Japanese Literature Challenge X – The Summary

Click on the image to go to
Dolce Bellezza's challenge post
with a list of all entries

June 2016 - January 2017

All good things come in threes! And so I participated also in the Japanese Literature Challenge X (2016/17) hosted by Dolce Bellezza - for literary and translated fiction presenting literature from Japan here on Edith’s Miscellany. Now it’s the end of January and the challenge closes which means that it’s time to take stock.

My choice of books followed my self-imposed rule of alternating female and male writers as well as classic and contemporary works. In addition, I fitted them into the Double Alphabet of Writers that I was filling up (male) and down (female) in 2016 (»»» see my challenge summary for Read 52 Books in 52 Weeks). The latter wasn’t always easy and in fact accounts for an unusually light read – The Restaurant of Love Regained by Ogawa Ito – an three instead of two male classics in my list.

None of the books that I picked disappointed me and there was no need to exchange any of them for another that I liked better. Admittedly, The Face of Another by Abe Kōbō turned out to be a rather difficult and confusing read, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. If urged to name my favourite Japanese reads of the past eight months, I waver between Silence by Endō Shūsaku and Black Rain by Ibuse Masuji although the school novels of Sumii Sué and Tsuboi Sakae have been rather enticing too and also Yoshimoto Banana’s and Nakamura Fuminori’s modern novels gave me great pleasure. In a nutshell: I loved what I read for this challenge!

And here’s now my summary list of the eight books that I read with links to my reviews:

• Abe Kōbō: The Face of Another (1964), original title: 他人の顔
• Endō Shūsaku: Silence (1966), original title: 沈黙
• Ibuse Masuji: Black Rain (1966), original title: 黒い雨
• Nakamura Fuminori: The Thief (2009), original title: 掏摸
• Ogawa Ito: The Restaurant of Love Regained (2008), original title: 食堂かたつむり
• Sumii Sué: The River with No Bridge (Volume 1: 1961), original title: 橋のない川
• Tsuboi Sakae: Twenty-four Eyes (1952), original title: 二十四の瞳
• Yoshimoto Banana: The Lake (2005), original title: みずうみ

»»» please read also my post for the Japanese Literature Challenge 9 (2015/16).

»»» please read also my (brief) post for the Japanese Literature Challenge 8 (2014/15) for which I signed up shortly before it was over, so I could contribute no more than two books to it.