店長がバカすぎて (Tencho ga Baka sugite) by 早見和真 (Kazumasa Hayami) (Kadokawa Haruki Corporation) *Japanese Text Only ~Ernie Hoyt

Kazumasa Hayami is a Japanese writer from Yokohama in Kanagawa Prefecture. When he was still a student at Kogakuin University majoring in literature, he went to door-to-door to various publishers to offer his services and eventually was hired by the weekly magazine AERA and wrote for the column titled 現代の肖像 (Gendai no Shozo) which translates to A Portrait of Our Times in English. It was a column dedicated to reporting on prominent people of the time. 

He made his literary debut in 2008 with his novel ひゃくはち (Hyakuhachi) based on his own experience as being a bench warmer on a prestigious high school baseball team. The book was later adapted into a movie. His novel ザ・ロイヤルファミリー (The Royal Family) was published in 2019 and was later adapted into a television drama series. 

The book 店長はバカすぎて (Tencho wa Bakasugite) which currently doesn’t have an English translation was published in 2020 by Kadokawa Haruki Corporation. To be honest, this was my third attempt at reading this book. Reading books in another language is a very daunting task. The first time I tried to read this book, I only got as far as two pages. The second time, I only managed ten. However, I persevered and was finally able to read the novel until the end. 

店長はバカすぎてroughly translates into English as [The Store Manager is So Stupid]. The novel is written from the point of view of a contract employee, twenty-eight year old Kyoko Tanihara who is single and lives alone and whose father runs a sushi shop in Kagurazaka. She works at a small bookstore called Musashino Shoten in Kichijoji, a neighborhood in the western part of Tokyo.

The story begins with Kyoko having to listen to her boss at the daily morning meeting before the store opens. This is a common practice in Japanese companies. It is called 朝礼 (chorei) which means morning assembly. Kyoko has a headache and isn’t really listening to her boss until he calls her by her full name. That’s another one of her boss’s habits that annoys her. He calls everybody by their full name. 

Kyoko doesn’t mind the morning assembly but believes they could be much shorter. She is really annoyed that she has to stand there and listen to her boss’s longwinded monologue. Lately, he seems to be hooked on self-help books and is always encouraging his employees to read them. 

It really isn’t the morning assembly that has given Kyoko a headache. The cause of her pain is one of the bookstore’s regular customers. A middle-aged man who always comes in on the morning that his favorite fishing magazine is released. Unlike the U.S., all the magazines in Japan have a specific release date. They are not delivered around the first or second week of the month as most U.S. publications are, excluding the weeklies. The computer shows that there are three copies in stock but they are not where they are supposed to be.

She asked the person in charge of shelving magazines if she had seen the fishing magazine. The part-time staff took offense thinking that Kyoko was accusing her of not doing her job. She then asked her boss who also said he was not the one who shelved it either. 

One of the bookstore’s full-time employees and Kyoko’s superior and friend, calls her over to the counter. They are looking at the security camera which shows the manager holding in his hands something that definitely looks like the fishing magazine the regular customer was looking for. It shows him setting them down in the self-help section as he picks up a self-help book to recommend to his employees at today’s morning meeting. 

The above is just one of the examples of what Kyoko Tanihara has to deal with. She also has to deal with hard to please writers, editors who seem to look down on small and mid-size bookstores, and a load of problem customers such as one that insists Kyoko order a book for her even though the book has been out of print for years, or the customer that wants to make small talk about things that do not have anything to do with books or publishing. 

As someone who has worked in the book industry for a number of years in both the United States and in Japan, I could relate to so much of what Kyoko Tanihara goes through every day at the bookstore. 

Kyoko Tanihara loves working in a bookstore. It has always been a dream of hers. She loves talking to people about books, recommending books, reviewing books, and talking to authors about their books as well. But she also has to deal with a lot of negatives - annoying customers, a stupid boss, and even stupider president of the company and yet she perseveres in being a bookseller. 

I’ve had to deal with different bosses, annoying co-workers and problem customers as well but like Kyoko, I also love the book industry. I really didn’t want to leave it but I had no other recourse at the time of my retirement from the bookstore. I hope this book gets translated into English in the future. I would be one of the first ones to read it. If I was even more confident about my language abilities, I’d like to translate it myself so I can share it with other English readers and book lovers. 

A sequel has already been published but I’m going to take a short break from trying to read another Japanese novel. For me, the sequel will just have to wait.

Harlequin Butterfly by Toh Enjoe, translated by David Boyd (Pushkin Press) ~Ernie Hoyt

Toh Enjoe is a Japanese writer from Sapporo City in Hokkaido. Most of his books are either literary fiction or science-fiction. Or speculative fiction as Harlan Ellison would say. He has won a number of awards including the Akutagawa Prize, Japan’s most prestigious literary award for his book 道化師の蝶 (Dokeshi no Cho).

Harlequin Butterfly is the English translation of 道化師の蝶 (Dokeshi no Cho) which was first published in the Japanese language in 2011 by Kodansha. This English edition was translated by David Boyd, an assistant professor of Japanese at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte. He has also translated books by Hiroko Oyamada - The Hole (Asia by the Book, March 2026) and along with Sam Betts has translated books by Mieko Kawakami including Heaven, (Asia by the Book, July 2022), Breasts and Eggs (Asia by the Book, November 2021) and All the Lovers in the Night (Asia by the Book, December 2022). 

You would be hard put to describe this book as science fiction or even speculative fiction.  The term “surreal” or “surrealistic fiction” would be more apt in my opinion. The book opens with an unnamed character on a flight from Tokyo to Seattle. She has a book in her lap but is thinking, “What about a book that can only be read when traveling?”. 

She believes “there’s nothing exciting about a book you can also read when traveling. There’s a right time and place for everything, and anything that claims to work everywhere can only be subpar, some kind of sham”. The book in her lap is titled Untold Tales with Those with Three Arms. 

Although she tries to read the book, nothing sticks in her head. She feels like “the words are struggling to hold on to the page, lagging behind and racing to catch up”. She continues to think about why it is that she can’t read while flying on an airplane. All she sees on the page is “a blur of words”. I concur with her thoughts when she says, “I can never read when I’m traveling. I’ll pack a couple of books, or maybe even buy one during the journey, but I can’t think of a single time that I actually got anywhere with one.”

She believes that the ability to collect stray thoughts and make money out of them is the key to success. Sitting next to her is such a man who made his fortune in doing such a thing. His name is A.A. Abrams. He’s a man who virtually spends all his time on airplanes. His business is always conducted on a flight but he never has a destination in mind. When he’s kept on the ground, he stays in a hotel near the airport, and tries to return on a flight as soon as the opportunity arises. “He’s no flight attendant. Not a pilot, either. Just a passenger with nowhere to go”. 

A.A. Abrams is in pursuit of a prolific writer named Tomoyuki Tomoyuki. This man appears to have the ability to write expertly in the language of any place he goes. However, Tomoyuki Tomoyuki always seems to be one step ahead of Abrams. 

Will Abrams eventually catch up to the ever elusive Tomoyuki Tomoyuki? Is Tomoyuki Tomoyuki an actual person? Is Abrams endeavor a complete waste of time? My head is still spinning after finishing this book. What was this story really about? It’s very hard to say. The editing could use a little work as in the beginning A.A. Abrams is introduced as a man but in later chapters, Abrams turns out to be a businesswoman who was diagnosed with uterine cancer long before her death. 

I’m still at odds to know if I enjoyed this book or not. I may have to give it another read for a better understanding of what exactly it was all about.

The Clock House Murders by Yukito Ayatsuji, translated by Ho-Ling Wong (Pushkin Vertigo) ~Ernie Hoyt

Yukito Ayatsuji is a Japanese mystery writer from Kyoto. He made his literary debut in 1987 with his book, 十角館の殺人（Jukakukan no Satsujin) which was translated into English in 2015 as The Decagon House Murders by Locked Room International and again in 2020 by Pushkin Press. The story was adapted into a streaming drama for Hulu Japan in 2024.

This book would also be the first in Ayatsuji’s House series which includes a total of ten books. Kodansha Publishers categorizes Ayatsuji’s House series as a honkaku mystery, a subgenre of the mystery fiction that was inspired by the Golden Age of Detective Fiction which includes writers such as Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, and Ngaio Marsh.

The Clock House Murders is the fifth book in the House series and was originally published in the Japanese language as 時計館の殺人 (Tokeikan no Satsujin) in 1991 by Kodansha. The book had won the Mystery Writers of Japan Award for Best Novel in 1992. It was translated into English by Ho-Ling Wong, who also translated The Decagon House Murders, The Mill House Murders, and Labyrinthine House Murders for Pushkin Press. This book was also adapted into a streaming series for Hulu Japan in 2026. 

