young Adult, Adult

Published: 2013 (United States)

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Filed under ..Adult Readers, ..Middle Grade Readers, .Fiction, .Graphic Novel/Manga/Manwha, .Translation, European, Japanese

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May 8, 2013 · 9:02 am

Three Years and Eight Months by Icy Smith, illustrated by Jennifer Kindert

Three Years and Eight MonthsParents with young children: please take caution in sharing this book with your youngest readers. Although the narrator is “only a 10-year-old boy,” what he witnesses, endures, and survives during the titular ‘three years and eight months’ of the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong during World War II is brutal, horrific, and inhumane. As in all wars, women, the elderly, and children always suffer most.

Choi lives with his widowed mother and his Uncle Kim in a “rundown apartment building in crowded Hong Kong.” Dismissed from school early one day, he watches his mother dragged away by Japanese soldiers. On Christmas, 1941, Japan takes official control of the island; for its citizens, occupation means destruction, starvation, imprisonment, and death.

Up in the mountains searching for firewood, Choi meets Taylor, the hapa son of Uncle Kim’s friend; Taylor’s American mother went to visit her California family and has been unable to return to Hong Kong since Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. The two boys trade wood for food when they can, which leads them to meet a kind Japanese soldier who teaches them enough Japanese to give them a job at the military station. The boys’ entry there provides access to information, food, and even medical supplies they can pass on to Uncle Kim …

Award-winning author and publisher Icy Smith – whose last book detailed war’s atrocities in Half Spoon of Rice – clearly channels her own family background here. Her opening dedication is a harrowing warning: “This book is dedicated to my father, uncle, and grandmother, who lived the reality of Hong Kong during the Japanese occupation. My uncle was forced to work for the Japanese military and transported prisoners to death camps. … My father was a slave boy who witnessed the Japanese brutalities … My grandmother was victimized by Japanese soldiers for three long years and became a nun after the end of World War II.” Hopefully, the single, kind ‘enemy’ soldier was also a part of Smith’s ancestral past. Decades later, Smith bears witness, first with personal story, then with “Remembering History” at book’s end with dates, facts, numbers, and period photos.

As much as Smith’s words capture this true story, Jennifer Kindert‘s illustrations vividly enhance the chilling experience. Kindert, a Texas-based Thai adoptee of Swedish parents, has a lush style that fills each page with careful, intimate details which bring readers immediately into each scene: the distant worried look of a young mother with two small children she carries balanced in a basket, the treasures local residents have brought the Japanese troops to trade for a few cups of rice, the upturned face of an imprisoned woman momentarily distracted from her heavy labor, the portrait of Emperor Hirohito on the wall with his head symbolically truncated from view as a group of soldiers initially hear the news of the first atomic bombing. Every picture reveals and intensifies both the horror and the humanity.

Too much of our history is filled with tragedy… perhaps bearing witness, even in childhood, is one way to combat the nightmarish repetition. Hope springs eternal, right?

Readers: Children (with caution), Middle Grade

Published: 2013

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Filed under ..Children/Picture Books, ..Middle Grade Readers, .Nonfiction, Chinese, Chinese American, Japanese

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May 1, 2013 · 8:41 am

The Goddess Chronicle by Natsuo Kirino, translated by Rebecca Copeland

Goodness ChronicleAward-winning Japanese crime fiction writer Natsuo Kirino (Out; Grotesque) contributes to the latest installment of the “The Myths” series, originally published by Britain’s Canongate, in which contemporary writers retell myths. Previous volumes have included Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad: The Myth of Penelope and Odysseus and David Grossman’s Lion’s Honey: The Myth of Sampson.

Kirino here retells the eighth-century creation myth of Izanami and Izanaki – the original female and male gods whose union produced the Japanese islands – in a novel framing two sisters, one fated to become the next Oracle to serve the “realm of light,” the other who will serve the “realm of darkness.” Unwilling to accept her fate, Namima attempts an escape that damns her to Izanami’s Realm of the Dead. Readers will find echoes of Orpheus and Eurydice as well as Persephone and Demeter.

Verdict: Although inventive, the double narrative of sisters and gods – the former freeing, the latter bound to centuries-old history – never quite meshes, often feeling clumsily forced. Still, bestselling Kirino’s many devotees will likely provide a ready audience

Review: “Fiction,” Library Journal, May 1, 2013

Readers: Adult

Published: 2013 (United States)

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April 29, 2013 · 9:13 am

Pot-San’s Tabletop Tales by Satoshi Kitamura

Pot-San's Table Top TalesWay back in the day, when I fancied myself at least a part-time potter, I used to think I put some tangible personality into my pieces, especially my dancing tea cups and goofy tea pots. So how delighted I was to discover adorable Pot-san – he with a handle for one ear, a spout for the other, his rosy-cheeked face sporting a jauntily-rounded red-topped top-hat – and share some of his dishy adventures.

