Although it includes a good chunk of work by non-Japanese writers, it does include work by Kikuchi Hideyuki, Ogawa Issui, Tobi Hirotaka,and recent Akutagawa winner Enjoe Toh.

(Speaking of Enjoe Toh, I’m a little more than halfway through the latest issue of Monkey Business, and I must say, not only is the whole issue just really great, the story by Enjoe in particular is excellent. No exaggeration or hyperbole. It is just a solid, extremely intelligent, and well-written story, the likes of which I haven’t seen in quite a long time, and I’m glad he’s living up to my expectations so far. I cannot wait to read more by him.)

And let’s look at that amazing cover one more time:

Damn that’s a good cover.

Japanese slang lesson of the day: イクメン：a man who takes a proactive role in child raising, possibly a stay-at-home dad. I guess the relatively recent emergence  (~2009) of this word illuminates certain trends (or at least perceived trends) in contemporary culture/gender norms.

I’m sure the marketing people at Shueisha loved being able to capitalize on the trend too, calling it a イクメン小説.

Anyway, Kawamoto Saburou won the Ito Sei Literary Prize for Criticism for 白秋望景, a biography of the tanka poet Kitahara Hakushuu.

Both Horie and Kawamoto will receive a 5 million yen cash prize.

Horie Toshiyuki is undertranslated in English, but he does have a short story in Digital Geishas and Talking Frogs: The Best 21st Century Short Stories from Japan, which is an excellent collection of contemporary short fiction.

And since I haven’t been able to find the contents listed anywhere else, I thought I’d entice you a bit. It includes work by:

FICTION

• EnJoe Toh ( Yay! Also, I guess this is more or less the official romanization now)
• Ono Masatsugu
• Kawakami Hiromi
• Jin Keita
• Furukawa Hideo
• Ogawa Mimei
• Shibasaki Tomoka
• Genji Keita
• Hayasuke Yoko
• Kishimoto Sachiko
• Rebecca Brown
• Barry Yourgrau
• “Comes in a Box” (a Japanese writer, it seems, who made his debut in an issue of the original Japanese Monkey Business)

POETRY

• Ishikawa Mina
• Kawakami Mieko (a prose poem with the title “A Once-Perfect Day for Bananafish”)
• Ozawa Minoru
• Stuart Dybek

ESSAYS

• Murakami Haruki (always fun to read, in my opinion)
• Ii Naoyuki
• and a section with various authors and artists who were asked the question “What Do You Wish We Had in Japan Today?” one month after March 11, 2011

MANGA

• The Brother and Sister Nishioka, based on a short story by Franz Kafka
• Takano Fumiko, based on a short story by Lafcadio Hearn

This thing is crammed with great authors (it seems way bigger than last year’s), and it’s run by A Public Space, a non-profit literary journal, so support! It’s only $15  (plus $3 shipping if you’re in America, more if you’re not), which frankly is kind of a fantastic deal. I’ll be back with my impressions when I finish it, probably posted in the reviews section (though it will be much less formal), in a week or two.

In the meantime, you can order your copy here.

What are you reading?!

I just finished Kawamata Chiaki’s Death Sentences (see our review!) and so today I’ll either start the book we’ll be reviewing next—Ikezawa Natsuki’s The Navidad Incident—or catch up on a classic that I regrettably have not read yet, but am very excited to fill the hole in my knowledge: Dazai Osamu’s No Longer Human. 

On the non-Japanese literature front, I blazed through David Rees’ hilarious How To Sharpen Pencils and on my lunch break at work I’ve been making my way through Enrique Vila-Matas’ Never Any End to Paris, which, so far, is amazing.

So share below in the comments: What are you reading and what have you just read?

The Best Translated Book Award, run by Three Percent at the University of Rochester, honors the best in international fiction and poetry translated into English in the previous year.

There was no Japanese fiction on the shortlist or longlist (it was a particular strong year for international fiction, and we all kind of agree that 1Q84 wasn’t that great now, right?) this year, but this more than makes up for it. Japanese poetry has done extremely well in the BTBA—Hiraide Takashi’s For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut won the poetry award in 2009, while Ito Hiromi’s Killing Kanoko and Kawata Ayane’s Time of Sky & Castles in the Air were on the shortlist in 2011 and 2010 respectively.

(That said, you all should definitely read the fiction winner Stone Upon Stone by Wiesław Myśliwski, or as much of the shortlist as you can. I’ve read about half the books on the list as of today, and they’re all pretty great—I’m head over heels in love with Never Any End to Paris, which I’m reading now.)

Death Sentences
Chiaki Kawamata
Translated by Thomas Lamarre and Kazuko Y. Behrens
University of Minnesota Press

One of the preeminent concerns throughout my adult life so far, usually with regards to culture in its various forms but also in my relationships to fellow human beings, is whether or not I “get it.”  I’m sure that fact speaks volumes about who I am as a person, but it seems to me that whenever things become popular, or critically received, or generally accepted by the culture at large, and I stand outside of that consensus, my immediate thought isn’t: “Oh, this is different; oh, it’s not for me; oh, everyone is deluded and I am obviously right,” it’s: “Oh my god, what’s wrong with me, why am I so dumb, what am I missing here?”