One of the main characters in this novel is Takaaki Kawaminami. He currently works as an editor for a magazine called Chaos which focuses on articles about the occult and supernatural. He is meeting with Kiyoshi Shimada, an up and coming mystery novelist who writes under the pen name of Kadomi Shishiya. The two had met three years ago in Oita Prefecture where Kawaminami was a third year university student. 

Kawaminami remembers making Shimada’s acquaintance quite well. It all started when he received a letter that was signed by Seiji Nakamura. Nakamura was a well renowned architect and had designed two curious buildings on the island of Tsunojima in Oita Prefecture in Kyushu. One was the Blue Mansion and the other was the Decagon House. However, Kawaminami received the letter after Nakamura’s death. 

In order to solve the mystery of the letter from beyond the grave, Kawaminami was visiting the home of Seiji Nakamura’s younger brother Kojiro. This is where Kawaminami first meets Shimada. They would become friends and work together to try to solve the mystery of the lette, but during their investigation, a series of murders would occur. The events from that time kept Kawaminami from contacting his friend.

Kawaminimi asks his friend if he has ever heard of the Clock Mansion in Kamakura. When he mentions the building, Kadomi gives his friend a questioning look and says, “Do you mean to say…” and Kawaminami answers, “Yes, it is exactly what you think. The house, which is also known as Clock House, is one of the buildings designed by Seiji Nakamura”.

As the editor of Chaos, Kawaminami tells his friend that the magazine is working on a special feature - “Confronting the Ghost of the Kamakura Clock House”. He tells his friend that the house used to belong to a man named Michinori Koga. Koga died nine years ago and around the same time, a lot of other people died as well. The deaths lead to the rumor that the house is haunted. “The most repeated one is about the ghost of a girl that manifests at the house and roams around the surrounding forest. And that apparition is said to be none other than Michinori’s daughter, who died long ago…”

Kawaminami then fills Koga in on what the magazine has planned. He and a few others will be locked inside the Clock House for three days. A well-known psychic named Mikoto Komyoji, will also be a part of the team. She will hold seances and try to contact the ghost. Kadomi has a bad feeling about his friend staying in that house for three days. He says to his friend, “It doesn’t feel right somehow. It would be a different story if it were any other haunted house, but this is one of Seiji Nakamura’s creations we’re talking about…”

In the past, horrible events had transpired in the Decagon House, the Mill House, and the Labyrinthine House - all of them being creations of Seiji Nakamura. Kawaminami suggests that Kadomi should join them and that he will try to get permission from the current caretaker of the house. Although Kadomi would like to join, he says he will check out the place on his own at his own leisure. 

For the magazine project, aside from Kawaminami, the others chosen to stay in the house are Shigeo Kobayakawa, the deputy editor-in-chief at Chaos and Kawaminami’s boss. Atsushi Utsumi, photographer for Kintasha, the company that publishes Chaos. The psychic, Makoto Komyoji. There will also be five members from W–University’s Mystery Club. Four of the members had camped near the Clock House about ten years ago, the same year when Michinori’s daughter is said to have died. 

Once all the members are gathered, then the real story begins. The medium told all the participants that they would have to change clothes and leave anything synthetic behind - necklaces, wristwatches, cell-phones, etc. She tells the group, “Spirits bound to a building are extremely sensitive to anything that is brought in from outside”. 

In the evening, the seance appears to have been a success but shortly afterwards, one of the members is grisly murdered. Soon, another murder takes place, then another. The team is being picked off one by one. Will the ones that are still alive be able to find the killer? Is the killer one of them? Will they get any help from the outside? 

Although I have not read the previous novels that precede this story, it indeed feels as if you are reading a novel from the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, think Ellery Queen or Agatha Christie. The novel had me guessing all the way through until the end and I still couldn’t figure out who the murderer was until I read the book to the very end. Very satisfying indeed!

The Hole by Hiroko Oyamada, translated by David Boyd (New Directions) ~Ernie Hoyt

Hiroko Oyamada is a Japanese writer from Hiroshima. After graduating from university, she worked in a factory that manufactured cars. Her experience there would lead her to write her first novel, 工場 (Kojo) which would also be first book to be translated into English as Factory.

The Hole is her second book to be published in English. It was originally published in the Japanese language as 穴 (Ana) which means “hole” in Japanese. It was published in 2014 by Shinchosha. It won the Akutagawa Prize, Japan’s most prestigious literary award, in 2013. 

The story is about a woman named Asa, short for Asahi, who moves to the countryside due to her husband’s job transfer. She also narrates the story. They would move to her husband’s home town and would be living in the house next door to her husband’s mother. A house which his parents own.

Asa was having a hard time picturing the second house. She thought to herself, “it was strange how I couldn’t seem to picture this house - how big it was, what color it was, what the yard was like”. She told herself, ‘my inability to conjure any memory of the place meant it couldn’t have been remarkably large or small”. Then again, she couldn’t even recall what her husband’s house was like. 

The husband, whose name is never mentioned in the book, says that will be able to stay at the house rent-free. Asa has no qualms about quitting her job and hopes she will be able to find a new one close to their new home. Her mother-in-law, Tomiko, tells 

One day as Asa was doing an errand for her mother-in-law, she spotted a big black animal. However, she couldn’t make out what kind of animal it was. She knew it wasn’t a weasel and it wasn’t a raccoon. It has “wide shoulders, slender and muscular thighs, but from the knees down, its legs were as thin as sticks”. It didn’t seem dangerous, so Asa decided to follow it.

That’s when she falls into a hole. The hole was about four to five feet deep. As Asa tried to get out of the hole, she then realized how narrow it was. She felt the hole was “exactly my size - a trap made for just me”. This would be the beginning of her surreal encounters with other people in the town. 

She first meets one of her neighbors. A woman named Sera. Sera already knows who Asa is but only refers to her as “the bride”. It was Sera who helped Asa out of the hole. In fact, many people in town referred to Asa as “the bride”.

This would be the beginning of a sequence of surreal incidents which would take place in Asa’s life. She can’t be sure if what she sees is real or if she’s hallucinating. Did she hallucinate the black animal? Why has her husband never mentioned that he had a brother? A person she would meet while out wandering in the field full of holes. 

Is Asa the “Alice in Wonderland” in her new surroundings? Is her husband’s brother the “rabbit” she follows down the hole? The book even makes a reference to the Lewis Carroll novel. The story is quirky and irrelevant while also being serious and mysterious. Oyamada makes the reader feel like Asa herself, is what we’re reading true or is it a fantasy of some sort? If you, as the reader, will be puzzled.

Nails and Eyes by Kaori Fujino, translated by Kendall Heitzman (Pushkin Press) ~Ernie Hoyt

Kaori Fujino is a Japanese writer from Kyoto. She made her literary debut with a story titled いやしい鳥 (Iiyashi torii) which won the 2006 Bungakukai Prize and was later published into a book of the same name. The title roughly translates to Pleasant Bird in English.

Nails and Eyes is her first book to be published in English. It was first published in the Japanese language in 2013 by Shinchosha with the title 爪と目 (Tsume to Me), which directly translates to Nails and Eyes. It also won the Akutagawa Prize, Japan’s most prestigious literary award.

The book is a collection of three short stories, the first being the Nails and Eyes. The other stories that follow the Nails and Eyes are What Shoko Forgets and Minute Fears. It is difficult to categorize the stories as they all include blends of science fiction, thrillers, and horror. 

Nails and Eyes is narrated by a young girl who had just lost her mother. Her father invites the woman he’s been having an affair with to come live in their home and to take care of his daughter. The daughter relates the story of how the woman became a part of their lives. It is hard to tell if the daughter is talking to the woman or just sharing her observations of the interaction between her father and the young woman. 

“I can’t marry you.” That’s what her father had told the woman on the first day of their affair. She was so surprised that she could only respond by saying, “Oh.” The father continues to explain why he can’t marry her. He says, “I have a child. She’s still a little girl.”. The woman could care less if the man had a child or not and just nods and answers, “OK, I understand.”

However, things would change a year and a half later. It was the father who found his wife’s body. He had come home one day to find his three-year old daughter sleeping in the middle of the bed in their bedroom. When he prodded her awake and asked where Mommy was, the daughter only replied, “I don’t know” and drifted back to sleep.

The father called his wife’s cellphone and was surprised to hear the ringtone nearby. He then went out on the balcony where he found his wife, frozen stiff and lying on her side. The police could find no evidence of foul play and the fingerprints they found on the patio door was of the mother, the man, and the daughter. When questioned by the police, the daughter said she could open and close the latch. Her mother’s death was ruled as an accident. 

The woman does move in but she’s indifferent to the man’s daughter. The daughter seems rather indifferent to the woman as well but the daughter follows the woman’s every move. The ending may leave the reader surprised, shocked, and confused as well. 

