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PARADE

Name: PARADE
Author: Hiromi Kawakami
ISBN: 978-1-59376-580-4

by Hiromi Kawakami ; translated by Allison Markin Powell ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 5, 2019

Like so much of Kawakami’s work, an elegant mystery that questions reality in the most ordinary of situations.

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Enigmatic novella in which the world of Japanese mythology intrudes into the mortal realm.

Readers familiar with Kawakami (The Ten Loves of Nishino, 2019, etc.) will know her alter ego–ish character Tsukiko Omachi and the one-time high school teacher known only as Sensei, who figure in such recent works as Strange Weather in Tokyo. In an afterword, Kawakami writes, elusively, that “the world that exists behind a story is never fully known, not even to the author.” Two worlds, in fact, exist here. The first is Tsukiko’s quiet life, which, on this summer day, the air loud with cicadas, is punctuated by a visit from Sensei, who, as ever, is critical: She doesn’t know how to make somen noodles, her habit of touching her earlobe is off-putting, she’s old enough that the imprint of the tatami mat on her skin doesn’t go quickly away after a nap. “That’s a rude thing to say,” says Tsukiko of Sensei’s last jibe, though she complies with his demand to tell him a story. The one she obliges him with is odd: As a child, she says, she was awakened one night by the clamor of two—well, somethings fighting, not animal, not human, but tengu, “the spirit creatures I had seen in folktale books.” Others see them, too, but ignore them, even as Tsukiko’s mother recounts that in her day it was a fox that followed her around, while some of Tsukiko’s classmates have companion ghosts, badgers, and the like. The most understanding of those classmates, a young girl named Yuko, seems sympathetic enough—until, as Tsukiko notes, the tengu touch her, and “when they did so, the spot on Yuko’s body where they had touched her would sparkle. Like a nighttime parade.” Is Yuko real or another visitor from the spirit world? At once melancholic and joyful, the story satisfies Sensei, the cicadas begin to chirp again, and life goes on, if suffused in strangeness.

Like so much of Kawakami’s work, an elegant mystery that questions reality in the most ordinary of situations.

Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-59376-580-4

Page Count: 96

Publisher: Soft Skull Press

Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
UNDER THE EYE OF THE BIG BIRD
by Hiromi Kawakami ; translated by Asa Yoneda

- BOOK REVIEW
PEOPLE FROM MY NEIGHBORHOOD
by Hiromi Kawakami ; translated by Ted Goossen

- BOOK REVIEW
THE TEN LOVES OF NISHINO
by Hiromi Kawakami ; translated by Allison Markin Powell

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IF CATS DISAPPEARED FROM THE WORLD

by Genki Kawamura ; translated by Eric Selland ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 12, 2019

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

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A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.

The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

Pub Date: March 12, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0

Page Count: 176

Publisher: Flatiron Books

Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.