Pot-san – the Japanese equivalent to “Mr. Pot” – welcomes newly-arrived Teacup to the table, enjoying their first cup of hot tea together with smiles and happiness. He has a “horrible dream” trying to save Teacup, but wakes just in time for Cheese Cake’s visit. He flies off-table with friends on a magic tray, only to injure delicate Teacup! Last, but hardly least, Pot-san helps Miss Salt feel inclusively needed when he introduces her to Chips Bigbowl who would love nothing more than to share a toothsome sprinkling.

Relying on colorful, fun, everyday objects, lauded author/artist Satoshi Kitamura cleverly addresses some of today’s stressors on young children. Pot-san shares the anxiety of new situations, how to be a good friend, how risky behavior can have serious consequences, and how sticking up for and enabling friends are both necessary and rewarding.

So while the kiddies cheer through valuable life lessons with charming Pot-san, we oldsters could take a moment to indulge in a cup of tea, too … and pass the Cheese Cake, please!

Readers: Children

Published: 2013 (United States)

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April 19, 2013 · 9:54 am

Limit (vol. 4) by Keiko Suenobu, translated by Mari Morimoto

Limit 4First things first: make sure to go backwards to catch up with the opening three volumes; this is definitely a series that needs to be read in order. Parents, be warned: these kids are going to scare you to distraction. Younger readers, take heed: don’t dare try any of this at home – or anywhere else for that matter.

Five became six when another survivor – the lone male – mysteriously emerged from the woods one volume back. But too soon, the six shrink to five again when frightened Usui is found lying face down on the first page of this latest installment.

The wound on her back clearly shows she’s been murdered … and Morishige is the first to be accused. But Morishige – for all her payback bullying – is too easy a target and the other four are forced to question each other as well as their own selves. Blinded by fear and fury, the survivors turn on one another. By volume’s end, another body lies motionless, and scrawled across the final pages is the chilling warning: “Among us … hides a killer.” Volume 5 can’t come soon enough.

This week feels especially off-kilter: Boston Marathon bombings and manhunt, ricin-laced letters sent to Capitol Hill and POTUS, the Senate’s latest decision on the gun debate with Newtown families watching, Thursday’s Waco fertilizer blast one day short of the 20th anniversary of the final hours of the Waco Siege, the Waco-inspired Oklahoma City bombing 18 years ago today. In the midst of all that, our children seem to be the most vulnerable – from just watching the violence from afar and forming unforgettable images, to being targeted in various degrees closer to home.

When confronted with the disturbing, I find the questions don’t stop: so when all the carefully maintained social contracts – rigid high school structures (for better or for worse), parental and other adult guidance, even the legal system – are suddenly cast aside in the name of survival, how will our children respond? And what can and should and must we do to adequately equip and enable them?

Readers: Young Adult, Adult

Published: 2013 (United States)

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Filed under ..Adult Readers, ..Young Adult Readers, .Fiction, .Graphic Novel/Manga/Manwha, .Translation, Japanese

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April 12, 2013 · 9:00 pm

Sorako by Fujimura Takayuki, translated by GEN Manga

SorakoHaving discovered manga/manwha on the verge of being old, I often have these delicious moments of ‘gaaaah’-wonder at coming across something original in the graphic industry. So here’s a not-quite-three-years-old publishing niche I recently learned about – I know! What took me so long?!

Meet GEN Manga, purveyors of Indie Manga from the Tokyo Underground, which promises that “GEN stories are published nowhere else in the world. They come straight from the artists in Japan to you. We translate the stories and put them out as they are created.”

While most of GEN’s output thus far – available digitally, or in limited print editions – is via serialized issues of manga and (more recently added) manwha (manga with Korean origins), they’ve also begun offering standalone books. GEN’s latest is a loose collection of slice-of-life episodes that vary in quality and length about an intermittently job-searching young woman named Sorako. The opening sequence is one of the longest, and certainly the most developed, as it introduces Sorako who is waiting for the missing family dog Toma to return. Sorako named Toma after noticing the kanji character for ‘stop’ (止) marking the road on her way home the day the puppy joined the family. Sorako, too, is currently at a stopping point, caught in a limbo of inaction, a sharp contrast to her own name which means ‘a child of the sky.’

Of the shorter, less memorable pieces is a two-page interlude in which Sorako decides that she might swim off a few pounds, but the lack of a swimming cap easily dissuades her from her plans. Again, for now, she’s more comfortable stopping (止) than soaring. In other episodes, a young woman working in a coffee shop dreams of going to England as she practices English with an unseen television voice alone at night, Sorako’s less-than-earnest job search gets a reprieve when she breaks her leg, and in the final story, a young married woman tries to decide if she’s going to study abroad or not (and we see that same ‘stop’ (止) character four pages from the end, this time positioned (cleverly) in the opposite direction.

Sorako is comprised of “indie stories (doujinshi, or independent) so the author creates them as she likes,” explains GEN’s Editor-in-Chief Robert McGuire. “There is no conformity to conventional standards or directional content editing as usually is the case with manga. In other words, she is free, as all artists are at GEN Manga, to experiment. However, because of this a certain amount of avant-garde or unconventionality is common. Readers should enjoy and expect a more artistic approach when reading them. GEN Manga strives to represent otherwise unseen indie manga as it is made in ‘doujinshi circles’ in Japan.”