What Shoko Forgets is about a woman who had a stroke about six months ago and now finds herself living in different facilities. Shoko is currently sharing a room with three other patients but there seems to be one extra person in the room tonight - a man. He whispers in her ear, “Shoko, you always pretend you’re asleep”. Shoko thinks to herself, “Always?”. Shoko then remembers that they go through this every night. However, it appears none of the other patients are aware of the man’s visits. Shoko is not even her name. Who is this woman and what is she going through?

The final story, Minute Fears is a modern tale of an urban legend. A young boy named Daiki doesn’t want to be left at home alone even though he had no problems staying alone in the past. However, he wouldn’t tell his mother what’s wrong. He could only mumble, “Mum, don’t leave me!”. He tells his mom that she could leave after Dad gets home. The Mom still wanted to know why but he wouldn’t tell her. It would be the father who would finally get the words out of Daiki. 

Daiki was at a pocket park in the afternoon. The story of this particular park is that if you don’t leave it by 4:44pm in the afternoon, you will be cursed. Even if you were with a group of people, you had to get out of there by 4.44pm“and anyone who happened to be the only kid in the park at 4:44pm would definitely be cursed. Today, Daiki found himself alone at the park at 4:44pm!

The kids believe the curse was coming from a little girl. Unfortunately, no one knew what her story was. What was the curse like? The girl would call the victim at home at night. If they pick up the phone, she would say, “Hey, come out to the pocket playground and play.” The kid would say, ”No way!” then hang up. There would be another call, the same voice, the same line - “Come out to the pocket playground”. 

The ghost of the girl would call again and say, “Come out to the pocket playground. I’ll pick you up and we can go together”, “Come out to the pocket playground. I’m almost at your door”, “Come out to the pocket playground. Come on, open up, come on”, and the last time she speaks, she says, “Now let’s go over to the pocket playground together.”

The mother had been calling her husband but Daiki wouldn’t let him answer the phone. After the mother gets home and talks to Daiki, she discovers that he still believes he’s cursed. Even though it’s in the middle of the night, the mother says to Daiki, “Now let’s go over to the pocket playground together”....

Three stories, three different genres. Each story is unique in its own way. Each story gets the reader thinking about what happens next. Fujino does not provide the answers. It is all left to your own imagination.

Spring Garden by Tomoka Shibasaki, translated by Polly Barton (Pushkin Press) ~Ernie Hoyt

Tomoka Shibasaki is a Japanese writer from Osaka who started writing while she was still in high school. After she graduated from university、 she took a job as an office worker but continued to write. Her short story, レッド、イエロー、オレンジ、オレンジ、ブルー (Red, Yellow、 Orange、 Orange, Blue) was first published in 1999 in the literary magazine Bungei. Her first novel, きょうのできごと （Kyo no Dekigoto) was published the following year. It was also adapted into a feature length film, directed by Isao Yukisada and stars Rena Tanaka and Satoshi Tsumabuki.

Spring Garden was first published in the Japanese language as 春の庭 （Haru no Niwa) in 2014 by Bungei Shunju. It won the Akutagawa Prize, one of Japan’s most prestigious literary prizes, the other being the Naoki Award. The English edition was translated by Polly Barton, who has also translated other works of Japanese writers including Where the Wild Ladies Are by Aoko Matsuda (Asia by the Book, May 2022), Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa (Asia by the Book, August 2025), and Butter by Asako Yuzuki (Asia by the Book, September 2025). 

The first English edition was published in 2017 by Pushkin Press. This trade edition was published in 2024. As Polly Barton is a British translator, the book was written in British English. I became aware of that fact when she mentions that one of the characters in the book was looking at the ground floor from her first story balcony. If you’re an American reader, once you realize the book is written in British English, it becomes a lot easier to understand. 

Spring Garden is the story about Taro, a divorced man living alone in an apartment complex that’s slated to be demolished. The block of apartments where Taro lived was View Palace Saeki III. It consisted of eight apartments - four on the first floor and four on the second. The rooms did not have any numbers, they were all named after an animal from the Chinese zodiac. 

Taro had noticed a woman standing on the balcony looking down at a house belonging to Mrs. Saeki, the owner of the apartment complex. Currently, the house was empty and Mrs Saeki was living in a retirement home. However, Taro realized that the woman wasn’t looking at Mrs. Saeki’s house, it was the house next to it, the sky-blue house.

Taro would get to know the woman and they would start a strange bond with her and the sky-blue house. He learns that she’s an artist and that her name is Nishi. Shehe had asked Taro if he could use his balcony to get a better look at the sky-blue house. She tells him it’s for her drawings. Taro learns that Nishi works as an illustrator and also draws manga under a pen name but she doesn’t tell him what her pen name is or what manga she draws. 

As a sign of gratitude, Nishi invites Taro out to dinner. While they are eating, she takes out a book from her bag. It is a photo book of the sky-blue house. Once she brings out the book, she begins to tell the story of how she became enamored of it and was hoping that one day she would be able to see its interior. 

Spring Garden is a rather strange story. It’s as if the sky-blue house is also one of the main characters, along with Taro and Nishi. They become obsessed with the house, researching its history and about the couple who lived in it when the book of the house was published. The house becomes a symbol for what they lost and what they hope to find in the future.

寿司屋の小太郎 (Sushi-ya no Kotaro) by 佐川芳恵 (Yoshie Sagawa) (Poplarsha) ~Ernie Hoyt *Japanese Text only

Yoshie Saga is a Japanese essayist and children’s book writer. She got married in 1975 to a man who was the owner of a sushi shop called Natori Sushi in Higashi Nakano in Tokyo’s Nakano Ward. In 1978, she became a professional cook and spent the next thirty years working with her husband at the shop.

She wrote about her experiences and her first book, 寿司屋のかみさん うちあげ話 (Sushi-ya no Kamisan : Uchiagebanashi) which roughly translates in English to Confessions of a Sushi Restaurant Owner’s Wife. The essay was later adapted into an irregular drama series and was aired between 1996 and 1997. 

Her experiences became the basis for the Wife of a Sushi Restaurant Owner series which includes a total of eight books. In 2011, she wrote her first children’s book, 寿司屋の小太郎 (Sushi-ya no Kotaro) which roughly translates to Sushi Restaurant’s Kotaro. This book would also develop into a series which consists of five volumes. 

The main character of this book is twelve-year old Kotaro. His father, Tsuyoshi Yamamoto, is a forty-year old sushi chef who has his own shop called [Masa Sushi]. His mother, Harumi is thirty-seven. Kotaro also has a younger sister named Mayuko who is only two years younger. 

Kotaro loves sushi. He thinks he may one day take over the shop from his father. Their shop, which is also their home, is located in the middle of Keyakidai Shotengai. Kotaro often helps his father in the shop and likes to brag that he knows how to make natto maki or natto roll. Natto is a traditional food item in Japan and is made by fermenting soybeans. It has a very strong smell and a slimy texture. Natto rolls consist of vinegared rice and natto and is wrapped in a sheet of toasted seaweed. 

Kotaro has many adventures. In his first adventure, a man claiming to be from Keiyakidai Elementary School came to the sushi shop and said he was talking to people working along the street to contribute to a safety poster for the community. However, one of Kotaro’s assignments, along with the rest of the sixth-graders was to draw a safety poster first and the best one would later be chosen and distributed to various places around town. Also, Kotaro did not recognize the man’s voice and had never seen him at school. 

The man was trying to swindle people out of 10,000 yen (approximately $80USD at the time the book was published). It was the shotengai’s tofu shop auntie who really got angry at the conman telling him, “Do you know how much tofu I have to make and sell to make a profit of 10,000yen?”. She gave the conman an earful. The adults were all proud of Kotaro for his actions. 

Kotaro has more adventures with his most dangerous and yet most intriguing was going to the large fish market with his father. As his father was busy talking with various fishermen and fish-sellers, Kotaro became bored and found himself walking around the pier where many boats were anchored. As he didn’t see anybody around, he boarded one. He found a nice spot to sit and became so relaxed he fell asleep. When he woke up, he was no longer at the pier. In fact, he was nowhere near any land. 

Poor Kotaro. What will become of him? Will he be lost at sea? Will the owners of the boat toss him overboard? Or will they say they will sell him in Hong Kong, when they get there. Of course, the boatowners were not evil men but they thought they would teach Kotaro a lesson for boarding a boat without permission. 

If you love sushi, then you will love 寿司屋の小太郎 (Sushi-ya no Kotaro). Unfortunately, there currenlty isn’t any English translations of any of the books in the series so you will have to learn how to read Japanese. Sagawa also provides simple recipes in the book and says you should be able to hold the book in one hand and make the dishes. She also mentions that the main character was based on the son of a couple of the shop’s regular customers. He would sit at the counter and ask for kohada (gizzard shad, a small herring-like fish) and aji (horse mackerel). The boy’s name was Kotaro! 

Sagawa also hopes that by reading this series, people will want to eat more fish and tell others that fish is not only healthy, but it’s delicious as well. I could go for some sushi right now!

