Japanese Literature Challenge 9 - The Summary

June 2015 - January 2016

January is drawing towards its close and the Japanese Literature Challenge 9 hosted by Dolce Bellezza - for literary and translated fiction in which I participated is coming to an end too. High time to make my summary! 

When I joined the challenge in June, I put eight books on my TBR list – one for each month. Four of them were classics and four contemporary works first released after 1970. Moreover, I took my usual care to have as many female as male authors on my list. And I seized the opportunity to review a book by a Japanese winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, namely Ōe Kenzaburō, for the perpetual Read the Nobels challenge.

Some of the books were really difficult to find. In fact, I was forced to exchange a few of my planned reads for others because I couldn't get hold of a translation into a language that I know. So I had to renounce to read and review The River Ki or The Doctor's Wife by Ariyoshi Sawako, for instance. I also discarded An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro because the author has passed almost his entire life in the United Kingdom and is so rooted in his country of residence that he writes in English instead of Japanese.

Nonetheless, I read eight books for the ninth edition of the challenge and reviewed them all. The last one is the monumental novel The Heike Story by Yoshikawa Eiji that I finished just recently. The review is going online on Friday.

To see the complete list of my reviews
please go to my post for the Japanese Literature Challenge 9.