Woah. Time does fly fast. We are another month down in 2024. We are now in the final stretch of the year. I hope the year has been great and kind to everyone. I hope you have already completed all the goals you set at the start of the year, or at least close to finishing them. As we approach the last quarter of the year, I hope your hard work gets repaid. I hope the remainder of the year will shower everyone with blessings, positive news, and good tidings. I hope it will go everyone’s way and that everyone’s wishes and prayers get answered. But before I could wave September goodbye, let me share the book titles I was able to acquire during the month. Because of the receipt of books in transit in previous months, I am featuring more books than usual. As such, I will be dividing it into three parts. The first part will feature translated novels.

Title: The Empusium
Author: Olga Tokarczuk
Translator (from Polish): Antonia Lloyd-Jones
Publisher: Riverhead Books
Publishing Date: 2024 (2022)
No. of Pages: 302

Synopsis:

September 1913. A young Pole suffering from tuberculosis arrives at Wilhelm Opitz’s Guesthouse for Gentlemen in the village of Görbersdorf, a health resort in the Silesian mountains. Every evening the residents gather to imbibe the hallucinogenic local liqueur and to debate the great issues of the day: Do devils exist? Are women born inferior? War or peace? Meanwhile, disturbing things are happening in the guesthouse and the surrounding hills. Someone – or something – seems to be watching, attempting to infiltrate this cloistered world. Little does the newcomer realize, as he tries to unravel both the truths within himself and the mystery of the sinister forces beyond, that they have already chosen their next target.

A century after the publication of The Magic Mountain, Olga Tokarczuk revisits Thomas Mann territory and lays claim to it, with signature inventiveness, humor, and bravura.

Title: Mina’s Matchbox
Author: Yoko Ogawa
Translator (from Japanese): Stephen Snyder
Publisher: Pantheon Books
Publishing Date: 2024 (2005)
No. of Pages: 280

Synopsis: 

In the spring of 1972, twelve-year-old Tomoko leaves her mother behind in Tokyo and boards a train alone for Ashiya, a coastal town in Japan, to stay with her aunt’s family. Tomoko’s aunt is an enigma and an outlier in her working-class family, and her magnificent home and handsome foreign husband, the president of a soft drink company, are symbols of that status. The seventeen rooms are filled with German-made furnishings; there are sprawling gardens and even an old zoo where the family’s pygmy hippopotamus resides. The family is just as beguiling as their mansion – Tomoko’s dignified and devoted aunt, her German great-aunt, and her dashing, charming uncle, who confidently sits as the family’s patriarch. At the center of the family is Tomoko’s cousin Mina, a precocious, asthmatic girl of thirteen who draws Tomoko into an intoxicating world full of secret crushes and elaborate storytelling.

In this elegant jewel box of a book, Yoko Ogawa invites us to witness a powerful and formative interlude in Tomoko’s life. Behind the family’s sophistication are complications that Tomoko struggles to understand – her uncle’s mysterious absences, her great-aunt’s experience of the Second World War, her aunt’s misery. Rich with the magic and mystery of youthful experience, Mina’s Matchbox is an evocative snapshot of a moment frozen in time – and a striking depiction of a family on the edge of collapse.

Title: A Woman of Pleasure
Author: Kiyoko Murata
Translator (from Japanese): Juliet Winters Carpenter
Publisher: Counterpoint
Publishing Date: 2024 (2013)
No. of Pages: 304

Synopsis:

In 1903, a fifteen-year-old girl named Aoi Ichi is sold to the most exclusive brothel in Kumamoto, Japan. Despite her modest beginnings in a southern fishing village, she becomes the protégée of her oiran, Shinonome, Ichi begins to understand the intertwined power of sex and money. And in her mandatory school lessons, her writing instructor, Tetsuko, encourages Ichi and the others to think clearly and express themselves. By banding together, the women organize a strike and walk away from the brothel and into the possibility of new lives.

Based on real-life events in Meiji-era Japan, award-winning and critically acclaimed veteran writer Kiyoko Murata re-creates in stunning detail the brutal yet vibrant lives of women in the red-light district at the turn of the twentieth century – the bond they share, the survival skills they pass down, and the power of owning one’s language.

Title: Under the Eye of the Big Bird
Author: Hiromi Kawakami
Translator (from Japanese): Asa Yoneda
Publisher: Soft Skull
Publishing Date: 2024 (2016)
No. of Pages: 278

Synopsis: 

In the distant future, humans are on the verge of extinction and have settled in small tribes across the planet under the observation and care of “Mothers.” Some children are made in factories from cells of rabbits and dolphins; some live by getting nutrients from water and light, like plants. The survival of the race depends on the interbreeding of these and other alien beings – but is is far from certain that connection, love, reproduction, and evolution will persist among the inhabitants of this faltering new world.