The Devil Takes Bitcoin by Jake Adelstein (Scribe) ~Janet Brown

If ever a book needed a diagram, it's The Devil Takes Bitcoin because Jake Adelstein (author of Tokyo Vice, Asia by the Book, January 2010) has never met a detail he doesn't like. Admittedly I read this with no idea of what a Bitcoin is but after hours of reading and taking pages of notes, I now know how to dress if I'm faced with a Japanese arrest, where to find Tokyo's cafes where waitresses wear maid costumes while calling  their customers "Master," and that Adelstein has liver cancer. However I still have only a vague idea of what a Bitcoin is and I have absolutely no idea of what the theme of this book is meant to be. 

For anyone as ignorant as I am, Bitcoin was first mentioned in 2008 when it was registered by anonymousspeech.com as www.Bitcoin.org. Two months later a white paper appeared under the title Bitcoin: a Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System, written by an elusive and untraceable person who called himself Satoshi Nakamoto. 

Bitcoin, as explained by Nakamoto, would be an "unregulated, decentralized currency unshackled from the clutches of the state,” a monetary system operating over the internet as electronic money that was unconnected to banks. Every transaction would be logged in a public ledger and production would be capped at 21 million Bitcoins, protecting this against forgeries and inflation and increasing value as demand outstripped the supply.

This 9-page proposal was only a theory because Bitcoin needed to be generated through computer software which at this point didn't exist. Three months later in 2009, Satoshi had found the necessary software developers and created (or mined) the first Bitcoin, at a time when the financial debacle of 2008 made this new currency an enticing possibility. Distribution was handled by a man who had created an exchange for gamesters (often teenage boys) who were obsessed with Magic cards. He added Bitcoins as another commodity to exchange on this site which was then discovered and purchased by a French computer geek based in Tokyo.

Mark Karpeles turned mtgox.com into Mt. Gox, the world's leading Bitcoin exchange. It sold Bitcoin to purchasers who used "fiat currency" (money that's government-issued). It purchased Bitcoin through wire transfers or ACH (bank-to-bank payments). Purchases were sent to the buyer's Bitcoin address, which functioned like a bank account number. 

Buyers received the Bitcoins by using a "public key" and withdrew them with a "private key" that they were given through their Bitcoin address. All of this was recorded in the blockchain (ledger) that was updated six times an hour with the Bitcoin addresses used in each exchange. 

"Little to no personal identity was disclosed in Bitcoin transactions," which attracted the attention of a website that was launched in the same month as the first Bitcoin. Silk Road was the brainchild of a libertarian surfer and physicist who presented it as "an anonymous Amazon.com." Although Ross Albricht believed people were essentially good and that the more laws, the worse society became, his initial Silk Road offering of mushrooms was rapidly overrun by less benign products. And what better way to make illegal purchases than Bitcoin? Mt. Gox and Silk Road became intertwined and disaster was right around the corner as publicity became focused on the Dark Web.

At first the attention was welcome but it all came too fast and things got sloppy. Paper wallets were created, printed documents with the data needed to generate private keys. If the document was lost, so were the Bitcoins. Other Bitcoins were stored in safety deposit boxes where they could be withdrawn without being logged on the blockchain. The U.S. government went after Silk Road and hackers targeted Mt. Gox. 

By 2015, 850,000 Bitcoins (about $500 million) had gone missing and Mt. Gox went bankrupt. The founder of Silk Road was sentenced to life with no parole. Mark Karpeles was under arrest in Japan. Satoshi Nakamoto vanished from the internet.

Perhaps because Adelstein was given custody of Karpeles' two cats and wasn’t a lover of felines, he had a vested interest in finding the true culprit who got away with the fortune in Bitcoins. At this point, his book becomes even more convoluted, as impossible as that may seem.

Who did it? Who was Satoshi Nakamoto? Who was the Dark Lord of the Dark Web, Dread Pirate Roberts? Can it all be traced back to the Russians? Do we care?

At the time when The Devil Takes Bitcoin was published, a single Bitcoin was worth around $100,000. (Adelstein used his meager supply of twelve to finance his daughter's first year of college.) Apparently other exchanges are profiting from the dire example set by Mt. Gox and the game goes on. Perhaps we'll all be using cryptocurrency soon and paper money will be as dead as the Danish Postal Service.

Sympathy Tower Tokyo by Rie Qudan, translated by Jesse Kirkwood (Penguin) ~Ernie Hoyt

Rie Qudan is a Japanese writer who was born in the city of Urawa which is now part of Saitama in Saitama Prefecture. She made her debut as a writer in 2021 when her book 悪い音楽  (Bad Music) was published. Her first book and her novella Schoolgirl were published in English by Gazebo Books in 2025. The book won the 170th Akutagawa Prize, Japan’s most prestigious literary prize for new writers.

Sympathy Tower Tokyo is her second novel to be published in English. It was originally published in the Japanese language with the title 東京都同情塔 (Tōkyō-to Dōjō Tō) by Shicho in 2023 and was translated by Jesse Kirkwood, a multilinguist who is proficient in French, Polish, and Japanese. 

Kudan’s novel is set in the city of Tokyo in the near future and is narrated by a woman architect named Sara Machina, her last name being pronounced as Makina, and her would-be biographer, Takt.

The story opens with Machina having a conversation with herself in her head. Her firm had been chosen to build what would become the centerpiece of Tokyo - Sympathy Tower Tokyo. What bothers her is the excessive use of katakana, a phonetic script in Japanese that is mainly used for writing foreign words, names, onomatopoeia, and scientific terms. Sympathy Tower Tokyo - シンパシータワートーキョー (In katakana English it would be pronounced shin・pa・shee tawa- tōkyō). 

So, what exactly is the Sympathy Tower Tokyo? It is the name for a prison that is to be built in the middle of Gyoen Gardens in Shinjuku, one of Tokyo’s most popular botanical gardens. 

For Machina, “-the sound of it, the katakana charactersused to approximate the English words, and what those words meant, and all the currents of power swirling around the project - started to bother me, and now there was no going back.” 

The more she thinks about it, the angrier she gets. She keeps asking herself, “Why this name?” and her own response to that question is, “Because the Japanese people are trying to abandon their own language”. She can’t understand why the Japanese want to use these foreign words - シングルマザー (shinuru maza / single mother), パートナー (patona / partner), ディファレントリー・エイブルド (diffarentori eiburudos / differently abled) when they have their equivalents in Japanese - 母子家庭の母親 (boshikatei no hahaoya), 配偶者 (haigusha), and 障害者 (shogaisha).

The tower would house homo miserabilis, the new word for 犯罪者 (hanzaisha), formerly “criminal” in English.  According to an AI-built, a fictictious chatbot that is similar in design and concept as ChatGPT, the concept was first proposed by the sociologist and happiness scholar Masaki Seto. 

Seto had written a book titled Homo Miserabilis : The New Subjects of Our Sympathy. Seto “sets out a caring attitude toward convicts and juvenile delinquents serving sentences in correctional facilities, urging us to consider their backgrounds, personal circumstances and personalities as deserving of pity, tenderness, and compassion”. 

Seto also created the term Homo Felix - a word for those who are “happy” or “fortunate”. He emphasizes the “need for Homo Felix to acknowledge their own privilege”. Of course there are those who oppose the building of the tower and argue that criminals, not homo miserabilis, do not deserve sympathy and should be punished for their crimes. 

Sympathy Tower Tokyo does get built but during its construction, Machina continually referred to it as the Tōkyō-to Dōjō Tō and the name became more popular in usage than its official title. It would also be the last building Machina designs. 

What really makes this novel interesting is Qudan’s use of ChatGPT to write about 5% of the book. However, she later clarifies that AI was used only for the AI dialogue in the book. It’s a book that’s guaranteed to start discussions on language and the use of artificial intelligence, which in my honest opinion, is a good thing.

Kinami Mayumi's Aomori Apple Story 1 by Mayumi Kinami, translated by Takahiro Ido (Ringo History Research Center) ~Ernie Hoyt

2025 marks the 150th anniversary of apple cultivation in Aomori Prefecture, Japan. Mayumi Kinami who was born into a family of apple grower, decided to write a book about the history about it. The book was independently published in May of 2025 in Japanese with the title of [靑森りんご物語 ①] (Aomori Ringo Monogatari 1). The English version was published later the same year with the title of Kinami Mayumi’s Aomori Apple Story 1.

In this first volume about the history of apple cultivation in Aomori, Kanami begins by discussing why it began. She explains that it “began as an unemployment policy of feudal warriors who lost their jobs after the Meiji Restoration”.

Three apple saplings arrived in the Aomori Prefectural Office in the spring of 1875. A man by the name of Tate-e Kikuchi, a former samurai, planted them on the grounds of the Prefectural office. According to Kinami, Tate-e Kikuchi is the father of apple cultivation in Aomori. He “dedicated his life to apples and other agricultural products”.