Why I got into literature—and in my tiny, amateur way, literary criticism—is thus beyond me.

Okay, enough about me (it’s always about me, isn’t it?). But I do say all of this to preface the following declaration that Death Sentences was an extremely frustrating read, because I don’t quite get it. But I really, really think that this time, it’s not my fault.  Death Sentences had the potential to be a great novel—it’s there, in the final product too—but it’s so very, very flawed. Flawed in the fun, page turning kind of sci-fi way and flawed in the intellectual, metaphor for contemporary society sci-fi way.

And I wanted so much to love it.

The premise of Death Sentences is that in 1940s Paris, an unknown poet connected with the Surrealist movement founded by André Breton, writes a handful of poems that act like hypnotic spells, including one that enslaves the reader like a drug and then ultimately kills them. Through both innocent accidents and deliberate actions, copies of the poem circulate until it becomes a threat to society, and a special police force in contemporary Japan is founded to hunt down all copies of the poem and destroy it. The reader even ends up on a terraformed Mars for a portion of the novel. And in telling this strange story, Death Sentences jumps between genres until it is not only sci-fi, but also hard-boiled detective fiction, historical fiction, and horror/thriller.

This all sounds pretty great right? The idea of connecting surrealism and sci-fi makes perfect sense, and Death Sentences, in it’s own way, is even a kind of Japanese response to George Orwell’s 1984, another undisputed classic. So where did it all go wrong?

Well, the biggest problem with Death Sentences is that Kawamata isn’t the best writer. His style is just incredibly flat. This mainly manifests itself in the fact that roughly half of the “paragraphs” in Death Sentences are only a single sentence, and I would say that three-fourths of the paragraphs—in the entire 240-page novel, I remind you—are less than three sentences. This isn’t an exaggeration, either. Turn to any given page and it’s like this. There are countless strings of sentences that would actually make more sense as a single paragraph. I get that one-sentence paragraphs are supposed to be dramatic, and punchy, but when a 200-page novel is made up almost entirely of one or two-sentence paragraphs, all that drama, and tension, and momentum, flies right out the window. Instead of this novel being a non-stop thrill ride, which I assume is what Kawamata intended, it becomes the exact opposite of that: a slog.

(Incidentally, I do not blame the translators for any “bad writing” in English because I feel that they were simply honoring the original and working with what they were given. However, I wonder, had this novel been taken on by a major publisher and not a university press, if an editor would have forced some structural changes, i.e. tightening up those sentences into longer, more logical, and more appealing paragraphs. And I wonder if, in that scenario perhaps, the English translation might have been better than the original. A scandalous proposition, maybe, but I do wonder…)

Structurally, Death Sentences is kind of a mess as well. I had no problem with the idea of switching genres between sections. The portion in 1940s France and New York City was probably my favorite part of the novel. But right in the middle of the story is an 80-page stretch in modern Japan that describes how a small publishing company gets a hold of the mysterious poem and publishes it in a collection, thus bringing about its widespread dissemination. It’s obviously a critical section, but the details lie almost entirely in the details of production and the personal lives of the people who work the publishing house. There are long stretches of these 80 pages where the poem itself is not part of the story at all, and because of the structure of the novel, we already know that the poem gets published and spreads. And it’s not enough time to care about the characters, because they’re not really involved in the rest of the story. In short, this section is much too long and slows all sense of momentum to a halt.

Perhaps this section is going for a “banality of evil” type situation, which could be intellectually satisfying (but it won’t be, see below), but on a basic structural level, it’s problematic to say the least.

On an intellectual, metaphorical level, well, frankly, I was left scratching my head. Without giving too much away, there’s an obvious parallel between Death Sentences and 1984 in regards to the evils of a government being in charge of the control of information. Death Sentences even takes that message further and attacks capitalism as a force of corruption, by connecting a thread from the private company that sponsors the poem’s publication that leads to a special police force that operates outside the law and, in the end (and this is kind of spoiler-y, if that sort of thing bothers you) a private, corporate owned militia that are the real controllers of a future Mars society.

This is all well and good, but what of the killer poem then? If the poem represents information, or art, or some other ideal that shines light into darkness, or the minority force that spreads secretly throughout an oppressive majority, why is it presented as a force of evil? Even before government interference, this is a poem that enslaves the reader into its strange reverie and ultimately kills them. This is a force that is bringing down the destruction of society, a force that kills its very tenants and disciples.

Is the message that it’s better to die than live in a capitalist society? That death is better than control? The poem as drug is not shown to bring any real enlightenment, or even, as hinted at by the back cover, definitive evidence that the poem brings them to another world, some better, extra-dimensional society.