Unfolding over fourteen interconnected episodes spanning geological eons, at once technical and pastoral, mournful and topic, Under the Eye of the Big Bird presents an astonishing vision of the end of our species as we know it.

Title: More Days at the Morisaki Bookshop
Author: Satoshi Yagisawa
Translator (from Japanese): Eric Ozawa
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Publishing Date: 2024 (2011)
No. of Pages: 163

Synopsis:

Set again in the beloved Japanese bookshop and nearby coffee shop in the Jimbocho neighborhood of Tokyo, More Days at the Morisaki Bookshop deepens the relationships among Takako, her uncle Satoru, and the people in their lives. A new cast of heartwarming regulars have appeared in the shop, including an old man who wears the same ragged mouse-colored sweater and another who collects books solely for the official stamps with the author’s personal seal.

Satoshi Yagisawa illuminates the everyday relationships among people that are forged and grown through a shared love of books. Characters leave and return, fall in and out of love, and some eventually die. As time passes, Satoru, with Takako’s help, must choose whether to keep the bookshop open or shutter its doors forever. Making the decision will take uncle and niece on an emotional journey back to their family’s roots and remind them again what a bookstore can mean to an individual, a neighborhood, and a whole culture.

Title: Mysterious Setting
Author: Kazushige Abe
Translator (from Japanese): Michael Emmerich
Publisher: Pushkin Press
Publishing Date: 2024 (2006)
No. of Pages: 222

Synopsis: 

Shiori knows that she was destined to sing – even if she is completely tone-deaf. Forced to give up her dream of becoming a travelling troubadour, she moves to Tokyo at eighteen to forge a career in music, whatever the cost. 0

But she quickly becomes isolated in this vast new city, and even the people she calls friends take advantage of her naivety. Then one day, she is entrusted with a secret of enormous power. If she chooses to, she can take revenge on the world.

Shot through with dark irony and a playful sense of the absurd, Mysterious Setting is a propulsive and gloriously strange story of innocence and experience.

Title: Night on the Galactic Railroad and Other Stories from Ihatov
Author: Kenji Miyazawa
Translator (from Japanese): Julianne Neville
Publisher: One Peace Books
Publishing Date: 2014 (1934)
No. of Pages: 112

Synopsis:

Kenji Miyazawa (1896 – 1933) is one of Japan’s most beloved writers and poets, known particularly for his sensitive and symbolist children’s fiction.

This volume collects stories that focus on Miyazawa’s love of space and his use of the galaxy as a metaphor for the concepts of purity, self-sacrifice, and faith, which were near and dear to his heart.

“The Nighthawk Star” follows a lowly bird as he struggles to transform himself into something greater, a constellation in the night sky.

“Signal and Signal-less” depicts a pair of star-crossed train signals who dream of eloping to the moon..

“Night on the Galactic Railroad,” Miyazawa’s most famous work, tells the story of two boys as they journey on a train that traverses the Milky Way, learning the true meaning of friendship, happiness, and life itself along the way.

Title: The Morning Star
Author: Karl Ove Knausgård
Translator (from Norwegian): Martin Aitken
Publisher: Penguin Press
Publishing Date: 2021 (2020)
No. of Pages: 666

Synopsis: 

One night in August, Arne and Tove are staying with their children in their summer house in southern Norway. Their friend Egil has his own place nearby. Kathrine, a priest, is flying home from a Bible seminar, questioning her marriage. Journalist Jostein is out drinking for the night, while his wife, Turid, a nurse at a psychiatric care unit, is on a night shift when one of her patients escapes.

Above them all, a huge star suddenly appears blazing in the sky. It brings with it a mysterious sense of foreboding.

Strange things start to happen as nine lives come together under the star. Hundreds of crabs amass on the road as Arne drives at night; Jostein receives a call about a death metal band found brutally murdered in a Satanic ritual; Kathrine conducts a funeral service for a man she met at the airport – but is he actually dead?

The Morning Star is about life in all its mundanity and drama, the strangeness that permeates the world, and the darkness in us all. Karl Ove Knausgård’s astonishing new novel, his first after the My Struggle cycle, goes to the utmost limits of freedom and chaos, to what happens when forces beyond our comprehension are unleashed and the realms of the living and the dead collide.