Nakano Thrift Shop

Author: Hiromi Kawakami
Publisher: Portobello Books
ISBN: 1846276012
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 192

Book Description
Among the jumble of paperweights, plates, typewriters and general bric-a-brac in Mr Nakano's thrift store, there are treasures to be found. Each piece carries its own story of love and loss - or so it seems to Hitomi, when she takes a job there working behind the till. Nor are her fellow employees any less curious or weatherworn than the items they sell. There's the store's owner, Mr Nakano, an enigmatic ladies' man with several ex-wives; Sakiko, his sensuous, unreadable lover; his sister, Masayo, an artist whose free-spirited creations mask hidden sorrows. And finally there's Hitomi's fellow employee, Takeo, whose abrupt and taciturn manner Hitomi finds, to her consternation, increasingly disarming. A beguiling story of love found amid odds and ends, The Nakano Thrift Shop is a heart-warming and utterly charming novel from one of Japan's most celebrated contemporary novelists.

The Ten Loves of Nishino

Author: Hiromi Kawakami
Publisher: Europa Editions
ISBN: 1609455320
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 143

Book Description
The story of an enigmatic man through the voices of ten remarkable women who have loved him at one point in their lives. Each woman has succumbed, even if only for an hour, to that seductive, imprudent, and furtively feline man who drifted so naturally into their lives. Still clinging to the vivid memory of his warm breath and his indecipherable sentences, ten women tell their stories as they attempt to recreate the image of the unfathomable Nishino. Like a modern Decameron, this humorous, sensual, and touching novel by one of Japan’s best-selling and most beloved writers is a powerful and embracing portrait of the human comedy in ten voices. Driven by desires that are at once unique and common, the women in this book are modern, familiar to us, and still mysterious. A little like Nishino himself . . . Winner 2020 Pen Translation Prize Praise for The Ten Loves of Nishino “If you like Haruki Murakami and Yoko Ogawa, it’s a safe bet that you’ll love The Ten Loves of Nishino.” —DozoDomo (France) “Agile, inventive fiction.” —Booklist “An intriguing portrayal of romantic attachment.” —The New Yorker “The women in this collection are vibrant, lusty, and clearly the agents of their own love lives . . . . Kawakami's novel treats its feminist themes with a light hand but still slyly lands its points.” —Kirkus Reviews

Manazuru

Author: Hiromi Kawakami
Publisher: Catapult
ISBN: 1640090193
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 207

Book Description
Startlingly restless and immaculately compact, Manazuru paints the portrait of a woman on the brink of her own memories and future. Twelve years have passed since Kei’s husband, Rei, disappeared and she was left alone with her three–year–old daughter. Her new relationship with a married man—the antithesis of Rei—has brought her life to a numbing stasis, and her relationships with her mother and daughter have spilled into routine, day after day. Kei begins making repeated trips to the seaside town of Manazuru, a place that jogs her memory to a moment in time she can never quite locate. Her time there by the water encompasses years of unsteady footing and a developing urgency to find something. Through a poetic style embracing the surreal and grotesque, a quiet tenderness emerges from these dark moments. Manazuru is a meditation on memory—a profound, precisely delineated exploration of the relationships between lovers and family members.

Strange Weather in Tokyo

Author: Hiromi Kawakami
Publisher: Catapult
ISBN: 1640090177
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 205

Book Description
Shortlisted for the 2013 Man Asian Literary Prize, Strange Weather in Tokyo is a story of loneliness and love that defies age. Tsukiko, thirty–eight, works in an office and lives alone. One night, she happens to meet one of her former high school teachers, "Sensei," in a local bar. Tsukiko had only ever called him "Sensei" ("Teacher"). He is thirty years her senior, retired, and presumably a widower. Their relationship develops from a perfunctory acknowledgment of each other as they eat and drink alone at the bar, to a hesitant intimacy which tilts awkwardly and poignantly into love. As Tsukiko and Sensei grow to know and love one another, time's passing is marked by Kawakami's gentle hints at the changing seasons: from warm sake to chilled beer, from the buds on the trees to the blooming of the cherry blossoms. Strange Weather in Tokyo is a moving, funny, and immersive tale of modern Japan and old–fashioned romance.

Parade

Author: Hiromi Kawakami
Publisher: Catapult
ISBN: 1593765819
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 55

Book Description
"A parable about memory, mythic characters, and confessional regrets . . . An ethereal, resonating literary gift" (Booklist, starred review) from the internationally bestselling author of Strange Weather in Tokyo. "On a summer afternoon, Tsukiko and her former high school teacher have prepared and eaten somen noodles together. “Tell me a story from long ago,” Sensei says. “I wasn’t alive long ago,” Tsukiko says, “but should I tell you a story from when I was little?” “Please do,” Sensei replies, and so Tsukiko tells him that, when she was a child, she awakened one day to find something with a pale red face and something with a dark red face in her room, arguing with each other. They had human bodies, long noses, and wings. They were tengu, creatures that appear in Japanese folktales. The tengu attach themselves to Tsukiko and begin to follow her everywhere. Where did they come from and why are they here? And what other invisible and unacknowledged forces are acting upon Tsukiko’s seemingly peaceful world?"