However, Kinami explains that it wasn’t just Tate-e Kikuchi who was responsible for the growth of the apple cultivation business. In order to get a real understanding of apple cultivation in Aomori Prefecture, we also need to learn about these three other people - Tsugaru Tsugaruakira, the 12th daimyo (lord) of the Hirosaki Domain, Daidoji Shigeyoshi, a chief retainer of the Hirosaki Clan. Shigeyoshi was also the founder of the Aomori Michinoku Bank, Kakuhiro Company and other companies, and Naritomo Sugiyama, another chief retainer.

Kinami also says apple cultivation in Japan wouldn’t have been possible without these people - Shungaku Matsudaira, Gartner from Germany, Lewis Boehmer, and John Ing.

Matsudaira is thought to be the first Japanese to make and eat an apple. Gartner is known for establishing a large apple orchard in Nanae in Hokkaido, and Boehmer taught the grafting method to Kikuchi. 

John Ing was a teacher. He was brought from Yokohama to Hirosaki to teach at the To-o Gijuku, “the only school in Tohoku at the time that employed foreign missionaries”. He fed apples to his students. 

There are many others that were involved with the growth of the apple business in Aomori. After the introduction of the main people involved in the apple business, then the real story of Aomori Apple begins.

The book consists of five chapters. The first chapter goes way back to the prehistoric era of the Aomori Apple and is divided into two sections. The first section deals with where the apples came from while section two deals with the dawn of the apple industry in the Tsugaru Plain. 

Chapter 2 deals with the beginning of apple cultivation in Aomori Prefecture. In this section, Kinami gives a more detailed account of Tsugaru Tsuguakira, Daidoji Shigeyoshi, and Naritomo Sugiyama. 

Chapter 3 goes into detail about the life of Tate-e Kikuchi while chapters 4 and 5 deal with “Apple Bubble” and Tate-e Kikuchi’s successors. This entire book is just a prelude to Part 2, in which Kinami will discuss the history of the Fuji apple, one of the world’s most widely produced varieties of apples.

If you can’t wait for Part 2 to come out, Kinami has also created a card game called Apple Pie. She based it on the game of mahjong. She thought, “if I incorporate the history of apple cultivation into the yaku (hand) of mahjong, players will learn about it while enjoying the game.

It is a fascinating subject and an enjoyable read. However, I think the publishers should have hired a more qualified translator for the English version. Sill, I am looking forward to reading the sequel and no, I have not played “Apple Pie” as I don’t understand the rules of mahjong.

おばけ宇宙大戦争 (Obake Uchu Dai Senso) by 水木しげる (Shigeru Mizuki) (Poplar) ~Ernie Hoyt *Japanese Text Only

As I have mentioned in a previous review, I often read books in the Japanese language to improve my kanji character understanding and reading skill. The local city library sponsored a book recycling event and I took home five books. 

During my elementary school years (1st grade through 4th grade), our family lived in a housing annex for American military families living in Japan. We lived in a place called Narimasu in Itabashi Ward in Tokyo. As you can imagine, my older brother and I didn’t grow up with American superheroes like Superman or Batman and we didn’t get a chance to watch any American cartoons. 

My brother and I were big fans of Japanese cartoons. In the seventies, many of the titles were sports-related - Kyojin no Hoshi (baseball), Ashita no Jo (boxing), Tiger Mask (wrestling), and Attack No.1 (volleyball), were some of the anime series we watched. However, there was one cartoon which was very Japanese in content. That series was titled ゲゲゲの鬼太郎 (GeGeGe no Kitaro). Almost all of the anime series were adapted from manga of the same name. 

GeGeGe no Kitaro was written by Shigeru Mizuki. Osamu Tezuka may be considered the “Godfather of Manga” but Shigeru Mizuki is the manga artist who popularized and revived Japan’s yokai culture. Yokai are supernatural creatures and spirits in Japanese folklore. 

おばけ宇宙大戦争 (Obake Uchu Dai Senso) which literally translates into English as Ghost Space War is the fourth book of twelve in Shigeru Mizuki’s series おばけ学校 (Obake Gakko) - Ghost School series in English. All the books feature GeGeGe no Kitaro and friends. 

GeGeGe no Kitaro or simply Kitaro is the main character. He is a yokai boy who was born in a cemetery after his parent’s death. Besides his mostly-decayed father, he is the last surviving member of the Ghost Tribe or Yokai Tribe. His father, Medama-Oyaji is an eyeball with a full body that can also speak. 

Kitaro’s friends include Neko Musume (Cat Girl), Nezumi Otoko (Rat Boy), Sunakake-Babaa (Sand-Throwing Hag), Konaki-Jijii (Crybaby Geezer), Ittan-Momen (Roll of Cotton), and Nurikabe (Plastered Wall). They all help Kitaro protect humans against evil yokai and others. 

The main story of this book is about a UFO queen who wants to take over Earth. She looks nearly human but her minions squids with more legs. Her large spaceship is hovering over Tokyo. An egg-like item was dropped from the ship and when it hit the ground it released a smell so bad that the entire population of Tokyo's cats disappeared. 

Many yokai gathered at Kitaro’s house and told him that he needs to do something about it or life would become inconvient for all of them. Kitaro agreed that that would be a big problem and set off to counter the UFO Queen’s attack. 

The Queen became aware that Kitaro was the leader of the yokai. She ordered her minions to use their secret weapon on him - a hallucination bomb. He then saw his friends Sunakake-Babaa and Konaki-Jijii. They told him that Kitaro was in alliance with the UFO Queen and that he was here to attack humans. The hallucination bomb clouds gathered around Kitaro and stuck a “transformation nail” in his head. Kitaro had now become a slave to the UFO Queen. Not only that, Kitaro’s friends discover there is another group of aliens invading Earth. Are they here to help the Queen or are they going to help the humans?

Will the world be taken over by the UFO Queen? Will Kitaro’s friends be able to save Kitaro from being a slave? Your guess is as good as mine. 

The book includes a second story titled Neko Machi Kippu. In this story Kitaro and Nezumi-Otoko take a part-time job with Neko-Hakase (Cat Professor) to help him find out why when unknown humans increase, the more cats there are.  

I’ve always believed that you do not have to be a child to enjoy children’s books. I still believe that today which is why I enjoy reading books such as these.

Kakigori Summer by Emily Itami (Mariner Books) ~Janet Brown

"I've always thought it makes good sense that the word for 'clean' in Japanese is the same as the word for beautiful." Few sentences have illuminated Japan's culture so incisively as does this quote from Emily Itani's Kakigori Summer. In fact few books have done this as thoroughly as this sweet novel about a family reunion, which makes it a fine choice for anyone intrigued by Japan.

One reason why I avoid Japanese literature is because it's so opaque. With all that I've read, from Yasunari Kawabata to Pico Iyer, nothing has provided a detailed glimpse into Japanese daily life, and that annoys me.

Kagigori Summer tells a conventional story of three sisters who come together in their childhood home after the youngest of them becomes "a national scandal” in Japan. A popular singer who has been idolized by her fans falls into a pit of notoriety after being photographed kissing the president of a major record company at the entrance to a love hotel. She tumbles into a nervous breakdown and her sisters come to take care of her.

Three sisters are a standard archetype, and true to form, these each embody a different facet of femininity. Rei, the oldest, is the ideal career woman who has achieved success in London. Kiki, the middle sister, is steeped in Tokyo’s domestic life, a single mother to an adorable blond moppet of uncertain paternity. Ai is the beautiful, artistic rebel. 

What makes these sisters different is their bloodline. They are hafu, with a Japanese mother who committed suicide when they were young and a British father who left them long before that and is immersed in his second family. Their maternal grandmother is their only nurturing relative, living next door to the house where the sisters grew up and where they come after Ai's collapse. 

In predictable fashion, they clash and grow closer over the summer, each finding their true path in life by the novel's end. What isn't predictable are the sharp insights and marvelous details of the Japanese language and culture, served up within the context of the novel.

Rei, living in England, finds herself, when looking at group shots of herself with her friends and colleagues, wondering for a minute or two who the Asian is in the photo. In Japan, she and her sisters are anomalies, "the size of ordinary Westerners. Towering Olympic shot-putter by Japanese standards." As outsiders, they attract attention and they focus it too. They have the knowledge of Japan that comes from living in the country and the perspective that allows them to see what makes their birthplace unique.

Carefully the novel describes the layout of a Japanese family home, the flowering plants in a cottage garden, the appearance of a temple and its shrines in a place that isn't thronged with tourists, the art of fireworks in a small town, the sacred rocks and wind-battered trees of a deserted beach with "paradise colors." It tells exactly how to shop in a place without a supermarket and gives the ingredients for making plum liqueur. 

And by using Japanese words without explanation, leaving readers to figure them out through context or google searches, this story gives as much total immersion as possible in its 322 pages. 