The magic poem as a symbol is muddled, unclear to me, and that’s why I walk away from Death Sentences not “getting it.” If I didn’t “get” Death Sentences because I am a terrible, one-dimensional reader, than that would actually bring me relief. If the poem represents something clear to you, something that justifies its existence as a force against what is supposed to be an evil, 1984-type situation, please, please let me know.

This has been perhaps the hardest review I’ve ever had to write. Death Sentences is certainly not the worst book I’ve ever read, and in many ways I respect it. It’s extremely flawed to be sure, but there are so many reasons I wanted to like this book, it makes it that much harder for me that it couldn’t live up to its ambitions. I don’t like criticizing something this much, but reading it was so frustrating, the only thing I can do is just let it all out.

Because ultimately, the fact of the matter is, I want books like Death Sentences to be translated and published in English. There is so much unambitious garbage written in English alone that crowds the market and keeps weird, idiosyncratic literature like this from finding an audience. Yes, I had some major problems with Death Sentences, but at least those problems came from trying to be something different, and great, and failing, and not from being generic, formulaic, or trying to appeal to the lowest common denominator.

So if you’re out there, publishers, give me more of this. Because even if I walk away frustrated and ranting, I will at least go out and buy this, and read it, happily.

The William F. Sibley Memorial Translation Prize is run by the East Asian Studies Department of the University of Chicago. Each winner will also receive a $2500 cash prize.

Because the award is to “encourage use” of the winning translations, the translations are free to read and download, and you can do so at the Prize’s homepage. They are currently accepting submissions for next year, but I’m already discouraged from entering since both winners are professors, one at Harvard and the other at Brandeis.

But in all seriousness, thanks again to Nihon Distractions; I would have definitely missed this if he didn’t pick it up.

For the third week in a row, Miura Shion’s 舟を編む  (“Assemble the Boats”) rides high at number one after winning the Japan Bookseller’s Prize, which is, as we’ve seen, one of the most influential awards for popular fiction.

Popular light novelist Nishio Ishin tackles the historical fiction epic in his latest bestseller 悲鳴伝 (“Legend of The Scream”), which debuts at number 5 this week.

At number 7, Higashino Keigo’s latest novel ナミヤ雑貨店の奇蹟 (“The Miracles of the Namiya General Store”) has sunk a little bit, but at least is still on the list.

And finally, Arikawa Hiro’s 三匹のおっさん ふたたび (“The Three SOBs: 2″) holds at 13.

Mishima Yukio Prize Finalists

• Aoki Jungo, 『私のいない高校』(“High School Without Me”)
• Fukunaga Shin, 『一一一一一』(“ONEONEONEONEONE”)
• Kimura Yuusuke, 「イサの氾濫」(“Overflowing with Goodness,” published Dec. 2011 issue of Subaru)
• Ishii Shinji, 『ある一日』(“One Day”)
• Murata Sayaka, 『タダイマトビラ』
• Shibasaki Tomoka, 「わたしがいなかった街で」(“In the Town Where I Wasn’t,” published Apr. 2012 issue of Shincho)

Yamamoto Shugoro Prize Finalists

• Tsujimura Mizuki, 『オーダーメイド殺人クラブ』(“The Custom Order Murder Club”)
• Tsunkawa Kotaro, 『金色の獣、彼方に向かう』(“The Golden Beast Heads Yonder”)
• Yuzuki Yuuko, 『検事の本懐』(“The Prosecutor’s Lifelong Dreams”)
• Harada Maha, 『楽園のカンヴァス』(“The Canvas Paradise”)

Yes, yes, I avoided translating the title of Murata Sayaka’s. Just not sure what she’s going for.

Winners of the Mishima Prize include Takahashi Genichiro, Furukawa Hideo, and Tomoyuki Hoshino, and winners of the Yamamoto Prize include Isaka Kotaro, Ekuni Kaori, and Miyabe Miyuki.

The winners of both prizes will be announced May 15th.

This year’s winner of the Matsumoto Seicho Prize, open to public submission and awarded to excellence in entertainment novels (think the Naoki Prize) by new writers, is Abe Chisato, a 20-year old student at Waseda University for his submission「烏に単は似合わない」 (“A Single Crow Just Doesn’t Look Right”). He is the youngest winner in the 19 year-old prize’s history, and it comes with 5 million yen. (Yomiuri)

The winner of this year’s Japan Horror Novel Grand Prize is Kosugi Eiryou’s「御役」(“His Honorable Duty”). His award will include 5 million yen, publication by Kadokawa Shoten, and a TV drama adaptation that will air on Fuji TV. (Yomiuri)

The winners of this year’s Yokomizo Seishi Mystery Award are 23 year-old Sugahara Sanagi’s 「さあ、地獄へ堕ちよう」(“Well, Let’s Go to Hell”) and Kawaai Kanji’s 「ＤＥＡＤ　ＭＡＮ」. They will both receive 2 million yen. (Yomiuri)