A marvelous writer who deserves to be much better known in English.
Best known as a poet, Japanese writer Miyazawa (1896-1933) turns to folklore and European modernism alike in this welcome collection of short fiction.
It’s a pleasing sign of cultural flexibility that Japanese pop culture, by way of anime, has found room for Miyazawa as inspiration and model; it’s hard to imagine an American superhero comic making similar room for, say, Sherwood Anderson. Yet Miyazawa is certainly playful enough to sustain a cartoon or comic, even when his purpose might be darker than it would seem at first glance. Consider his story “The Restaurant of Many Orders,” whose title does not refer to the rush of customers to keep the cooks busy but instead to a bossy establishment that instructs would-be patrons to go through a series of mandates, from combing their hair to spreading cream over their faces and ears, and lots of it, too. Finally, one of the well-groomed hunters who wanders into the place comes to a realization: “I’ve an idea that ‘restaurant’ doesn’t mean a place for serving food, but a place for cooking people and serving them.” Spot-on. Some of Miyazawa’s enigmatic stories seem to conceal hints of Kafka, as with “Gorsch the Cellist,” in which a not so very accomplished musician finds that his best audience is a studious cuckoo: “In fact, the more he played the more convinced he became that the cuckoo was better than he was.“ Badgers, cats, rabbits, and other critters figure in the story, as they do in many of Miyazawa’s pieces—and it’s a stroke of Kafkaesque brilliance that in one of them, a trap that catches a rat should have a speaking role. A hallmark is “The Fire Stone," a story in which a family of puzzled rabbits comes into possession of a dazzling jewel that burns “like the fires of a volcano…[and] shone like the sunset” and that touches off all kinds of discord before it takes flight like a bird and disappears.
A marvelous writer who deserves to be much better known in English.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-68137-260-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A charming and persuasive entry that will leave readers impatiently awaiting the concluding volume.
Book 2 of Hearne's latest fantasy trilogy, The Seven Kennings (A Plague of Giants, 2017), set in a multiracial world thrust into turmoil by an invasion of peculiar giants.
In this world, most races have their own particular magical endowment, or “kenning,” though there are downsides to trying to gain the magic (an excellent chance of being killed instead) and using it (rapid aging and death). Most recently discovered is the sixth kenning, whose beneficiaries can talk to and command animals. The story canters along, although with multiple first-person narrators, it's confusing at times. Some characters are familiar, others are new, most of them with their own problems to solve, all somehow caught up in the grand design. To escape her overbearing father and the unreasoning violence his kind represents, fire-giant Olet Kanek leads her followers into the far north, hoping to found a new city where the races and kennings can peacefully coexist. Joining Olet are young Abhinava Khose, discoverer of the sixth kenning, and, later, Koesha Gansu (kenning: air), captain of an all-female crew shipwrecked by deep-sea monsters. Elsewhere, Hanima, who commands hive insects, struggles to free her city from the iron grip of wealthy, callous merchant monarchists. Other threads focus on the Bone Giants, relentless invaders seeking the still-unknown seventh kenning, whose confidence that this can defeat the other six is deeply disturbing. Under Hearne's light touch, these elements mesh perfectly, presenting an inventive, eye-filling panorama; satisfying (and, where appropriate, well-resolved) plotlines; and tensions between the races and their kennings to supply much of the drama.
A charming and persuasive entry that will leave readers impatiently awaiting the concluding volume.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-345-54857-3
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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