Tag Archives: Japanese Literature

Snow Country-Yasunari Kawabata

Published: 1948 (Serialized in 1930’s and 1940’s by Bungeishunjuu and Kaizo among others, translated into English by Edward Seidensticker in 1956) Yasunari Kawabata’s novel, Snow Country, is a beautiful and sobering novel that transports the reader to a place near and dear to my heart, Niigata Prefecture. In Part One of the novel, Shimamura, aContinue reading “Snow Country-Yasunari Kawabata”

Earthlings-Sayaka Murata

Published: 2018 (Shinchosa) Setting: 1990’s and 2010’s Tokyo and rural Nagano Summary: In Murata’s second novel to be widely-translated, Earthlings, an idiosyncratic young girl named Natsuki confronts childhood trauma in an unorthodox and revealing manner, ultimately ending in total detachment from human “Earthlings,” and their society at large, twenty years later. Natsuki, unfit to be in her normalContinue reading “Earthlings-Sayaka Murata”