Record of a Night Too Brief

Author: Hiromi Kawakami
Publisher: Pushkin Press
ISBN: 180533140X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 161

Book Description
“Evocative... Astonishing, strange, and wonderful” – Kirkus Reviews (starred review) A trio of surreal, dazzlingly imaginative short stories set in contemporary Japan that explore desire and loss, talking animals, and odd disappearances Sensual, yearning, and filled with the tricks of memory and grief, from the celebrated author of Strange Weather in Tokyo In these 3 haunting and lyrical stories, young women experience loss, loneliness, and extraordinary romance. The nightingale sang again. The plates on the table gleamed, and the food, in all its ceaseless variety, breathed, glossy and bright. The night had only just begun. A woman travels through an unending night with a porcelain girlfriend, monsters of the mist and a monkey who shows no mercy. A sister mourns her brother, who is visible only to her, while her family welcome his would-be wife into their home. One morning, a woman treads on a snake in the park. She comes home that evening and realises the snake has moved into her house and is saying she is her mother… Winner of the Akutagawa Prize, Japan’s most prestigious literary award, the 3 stories in this collection: Record of a Night Too Brief Missing A Snake Stepped On reveal a highly surreal, meticulously crafted exploration of the many facets of desire, loss and fantasy. Part of Pushkin’s Japanese Novella series: stylishly designed editions of the best of contemporary Japanese fiction, featuring celebrated, prize-winning authors including Mieko Kawakami, Hideo Furukawa, Kaori Fujino and Natsuko Imamura.

Death by Water

Author: Kenzaburo Oe
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
ISBN: 0802190871
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 443

Book Description
Kenzaburo Oe was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for creating "an imagined world, where life and myth condense to form a disconcerting picture of the human predicament today." In Death by Water, his recurring protagonist and literary alter-ego returns to his hometown village in search of a red suitcase fabled to hold documents revealing the details of his father’s death during WWII: details that will serve as the foundation for his new, and final, novel. Since his youth, renowned novelist Kogito Choko planned to fictionalize his father’s fatal drowning in order to fully process the loss. Stricken with guilt and regret over his failure to rescue his father, Choko has long been driven to discover why his father was boating on the river in a torrential storm. Though he remembers overhearing his father and a group of soldiers discussing an insurgent scheme to stage a suicide attack on Emperor Mikado, Choko cannot separate his memories from imagination and his family is hesitant to reveal the entire story. When the contents of the trunk turn out to offer little clarity, Choko abandons the novel in creative despair. Floundering as an artist, he’s haunted by fear that he may never write his tour de force. But when he collaborates with an avant-garde theater troupe dramatizing his early novels, Kogito is revitalized by revisiting his formative work and he finds the will to continue investigating his father’s demise. Diving into the turbulent depths of legacy and mortality, Death by Water is an exquisite examination of resurfacing national and personal trauma, and the ways that storytelling can mend political, social, and familial rifts.

Jonathan Pie: Off The Record

Author: Jonathan Pie
Publisher: Bonnier Publishing Ltd.
ISBN: 1911600605
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 162

Book Description
Want to know more about history and politics? Then you should probably go and read a proper book. Fancy a laugh at some smutty jokes? Then go and read Viz. But if you fancy a combination of the two, this is the book for you. In Off The Record, bitter and twisted leftie news reporter Jonathan Pie picks ten of the world's worst wankers and tears them apart. Here you'll find the answers to some difficult questions. Was Blair just a Tory in disguise? Did Cameron really have sexual relations with that pig? Just how the fuck did we end up with President Donald Trump? It's the ultimate guide to political arseholery. With extra swearing.

People From My Neighbourhood

Author: Hiromi Kawakami
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781846276989
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 128

Book Description

Ponti

Author: Sharlene Teo
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1501173138
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Book Description
An award-winning novel about the value of friendships in present-day Singapore—a “stirring debut…relatable yet unsettling [that] smartly captures earnest teenage myopathy through a tumultuous high school relationship” (Publishers Weekly, starred review). “I am Miss Frankenstein, I am the bottom of the bell curve.” So declares Szu, a teenager living in a dark, dank house on a Singapore cul-de-sac, at the beginning of this richly atmospheric and endlessly surprising tale of non-belonging and isolation. Friendless and fatherless, Szu lives in the shadow of her mother Amisa, once a beautiful actress—who gained fame for her portrayal of a ghost—and now a hack medium performing séances with her sister in a rusty house. When Szu meets the privileged, acid-tongued Circe, an unlikely encounter develops into a fraught friendship that will haunt them both for decades to come. With remarkable emotional acuity, dark comedy, and in vivid prose, Sharlene Teo’s Ponti traces the suffocating tangle the lives of four misfits, women who need each other as much as they need to find their own way. It is “at once a subtle critique of the pressures of living in a modern Asian metropolis; a record of the swiftness and ruthlessness with which Southeast Asia has changed over the last three decades; a portrait of the old juxtaposed with the new (and an accompanying dialogue between nostalgia and cynicism); an exploration of the relationship between women against the backdrop of social change; and, occasionally, a love story—all wrapped up in the guise of a teenage coming-of-age novel…Teo is brilliant” (The Guardian).