Hello, readers! It is Monday again! As it is Monday, welcome to another #5OnMyTBR update. The rule is relatively simple. I must pick five books from my to-be-read piles that fit the week’s theme.

This week’s theme: Short Stories

5OnMyTBR is a bookish meme hosted by E. @ Local Bee Hunter’s Nook where you chose five books from your to-be-read pile that fit that week’s theme. If you’d like more info, head over to the announcement post!

Title: The Kobe Hotel
Author: Saito Sanki
Translator (from Japanese): Saito Masaya
Publisher: Weatherhill
Publishing Date: 1993
No. of Pages: 196

Synopsis: 

One of the leading haiku poets of the twentieth century, Saito Sanki was also a writer of offbeat short stories populated by quirky characters, all drawn from personal experience. The Kobe Hotel features selections from both genres, published in English for the first time. The stories are based on the author’s life during World War II, when he lived in a run-down hotel in the port city of Kobe. The atmosphere of wartime Japan in a cosmopolitan city frequented by the German navy is recreated in the adventures of a colorful group of Japanese misfits and expatriates stranded in the hotel for the war’s duration. The final stories are set in the immediate post-war days and include a visit to Hiroshima, devastated by the atomic bomb, and a lurid description of a brothel built for occupation soldiers.

Title: Things Remembered and Things Forgotten
Author: Kyoko Nakajima
Translator (from Japanese): Ian McCullough MacDonald and Ginny Tapley Takemori
Publisher: Sort of Books
Publishing Date: 2021
No. of Pages: 263

Synopsis: 

If we want to understand what has been lost to time, there is no way other than through the exercise of imagination… imagination applied with delicate rather than broad strokes.

So writes the award-winning Japanese author Kyoko Nakajima of her story, Things Remembered and Things Forgotten, a piece that illuminates, as if by throwing a switch the layers of wartime devastation that lie just below the surface of Tokyo’s insistently modern culture.

The ten acclaimed stories in this collection are pervaded by an air of ghostliness. In beautifully crafted and deceptively light prose, Kyoko Nakajima portrays men and women beset by cultural amnesia and unaware of how haunted they are – by fragmented memories of war and occupation, by fading traditions, by buildings lost to firestorms and bulldozers, by the spirits of their recent past.

Title: People From My Neighborhood
Author: Hiromi Kawakami
Translator (from Japanese): Ted Goossen
Publisher: Granta
Publishing Date: 2021
No. of Pages: 121

Synopsis: 

Welcome to the neighbourhood. Meet the neighbours.

The small child who lives under a sheet; the old man who has two shadows, one docile, the other rebellious; two girls named Yoko who are locked in a bitter lifelong rivalry; the people who visit an apartment block and come away with strange afflictions. In Kawakami’s super-short ‘palm of the hand’ stories, the world is never quite as it should be – but you won’t want to leave.

Title: The Labors of Hercules
Author: Agatha Christie
Publisher: HarperCollins
Publishing Date: 2011
No. of Pages: 314

Synopsis: 

In appearance, Hercule Poirot hardly resembled an ancient Greek hero. Yet – reasoned the detective – like Hercules he had been responsible for ridding society of some of its most unpleasant monsters.

So, in the period leading up to his retirement, Poirot makes up his mind to accept just twelve more cases: his self-imposed “Labors.” Each would go down in the annals of crime as a heroic feat of deduction.

Title: Innocent Eréndira 
Author: Gabriel García Márquez
Translator (from Spanish): Gregory Rabassa
Publisher: Picador
Publishing Date: 1981 (1978)
No. of Pages: 126

Synopsis: 

These stories in this latest collection were written over a span of twenty–five years. The earlier stories are among the first García Márquez ever wrote; the latest and longest the title story, takes up a theme mentioned in passing in the classic One Hundred Years of Solitude – the tale of a young girl who accidentally burns down the house of her grandmother, and is forced into a life of prostitution and slavery to repay her debt. All the stories display the authentic voice of Gabriel García Márquez’s genius.