Goodreads Monday is a weekly meme that was started by @Lauren’s Page Turners but is now currently being hosted by Emily @ Budget Tales Book Blog. This meme is quite easy to follow – just randomly pick a book from your to-be-read list and give the reasons why you want to read it. It is that simple.

This week’s book:

A Dark Night’s Passing by Naoya Shiga

Blurb from Goodreads

Tells the story of a young man’s passage through a sequence of disturbing experiences to a hard-worn truce with the destructive forces within himself.

Why I Want To Read It

Happy first day of the work week everyone! I know, Monday is our least favorite day of the week, at least in my case. Oh. Today is the last Monday of my birth month! I can’t believe we are days away from greeting the eighth month of the year. Time does fly fast. I hope you were all able to rest and relax during the weekend in preparation for another tough week ahead. I hope you had a great start to the week and that you were able to establish your tempo for the rest of the week. More importantly, I hope you are all doing well, in body, mind, and spirit. The COVID19 situation here in the Philippines is starting to worsen again. With the resumption of regular social and economic activities, many have been complacent. No one’s guard is up, it seems because everyone has already adjusted their mindset. I guess, with or without the virus, everyone is eager to resume their normal lives. It no longer matters what this new normal looks like. While protocols are still in place, I hope that everyone still observes minimum health protocols.

To kickstart the blogging week, I am posting a new Goodreads Monday update. For my birth month, I forayed into the cosmos of Japanese literature. It is a part of the literary world that I always keep on going back to. It has become an annual tradition, to have a pilgrimage to one of the exciting and most diverse spheres of literature. If my memory serves me right, this annual pilgrimage almost always has been during my birth month. I am nearly done with Paprika, my first novel written by Yasutaka Tsutsui. If you are an anime fan, you will recognize the title as the book has been adapted into a film of the same title. Anyway, for this Goodreads Monday update, I am featuring another unfamiliar name, at least to me, Naoya Shiga, with his only full-length novel, A Dark Night’s Passing.

Like The House of Nire, the book featured in last week’s Goodreads Monday update, I obtained a copy of A Dark Night’s Passing while I was randomly browsing the “for sale” album of an online bookseller. Actually, I bought both books at the same time from the said bookseller. This was despite the fact that I barely had any iota on who Shiga was nor have I encountered any of his works. There was only one thing I knew for sure: it is a work of Japanese literature, which is more than enough of a reason I guess. Meanwhile, Shiga’s prose, which I just learned today, flourished during the first half of the 20th century although it was marked by occasional periods of inactivity. This makes him a contemporary of esteemed Japanese Jun’ichirō Tanizaki. Shiga is also popular for being a master stylist and has established a reputation as a short story writer.

A Dark Night’s Passing was initially published with the Japanese title An’ya kōro. It was also published in two parts between 1921 and 1937. It is actually quite lengthy. Not that a book’s length bothers me. The story revolves around Tokitō Kensaku, a young man who was born into an affluent family in the 1900s. He aspires to be a writer but what ensues is a search for peace of mind as different conflicts complicate his life. It seems that after the publication of the book, Shiga’s literary career virtually ended as he produced very little major work after. Anyway, I can’t wait to read the book and immerse myself in his prose. How about you fellow reader? Are there works of Japanese literature you can recommend to me? I hope you can share it in the comment box.

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