"There's no exact translation for 'cosy' in Japanese," Kiki observes, but in Emily Itami's generous unveiling, readers see the coziness of daily life for themselves and are certain to end up yearning for it—or at least for kakigori, the delectable mixture of shaved ice, syrup, fruit, and beans that the sisters share in their emotionally fraught, yet idyllic, rural summer.

How Do You Live? by Genzaburo Yoshino, translated by Bruno Navasky (Algonquin Young Readers) ~Ernie Hoyt

How Do You Live? is the English translation of 君たちはどう生きるか (Kimitachi wa Dou Ikiru ka?) which was originally published in the Japanese language in 1937 by Iwanami Shoten. This English edition was published in 2021 and translated by Bruno Navasky, a teacher and writer based in New York City. The new edition also includes a foreword by Neil Gaiman.

I had read the manga and text version of 君たちはどう生きるか (Asia by the Book, January 2024) and was not overly impressed. I discovered this English translation of the book at the local city library. I was thinking that reading the book in English might give me a new perspective on what Genzaburo Yoshino was trying to convey. 

In order to properly understand the book, you would need to know a little about the author, Genzaburo Yoshino. He was a journalist and a teacher. He graduated from the Tokyo Imperial University, now known as Tokyo University and is considered Japan’s most prestigious university. Although he studied to be a lawyer, his interest shifted and graduated with a degree in philosophy. 

After serving for two years in the Imperial Japanese Army, he got a job at the Library of Tokyo, where he developed an interest in politics. This was during the time Japan was becoming more militaristic and authoritarian. A special branch of the police department was created called the Tokubetsu Toukou Keisatsu, also known as Tokko which translates into English as the Special Higher Police, a division of the police force whose main purpose was to enforce civil law, control political groups and ideologies deemed to threaten the public order of the Empire of Japan. 

In 1925, the Japanese government passed the Peace Preservation Law which made it a crime for anyone to say or write things that were critical of the government. It sounds like something the current American administration is trying to replicate. Yoshino was arrested for having ties to alleged socialists. He spent eighteen months in prison. 

After he was freed, a friend of his offered him a job as an editor of a book series for younger readers. Their plan was to write an ethics textbook for the series to teach the next generation how important it is to have a free and progressive culture for humans to grow. 

The main character is Junichi Honda, known to his friends as Copper (Koperu in the original Japanese version), a nickname given to him by his uncle, attributing the name to Copernicus for one of his nephew’s insights into human nature. 

The book is mostly a coming of age story set in Showa era Japan but it’s more than just about Copper growing up and finding his way into the world. It includes a lot of life lessons - the importance of thinking for yourself, standing up for others, and doing what you believe is right.

Junichi goes through a lot of growing pains and many of his experiences are experiences we can relate to as well. The book may have been published many years ago but its message still holds true today. I found Nasasky’s translation of the original a lot easier to understand than I did when I read the manga version. Having learned a little more about Genzaburo Yoshino, I have a better appreciation of what this book tries to accomplish.

のらいぬクロの冒険 (Nora Inu Kuro no Boken) [Stray Dog Kuro's Adventure] by 那須正幹 (Masamoto Nasu) (Mainichi Shinbun) ~Ernie Hoyt *Japanese text only

As a long time resident of Japan and a self-taught Japanese kanji reader I often like to challenge myself by reading a book in its original language. The city library was holding a recycle book campaign where I picked up five books. My kanji reading ability is still probably around an elementary student’s level so I mostly chose children’s books to take home. 

The first one I read was のらいぬクロの冒険 (Nora Inu Kuro no Boken). The title translates into English as Stray Dog Kuro’s Adventure. It was published in 2003 by Mainichi Shinbun and was written by Masamoto Nasu and illustrated by Moe Nagata.

Kuro, the main character, was born at the end of spring in the garden of a house under a magnolia tree. He was one of a litter of four. Kuro’s mother was a young dog whose doghouse was located near the root of the magnolia tree. She was all brown except for the tip of her tail which was white. 

In reality, the parents had no intention of getting a dog but their children begged them so they got a dog from an acquaintance of the father. At the time, the dog was still a puppy and they named her Moko.

At first, everyday someone would take Moko for a walk in the morning, but after six months, the family stopped taking her for walks. Moko would spend all day tied up near her doghouse in the garden. 

When Moko was a puppy, the children would bring their friends over and play with the dog. Once Moko got older, the family would ignore her and Moko became hard to please. If someone new came into the garden, she would bark loudly and jump at them with such force it seems like the chain would snap. Whenever she did that, the father would punish her. Now, the only person taking care of Moko was the mother, but all she did was bring Moko food. 

One day the mother was shocked. She shouted, “Oh no! Moko has given birth to some puppies”. Sure enough, she gave birth to a litter of four. The children were excited and begged their mom if they could keep them. Their mother ignored their requests but their father answered, “How can you keep any more dogs if you can’t even take proper care of Moko?”

The father’s solution to the problem was taking the four puppies away from Moko, placing them in a cardboard box, and taking the box to a nearby park and leaving it there. These days if someone were caught doing something like that, they would be suspected of cruelty to animals. It’s unfortunate that this practice still continues today. 

The puppies were still small and crying for their mother. At the park, the puppies managed to get out of the cardboard box and they went running around the park looking for their mother. Unfortunately, one of the puppies fell into a small river and was taken away by the current. There were now only three puppies. 

An adult stray who lived at the park heard the cries of the puppies. An old lady who frequented the park and would often give her food called her Shiro as she was a white dog. Shiro. She decided to take care of the remaining three puppies. However, by the following morning, two more of the puppies were cold and didn’t have a heartbeat. Kuro would be the sole surviving puppy. 

This is where Kuro's real adventure begins. Shiro teaches Kuro how to be a strong and independent stray dog. She teaches him to avoid certain areas at certain times of the day. She shows him different places where humans will sometimes give them food. She also teaches him to not trust any humans. 

One day, a young boy finds Kuro at the park. Kuro reminds him of a pet he had when he was younger and decides to take Kuro home. At first, Kuro is very cautious but as the days go by, he learns to trust the boy and learns that the boy’s name is Tetsuo. Tetsuo takes good care of Kuro and becomes his pet. 

The story is simple and easy to follow. It teaches the reader about being responsible for a pet. As long as owners love and care for their pets, there would be less animal cruelty, such as the father abandoning newborn puppies in a park far from their home. 

I’m not a pet owner but when I hear or read about the cruelty some people do to animals, it makes me very angry. Kuro was lucky to have been found by a boy like Tetsuo. If only there more people like Tetsuo, this would be a better world.

Spirited Away by Hayao Miyazaki (Viz Media) ~Ernie Hoyt

Spirited Away is the international English title for director Hayao Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli film 千と千尋の神隠し (Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi). This book is the graphic novelization of the 2001 full length animation movie of the same name. 

It is the story of a young girl named Chihiro who is on her way to her new home with her parents. However, the father gets lost and the family finds themselves in front of a tunnel that goes through an old building. The father decides to check it out and although Chihiro is a little afraid, she follows her mom and dad. 

Once they’re out of the tunnel, they find themselves at what the father believes is an abandoned theme park. The father also smells something delicious and as they go into town, they come upon an area with a number of restaurants with a lot of tasty looking items on the table. Although there is nobody serving the food, the parents decide to eat. The father tells Chihiro not to worry, “You’ve got Daddy here. He’s got credit cards and cash”. 

Chihiro refuses to eat any of the food and decides to do a little exploring on her own. She finds herself on a red bridge in front of a large bathhouse. From the bridge, she can see a train and thinks the station must be nearby. She then hears someone shouting at her saying, “YOU SHOULDN’T BE HERE! GET OUT OF HERE! NOW!”. 

Chihiro and her parents had unwittingly entered into the world of kami or spirits. The boy she meets on the bridge is named Haku. Haku tells Chihiro that she needs to cross a riverbed before it gets dark and the spirits start showing up. As Chihiro goes to find her parents, she finds that they have been turned into pigs and she can no longer cross the riverbed as it has become flooded. 

Haku comes to help her again. He tells her in order to save her parents and return to the human world, she will have to get a job here in the spirit world. He tells her to go see a person named Kamiji, a man who works at the boiler room for the large bathhouse. Kamiji sends her to the owner of the bathhouse - a witch named Yubaba. 

Yubaba tries to turn Chihiro away but eventually gives her a work contract. As Chihiro (千尋) signs her name, Yubaba takes awa the second kanji character of her name and renames her as Sen (千) and Chihiro soon forgets her real name. Haku later explains that that is how Yubaba controls people by taking their names. If she completely forgets her name, she will be stuck in the spirit world forever. 

Chihiro is taken under the wings of a bath worker named Lin. Lin shows her the ropes. However, Yubaba and the bath workers make things difficult for Sen. One of her first jobs is to clean a tub that hadn’t been cleaned in months. She then has to take care of a customer who is not only really large but also smells really bad. 

