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“Let’s face it, manga has always been lame! . . . But it’s okay that it’s lame.” — Inio Asano, “A Tour Through Inio Asano’s Workplace” In one way at least millennials are lucky: we were the first generation in the West for whom imported Japanese culture was completely unremarkable. Though it comes from a …

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Japanese authors often enjoy discussing books and writing in their fiction. They enjoy writing, and they also enjoy cats (something we cat lovers can rejoice in). The Travelling Cat Chronicles is no exception. Arikawa certainly isn’t the first Japanese author to celebrate the ways of the feline and follows in the footsteps of writers such as: To …

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In so many ways, the women of East Asian literature are the prominent voices of their cultures today. The best East Asian writers are women. In Japan and Korea especially, those writers who have the greatest clarity of mind and creative spirits are insightful, fascinating, and imaginative women. Women who speak for the sidelined and …

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In much of his writing, Murakami relentlessly explores the concepts of personal and national identity, wrapped up with themes and motifs of loneliness, isolation, loss, and being lost. The fact that he is so relentless, and the amount of questions he asks, nods to the fact that he has not found an answer. Finding Ourselves …

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Strange Weather in Tokyo is a cultural examination of post-war Japan packaged into a touching, life-affirming love story for the ages. The twentieth century, and the end of World War II, saw a global shift in culture, technology, and economics never before experienced. One of the places hit hardest by this was Japan, which previously had …

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In that vast, open sea of genre fiction, detective stories exist on an island that I’ve never really visited. Not because this island is full of traps and dark alleyways, and the murder rate is alarmingly high, but simply because we all have genres that we gravitate towards and detective stories were never mine. And …

Read More about The Honjin Murders by Seishi Yokomizo BOOK REVIEW

At the beginning of 2019, Red Circle launched three short stories, all of which we dearly loved. They were fresh and original Japanese short stories with enlightened themes and page-turning plots. Now, as 2019 feeds into 2020, we have two new Red Circle Minis in translation from two astonishingly talented translators. Each book is wholly …

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Strange Weather in Tokyo, first published in English in 2014, was a frightfully clever introduction to the mind of Kawakami. Parade is a continuation of that. Strange Weather was a love story between a young Tokyo office worker and her former teacher from another lifetime which placed its own plot and characters front and centre …

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Franz Kafka never knew fame or even real recognition in his lifetime, but his legacy has grown through the decades since his death. It seems that more and more books published this century have been inspired by his themes, his dark comedic tone, his philosophies, and even his bleak characters and settings. This is certainly …

Read More about The Factory by Hiroko Oyamada BOOK REVIEW

So many of our greatest stories of terror and the supernatural come from faraway lands. A nation’s laws, customs, traditions, politics, and religion will have a profound effect on what kinds of stories they want to tell. Horror is a magnificent genre that takes heavy themes, chews them up, and spits them out as something …

Read More about 12 Translated Horror Stories to Chill Your Blood