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 …
Japanese Literature
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 …
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 …
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 …
The state of the world as it stands today, with regressive government bodies, the existence of oligarchies, state-controlled media, and a frightening amount more, all makes it both easier and harder to create new dystopian fiction. Easier in the sense that you can throw a dart at a map and come up with an absurd …
The Ten Loves of Nishino (or The Ten Loves of Mr Nishino in the UK) is a novel that is, much like Kawakami’s other works, at once frolicking fun and darkly mournful. The out-of-order biography of an enigmatic frustration of a man tortured and strange, told through the intimate first-person perspectives of ten of his …
The ethos and approach to publishing of Red Circle Authors Limited is everything that we at Books and Bao cherish. As someone who howls from the mountaintops about the importance of Anglophones reading more translated literature from across the globe, it is thrilling to see a small publishing house release a selection of Japanese stories …
Here is a Japanese novel about social outcasts and the struggling and underappreciated working class, written by a social outcast, and translated by a proud socialist. Tokyo Ueno Station provides a harsh and honest look at the ways in which twentieth-century Japan has treated its people. Yu Miri was born in Japan to Korean parents, …
Delve into the terrifying world of Junji Ito with this adaptation of the classic novel Frankenstein. When it comes to adaptation, book-lovers often feel divided. Some welcome film adaptations; others don’t see the point. Some spend hours debating which is better. I am of the opinion that a book and a film are too far …
Two months ago I had already decided on my favourite novel, and novelist, of 2018: Convenience Store Woman and its author Sayaka Murata. I loved this book for its daring to go against the norm, something that is often far more punk rock here in Japan than it is in the West. But as we …