Later on, she sees another spirit and believing it to be a customer, she lets it into the bathhouse. However, that customer turned out to be a monster called No-Face and it is causing havoc on the premises. 

Can Chihiro save the bathhouse from the monster? Can she be able to find her parents and help them become human again? Will she be able to remember her real name and will she be able to help Haku find his own real name as well? All the answers to these questions will depend on the courage and spirit of Sen herself as she faces many challenges and obstacles to reach her goal. 

Spirited Away is not only a beautiful story that incorporates Japanese myth and folklore, it was also the first non-English language film to win the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature at the 75th Annual Academy Awards held in March of 2003. It was also Japan’s highest grossing film until until 2020’s Demon Slayer : Kimetsu no Yaiba - The Movie Mugen Train,

The Lady and the Monk by Pico Iyer (Vintage) ~Janet Brown

Who can explain why a country that we’ve never known can call to us? Pico Iyer, a man of many backgrounds, felt an inexplicable affinity for Japan from childhood onward. Without ever having been there, it always felt like “an unacknowledged home” and when he spent a long layover in the town of Narita while on his way to Southeast Asia, what he saw was much like his boyhood in England. “A sense of polite aloofness” in “an island apart from the world,” “an attic place of grey and cold” where “polished courtesies kept the foreigner out” all felt very British. Iyer, “with no plans, no contacts, no places to live,” came to Kyoto with two suitcases, hoping to live a solitary life of learning and exploring the spiritual life in Japan.

Spending his first weeks in a temple, Iyer discovers that the temple is “ringed by love hotels. “A wonderland of indulgences” is only five minutes away, where streets explode with pachinko parlors, convenience stores, and shopping malls. Soon he finds a room on a narrow lane in a residential neighborhood that’s occupied almost exclusively by women and children. Iyer is probably the only male in the area who doesn’t spend his working hours in an office.

Kyoto, he says, more than almost any other city in Japan, is “self-consciously Japanese,” a “repository of the country’s female arts and of the spiritual life found in temples…a city defined by monks and women.” So it’s almost inevitable that on a visit to a temple he meets an elegant Japanese lady who invites him to come to her daughter’s birthday party.

Iyer is in love with Kyoto by now, wrapped in “the blue intensity of knowing nothing but the present moment.” His senses sharpened, he finds that living in “a flawless world shook me out of words. Still his descriptions are precise and painterly, seeing “the moon a torn fingernail in the sky,””the sky a burnished strip of gold and silver,” and autumn as a series of “tidy daily miracles” with “drizzle softer than a silk still life.” He becomes enthralled by Japanese classic literature in which poetry and its two most famous novels, The Tale of Genji and The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon were written by women. “Enameled perfection,” Iyer describes this, “poetry of the paper screen.” In Japanese, he’s told there are “different colors for each wind, different words for moonlight on water.”

It’s an easy step to go from this deep infatuation with a culture to a fascination with the one person who opens this culture for him. The elegant lady quickly reveals her restless spirit in English that is as articulate as it is charmingly flawed. She longs for Iyer’s freedom. He becomes enthralled by her quick intellect and her delightful candor. A prisoner of her traditional culture, Sachiko welcomes the opportunity to leave her household and take this foreigner to places she’s never been able to visit until now. She’s a fearless speaker of English and Iyer is eager to use the Japanese language in which he’s still a beginner so their conversations are “three-legged waltzes” in which emotions take on a greater prominence. While they discuss Herman Hesse and Emily Bronte, they forge a form of intimacy that neither expected.

The Lady and the Monk is a book that only carries a special meaning if the readers know the life that Iyer has now. Without that knowledge, it ends on a note reminiscent of Madame Butterfly, with Iyer leaving Japan and Sachiko embarking on a new life without him. In truth, this is an introduction to their life together in Japan and should have included an afterword to this effect. But even without that, this scrupulous and lyrical story of a double-barreled love affair, with a country and a person, is told with delicacy and grace, leaving readers with this question. Where is your own “unacknowledged home” in the world?

カリフォルニア留学記 ちょっとスローにみちる流 (California Study Abroad Diary : A Little Slow Life, Michiru-style) by ショート・みちる (Michy Short) (Komine Shoten) *Japanese text only ~Ernie Hoyt

The Japanese title, [カリフォルニア留学記 ちょっとスローにみちる流] translates in English to California Study Abroad Diary : A Little Slow, Michiru Style. The book is written by Michy Short. She was born in Hokkaido in 1980. Her father is American and her mother is Japanese. She moved to the United States with her family in 1983. Her family moved back to Japan in 1985. She spent her elementary school years living in Japan. However, after graduating from elementary school, she decided to move back to the U.S. for her junior high school and high school years. 

She has previously written two other books in Japanese about her experiences in the United States - みちるのアメリカ留学記 (Michiru no America Ryugakuki) and みちるのハイスクール日記 (Michiru no High School Nikki), Her first book was about her initial experiences of moving to the United States and talking about the challenges she faced in junior high school. Her second book which translates to “Michiru’s High School Diary” continues her journey of living and going to school in the U.S. 

Michiru should have been in the 8th grade when she first moved back to the States and even though her father is American, Michiru could not properly write the alphabet, so she was placed in the 6th grade. The family would spend the summers back in Japan. 

When Michiru started high school, her father, who is an anthropologist, remained in Japan. She went back to the U.S. with her mother, younger brother, Rookie, and their dog Kuma. Michiru graduated from an elite all girls high school.

In this book, Michiru is now a university student. She talks about living alone for the first time, then moving into a share-house with friends. The house appears to have a revolving number of residents including a hippy, a wandering traveler, and a graffiti artist to name a few. She also talks about her first part-time job to help her support her university tuition and other expenses. 

Michiru has always loved drawing pictures and making things with clay. She decided to further her interest in art by applying to San Diego State University which has a strong art program. 

Michiru divides her book into four parts. In Part 1, she talks about starting life as a university student. She also talks about living on her own in her first apartment, getting a part-time job at a sushi shop, creating her first piece of art for a class at university, and of course she introduces the reader to San Diego State University as well. 

In Part 2, Michiru, along with a few of her friends decide to rent a house together and introduces the revolving number of housemates. The differences between the U.S. and Japan when it comes to the legal age of drinking alcohol and getting your driver’s license. She also writes about exploring a cave and camping on the Channel Islands. 

Part 3 covers things that Michiru is concerned about while living in the U.S. One is the price of health care, including going to the dentist. Some of her friends suggested going over the border to Mexico and having her teeth taken care of. Although she was a little reluctant at first, the pain was becoming too unbearable so she decided to heed her friend’s advice. 

Michiru’s book was published in 2005 so she was still living in the U.S. when President George W. Bush started the Persian Gulf War. Most American citizens were opposed to America going to war with Iraq as there was no proof that Iraq was involved in the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack on the World Trade Building in New York City, nor was there any proof or evidence of Iraq having weapons of mass destruction. Michiru would join demonstrations against the war. However, that didn’t stop President Bush from starting the war. 

Another thing which worried her about America was the fast food industry. One of her housemates had just read Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser. After she read the book, it made her think twice about going to McDonald’s. 

The final part of the book deals with her final years at university before graduation, what she plans to do afterwards, and what it’s like being a Japanese-American with Japanese citizenship and living in the United States. 

I often enjoy reading about foreigner’s who decide to come to Japan to study or make it their home, so it was refreshing to read a book about someone with a similar but opposite background. Michiru has an American father and Japanese mother. She is a Japanese citizen, but decided to move and go to school in the United States. I don’t know if she still lives in the U.S. or has moved back to Japan but in her writings she often states that she says she probably wouldn’t fit into Japanese society and doesn’t think she will move back. 

On the other hand, I am an American citizen but also have an American father and Japanese mother. Although I didn’t go to school in Japan, as an adult, I decided to move back to my mother’s home country to live and work. I also have no intention of moving back to the United States. And like Michiru, I am also often asked similar questions about which country I like better, the U.S. or Japan. I am just like Michiru - I love both countries. I consider both of them as my home. And like Michiru, I am unwilling to choose one country over the other.

Hell by Yasutaka Tsutsui, tranlated by Evan Emswiler (Alma Books) ~Ernie Hoyt

Yusataka Tsutsui is a Japanese writer who is mostly known for his science fiction novels. One of his earliest novels - 時をかける少女 (Toki o Kakeru Shojo), known in English as The Girl Who Leapt Through Time was adapted into a feature length movie in 1983, 1997, and 2010. It was also made into a full length animation movie directed by Mamoru Hosoda in 2006. 

Hell is an altogether different kind of book. It was originally published in the Japanese language as ヘル (Heru, which is just romaji for Hell) and not 地獄 (Jigoku) which is Japanese for hell, in 2003 by Bungei Shunju Ltd. 