So there you have it. Unique and uncensored, to expect the unexpected. That’s quite a return for the mere $2.99 digital investment.

Readers: Middle Grade, Young Adult

Published: 2013 (United States)

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March 26, 2013 · 9:27 am

21st Century Boys (vol. 2) by Naoki Urasawa, with the cooperation of Takashi Nagasaki, English adaptation by Akemi Wegmüller

21st Century Boys 2So why is it that all good things are supposed to come to an end? I’d be perfectly happy with another 20 more volumes. Really, is that too much to ask?

With an enormously huffy sigh of resignation, I moaningly offer a final post for Naoki Urasawa’s 20th-into-21st Century Boys. Yup, this is it. Really. The series stops here.

The Friend might be dead, but total annihilation still looms. Kenji’s gone virtual, searching for desperate answers by confronting his own 20th-century-boy past in order to find the anti-proton bomb detonator and prevent the latest threat to world destruction. Meanwhile, Kanna is out in the real world trying to find the same remote control, even as less-than-cooperative representatives of the supposed-to-be-peacekeeping UN Forces think she’s the “devil’s daughter” and impede her any way they can. While everyone is on high-octane search mode, the Giant Robot suddenly starts moving … ready to initiate Armageddon one last time. Be warned: “All kinds of stuff up the road for you, kid …”

I only wish that meant more Urasawa ‘stuff’ for me, sniff-sniff. First Monster, then Pluto, and now 20th-21st Century Boys. All finished! Withdrawal starts now. I guess I can always line up all 18 + 8 + 24 volumes, respectively, and have my own in-denial-mangafest … maybe facing the endings get easier the 16th time around or so?

Oh, Naoki Urasawa – wherefore art thou my next series?

Readers: Young Adult, Adult

Published: 2013 (United States)
21 SEIKI SHONEN © Naoki Urasawa/Studio Nuts
Original Japanese edition published by Shogakukan Inc.

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March 25, 2013 · 9:43 am

The Language Inside by Holly Thompson

Language InsideThis might be a spoiler of sorts: The advance galley is printed with a March 12, 2013 pub date, but when I went searching for an image of the book’s cover to load here, online bookstores list a May date. Hmmm … if the latter is correct, then let this post serve as urgent advice: pre-order this book now.

I don’t know what makes my usually poetry-resistant brain so appreciative of novels-in-verse, but they definitely provide moments of blissful delight. And I’m growing rather partial to Holly Thompson‘s ethnic-blending, boundary-crossing, expectation-defying titles for young adults (check out her Orchards here).

Meet Emma Karas: while her name and face might suggest otherwise, Emma is Japanese. Culturally, anyway: she’s lived most of her life there, speaks the language like a native, and has a preference for miso and ramen over hamburgers and pasta. When she’s unexpectedly uprooted to Lowell, Massachusetts, all she wants to do is go home – to Japan.

Emma’s mother has cancer. Her treatment means Emma, her brother, and their mother will live in Lowell with her father’s mother. Emma’s father visits as often as he can from his job in New York City. Emma is torn between being the supportive daughter to her suffering mother, and feeling disloyal to her Japanese friends and their families who remain in shock and mourning less than a year since the devastating 2011 Tōhoku tsunami and earthquake.

To fill some of her longing-to-be-home hours, Emma volunteers at the Newell Center for Long Term Care, where she’s assigned to work with Zena, a stroke victim who can only communicate through her eyes. Zena is a poet, and her silent words which Emma helps put to paper have a healing effect on them both. The Newell Center is also where Emma meets Samnang, a fellow high school student with a troubled past, who works with two elderly survivors of the Cambodian killing fields.

Emma and Samnang are both cultural anomalies as defined by others’ assumptions: ” … when the language outside / isn’t the language inside,” Emma writes in a poem. Emma can’t be Japanese and yet she’s not quite American. Samnang is American and yet his Cambodian features make him forever other. Could such teenagers be anything but destined for each other?

As lyrical and effecting as Language is, it’s not read without questions, specifically about narrative choices. Why did Emma’s mother need to have her treatment in the States? Surely a country as advanced as Japan would have equivalent treatment options; additionally, given how long the family has been based in Japan, close family friends seem to be abundant in Japan, and virtually nonexistent Stateside. Why would Emma’s mother choose to stay with her mother-in-law instead of her own parents in Vermont? Why would Emma’s father work in New York when his wife is so seriously ill? As kind and thoughtful as she is, why is YiaYia so resistant about the foods that might comfort her extended family most?

The questions go on, but eventually such logistical details pale as Emma and Zena’s tender relationship develops, and as Emma and Samnang tentatively fall in love. ‘Don’t sweat the small stuff,’ actually comes to mind. Yes, questions linger, but ultimately, those moments of blissful delight extend … and win out.

Readers: Middle Grade, Young Adult

Published: 2013

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Filed under .Fiction, Japanese, ..Middle Grade Readers, .Poetry, ..Young Adult Readers, Nonethnic-specific, Cambodian American

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