Happy Wednesday everyone! I hope you are all doing well, in body as well as in mind, despite the uncertainty of our circumstances. With the midweek is another WWW Wednesday update. WWW Wednesday is a bookish meme originally hosted by SAM@TAKING ON A WORLD OF WORDS. The mechanics for WWW Wednesday is quite simple, you just have to answer three questions:

  1. What are you currently reading?
  2. What have you finished reading?
  3. What will you read next?
www-wednesdays
What are you currently reading?

Previously, I named Mieko Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs as one of two books that I must read within the year. Thankfully, a couple of months later, I am finally reading this book that I have been crossing my fingers for. I am not sure what really reeled me in but the moment I encountered the book, I just knew I have to read it. Kawakami’s debut novel Breasts and Eggs is divided into two parts. The first part commenced with Natsuko Nastume, an aspiring writer, waiting for her older sister Makiko and niece Midoriko at the train station. Makiko, an ageing hostess, travelled to Tokyo in the hopes of getting a breast implant. The second part comprised a bulk of the book and happened a couple of years after Makiko and Midoriko’s visit. Natsuko has finally published her first novel and is currently working on her second. In the second part, I got to know more about Natsuko. She was averse to the idea of sex but was seriously considering having a child of her own. The story is just about to get more interesting.

What have you finished reading?

To be honest, I was apprehensive about Kobo Abe’s The Woman in the Dunes as first even though I kept on encountering it in many a must-read lists. The first thing that came to my mind was Frank Herbert’s Dune Series (although I haven’t read any of the books in the series as well). But after some time, I was finally convinced to pick up one of Abe’s most popular works. Initially published in Japanese in 1962, the novel won the 1962 Yomiuri Prize and was published in English two years later. The story involves an amateur entomologist who travelled to a remote village in the hopes of identifying a type of sand beetle. Before he realized it, time has passed and the last bus going out of the village has already departed. The “hospitable” villagers offered him a shelter at the bottom of a funnel-shaped pit of sand; the only access to the house owned by a widowed woman was through a rope ladder. However, when he woke up the following day, the rope is no longer there. And thus commenced an interesting tale. It did take me a while to appreciate the novel and once it opened up, I begun to understand the meaning behind Abe’s popular work.

What will you read next?

I would have not added to my growing reading list Genzaburo Yoshino’s How Do You Live? had I not learned earlier this year that popular Studio Ghibli director Hayao Miyazaki is currently working on an anime film inspired by this 1937 novel. The curious cat that I am, I immediately purchased a copy of the book and I am looking forward to what the novel has in store. The second novel I have in mind is Yasunari Kawabata’s The Lake. It has been nearly four years since I read any of the Nobel Laureate in Literature’s works. The time is about ripe to immerse in one of his novels.

Thus concludes another WWW Wednesday update! I hope everyone is having a great midweek! Do keep safe and as always, enjoy reading!

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