Nobuteru and his friends, Yuzo and Takeshi, were playing on a school-yard platform about five feet off the ground. However, the boys weren’t thinking how dangerous the platform was. They were just goofing off. Unfortunately, one of the boys bumped into Takeshi, who fell to the ground and hurt his leg. The other two boys just laughed, jumped down, and began dragging around Takeshi by his oddly bent leg singing one of the songs that was popular on TV at the time. 

But then, Nobuteru thought, that’s kind of strange. The song was released after the war. They couldn’t possibly have sung that song. The more Nobuteru thought about it, an even stranger thing occurred to him. Nobuteru and his family moved to a different city when he was in the fifth grade. After the war was over, Takeshi and Yuzo had never returned to school. In fact, Nobuteru had no idea what had happened to either one of them. 

Nobuteru was in his seventies and often thought about Takeshi and how he and Yuzo crippled had crippled him. While at university, Nobuteru had heard from one of his classmates that Yuzo became a yakuza and was killed by a rival gang member when he was in his twenties.  He also heard through the grapevine that Takeshi graduated with honors from a top university and was working up the ladder in a large corporation. Nobuteru was happy and relieved but still felt a little uneasy, thinking that one day, Takeshi might want to take revenge on him and Yuzo for what they did to him.  

However, Takeshi died in an automobile accident when he was fifty-seven years old. When he awoke, he was in a dimly lit bar. He was no longer crippled and his damaged organs were all repaired. The other people he met in the bar called this place “Hell”. Takeshi wasn’t perturbed about being there. He remembered what a man once told him when he first arrived, “You know what Hell is? It’s just a place without God. The Japanese don’t believe in God to begin with, so what’s the difference between this world and the world of the living?”

The same man who had told Takeshi that Hell is no different from the world of the living also told him, “Most Japanese have no religious faith, and they have no one, including their parents, who can serve in God’s stead. So if they get even a little power, they start to think of themselves as gods. You might say that Hell exists solely for the purpose of ridding ourselves of that illusion. After all, there’s no place that can do that in the world of the living.”

So, what exactly is Hell? In Tsutsui’s world, it certainly isn’t a “fiery place of torment” or “an outer darkness and separation from God”. People don’t suffer eternal damnation in Tsutsui’s hell. He does get the reader thinking about what happens to us after we die. Do we go to heaven or do we go to hell? Is Tsutsui’s Hell more akin to purgatory? It will up to you, the reader, to decide.

Abroad In Japan by Chris Broad (Penguin) ~Janet Brown

Chris Broad is a real-life incarnation of Forrest Gump. Looking for his first job after leaving his university, he applies to Japan’s JET program that supplies native speakers of English to Japanese schools, despite having no interest in teaching, no knowledge of Japan, and absolutely no proficiency in Japanese. He has one thing going for him. He’s savvy enough to know that few applicants will voice their preference for a rural assignment and this gets him a job.

He arrives in a city in decline where boarded-up windows are a common sight and the bordering mountain range makes the place isolated in winter. The most flourishing feature of Sakata is Chris’s workplace, a high school with 1200 students and 120 teachers. In this area with a population of 100,000, Chris is one of fewer than ten Westerners, with only one other gaijin in his school.

To anyone who’s ever taught in Asia, it looks as if Chris has fallen into a rather cushy gig. He’s never in a classroom without a Japanese co-worker and his workload consists of lessons taught straight out of the supplied textbooks. His apartment is ready for him upon arrival and costs a mere $110 a month. On the other hand, he’s had only three days of training, he’s given a workload of thirty classes with forty students in each, his Japanese colleagues who are seasoned English teachers speak minimal amounts of that language with maximum amounts of errors, and they’re the ones who have written the textbooks.

His sole compatriot in the school is a hard-drinking chainsmoker, the only affordable nightlife is found in a local tavern, and the winter brings two feet of snow every night, burying cars in drifts and making the mountain roads impassable. Out of boredom and in competition with his colleague who’s one of the few gaijin who has passed the Kanji Kentei, an examination that demands the knowledge of 3000 characters, Chris sets himself a goal of learning the basic requirement of 2200 characters, memorizing 25 of them every day.

His luck continues, first with a group of middle-aged adults who ask him to tutor them in English and who become his social safety net. But he hits the jackpot when he’s approached by a convivial passerby who insists on becoming his friend. Natsuki is a fearless English speaker who loves nothing better than sprinkling his usage with the f-bomb. He quickly becomes Chris’s mainstay and eventually his video co-star.

His biggest stroke of Gumpian luck comes through Youtube. Chris once had dreams of making movies so this becomes his way to stay in touch with family and friends while amusing himself in the evenings. Youtube is still a novelty back in 2012 and Chris becomes a version of Mr. Bean, bumbling his way through Japanese culture as he strives to assimilate. When he goes to the public baths and finds he’s meant to be in the nude, armed only with a modesty towel; when he ventures into the rarified atmosphere of a hostess club where a night out can easily cost $240; when he’s thrown out of a love hotel; when he samples McDonald’s fries drizzled with chocolate sauce, Chris begins to clock up views, sometimes a quarter of a million in a night. In a fit of daring that’s perilously close to madness, he decides to make Youtube his primary occupation--and it works. 

A friend in Sakato knows a man in a nearby city who works in “in-bound tourism,” went to school in Seattle and London, worked for years in Frankfurt and Sydney, speaks fluent British English, and has adopted a Western mindset. Ryotaro hires Chris as a videographer who explores Japan via Youtube.

By this expansion of his territory, Chris’s luck continues. A video of him leaping from his bed when a nation-wide alarm system announces an incoming North Korean missile makes him famous. A visit to an island recovering from the disaster of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami puts him up close and personal with his idol, Ken Watanabe. Even an earthquake that destroys his filming studio proves to be a bit of good fortune.

The same convivial charm that has made him a Youtube star makes this memoir irresistible. He’s a clever phrasemaker, describing his first breath in Japan as “so despicably humid, each breath was like inhaling a mouthful of steam.” On his first visit to a Tokyo sushi bar, he decides “The sushi I’d experienced in the U.K. felt like a hate crime compared to this.” Unlike far too many other expats in Asia, he reserves his ridicule for himself rather than a culture that is frequently confusing.

There’s little in his memoir that can’t be read in every book ever written about Japan but only this one is told by Forrest Gump. For a distraction from the bleak and the dispiriting literature that’s all too easy to find,  Abroad in Japan is hard to beat.

Kiki's Delivery Service by Eiko Kadono, translated by Emily Balistrieri (Yearling Books) ~Ernie Hoyt

Eiko Kadono is a Japanese children’s author and illustrator. She is also a nonfiction writer and essayist. One of her most popular books to be translated into English and which has also been adapted into a feature length animation film by Studio Ghibli is Kiki’s Delivery Service. 

The previously reviewed Kiki’s Delivery Service (Asia by the Book, September 2024) was the graphic novelization of the movie and was written and drawn by Hayao Miyazaki. As much as I enjoy watching the movie, I was interested in reading the original story. As a reminder, the story was originally written in the Japanese language with the title 魔女の宅急便 (Majo no Takkyubin) which translates to The Witch’s Delivery Service and was published in 1985. 

This English edition of Kadono’s story was published in 2021 by Yearling Books, a division of Random House Children’s Books. The book includes a note from the author. She tells her readers that the story was inspired by one of her daughter’s drawings. It was a picture of a witch flying in the sky while listening to a radio. The picture included musical notes that danced around the witch. 

Kiki’s Delivery Service is a young girl’s coming-of-age story. It is set in a world where witches still live among ordinary humans. The protagonist, Kiki, is the daughter of Kokiri and Okino. Kokiri is Kiki’s mother and comes from a long line of witches. Her father, Okino, is an ordinary human. Okino is a folklorist who studied legends and tales about spirits and magic. Kiki was about to turn thirteen years old. 

In Kadono’s world, when the daughter of witches and humans turn ten years old, they must decide if they want to follow in their mother’s footsteps and become a witch. If they chose this path, they would learn their mother’s magic and would have to choose a full-moon night of their thirteenth birthday to leave home. 

This meant that a young witch would have to search for a town of their own where there wasn’t a witch in residence. Over the years, the witches' powers have gotten weaker and their population has decreased. It is also difficult for young witches to find a witchless town or a town that will welcome a witch to their community. 

Kokiri had only two magic powers. One was to grow herbs to make sneeze medicine and the other was flying through the air on a broom. Kiki took to flying pretty well but would often get distracted and fall to the earth. She was never able to get the hang of growing herbs to make the sneeze medicine her mother perfected. Still, Kiki believes she can become anything she wants. 

Kiki would leave her home accompanied by her black cat Jiji. They would have all kinds of adventures, not only searching for a new town, but also in becoming a member of that town. As a young girl, Kiki will have her ups and downs as do all adolescents. She must also find a place to live and needs to find a way to make a living. It may seem like an impossible task for such a young girl but it’s a well known fact that girls mature faster than boys. I imagine a young female witch matures even faster!