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: No Prompt

Because there is no prompt this week, I decided to feature books by Japanese writers. This is in line with my current reading journey where I am reading the works of East Asian writers because I was not able to hold a Japanese literature last year.

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: Wonderful Fool
Author: Shusaku Endo
Translator: Francis Mathy
Publisher: Peter Owen
Publishing Date: 2002
No. of Pages: 237

Synopsis: 

Wonderful Fool is the story of Gaston Bonaparte, a young Frenchman who visits Toko to stay with his pen-friend Takamori. Gaston is a trusting person with a simple love for others even after they have demonstrated deceit and betrayal, but his appearance and his behaviour proves a bitter disappointment and embarrassment to Takamori and his associates, as Gaston spends his time making friends with street children, stray dogs, prostitutes, and gangsters. Endo charts his misadventures with irony, satire, and humanity.

Title: The River Ki
Author: Sawako Ariyoshi
Translator (from Japanese): Mildred Tahara
Publisher: Kodansha International
Publishing Date: 1981 (1959)
No. of Pages: 243

Synopsis: 

A tale of a green river whose current links the moods and fortunes of three women, three generations. By the author of the award-winning Doctor’s Wife.

Title: The Flower Mat
Author: Shugoro Yamamoto
Translator (from Japanese): Mihoko Inoue and Eileen B, Hennessy
Publisher: Tuttle Publishing
Publishing Date: 1977 (1948)
No. of Pages: 173

Synopsis: 

First published as Hanamushiro in 1948, the setting for The Flower Mat is eighteenth-century Japan, a time when families were bound together by a rigid code of honor and individual lives were of necessity valued far less than the interests of the group. It tells of a young bride, Ichi, born into such a tradition, groomed in the virtues of ideal womanhood, and finally tempered by tragedy. Her life and fate are bound up inexorably with the fortunes of her in-laws, high-ranking officials. She soon becomes aware that something is dreadfully wrong, that something is threatening her home and her peaceful way of life. Uneasy and frightened, she tries to put clues together, but her questions go unanswered. Political intrigue and sudden tragedy force her into a new and unfamiliar world. We follow Ichi as she grows from passive observer – a wife suppressing her own passions – to active agent – a woman who will risk anything for justice. Struggling for truth and justice, Ichi finds that her only weapons are her own strength and the lovely mats, decorated with delicate flowers, that she designs.

Title: We’ll Prescribe You a Cat
Author: Syou Ishida
Translator (from Japanese): Madison Shimoda
Publisher: Berkley
Publishing Date: 2024 (2023)
No. of Pages: 297

Synopsis: 

Tucked away on the fifth floor of an old building at the end of a narrow alley in Kyoto, the Nakagyō Kokoro Clinic for the Soul can be found only by people who are struggling in their lives and who genuinely need help. The mysterious clinic offers a unique treatment to those who find their way there: it prescribes cats as medication. Patients are often puzzled by this unconventional prescription, but when they “take” their cat for the recommended duration, they witness profound transformations in their lives, guided by the playful, empathetic, and occasionally challenging yet endearing cats.

Throughout these pages, the power of the human-animal bond is revealed as a disheartened businessman finds unexpected joy in physical labor, a middle-aged man struggles to stay relevant at work and home, a young girl navigates the complexities of elementary school cliques, a hardened handbag designer seeks emotional balance, and a geisha learns to move on from the memory of her lost cat. As the clinic’s patients grapple with their inner turmoil and seek resolution, their feline companions lead them toward healing, self-discovery, and newfound hope.

Title: Mild Vertigo
Author: Mieko Kanai
Translator (from Japanese): Polly Barton
Publisher: Fitzcarraldo Editions
Publishing Date: 2023 (1997)
No. of Pages: 169

Synopsis: 

Housewife Natsumi leads a small, unremarkable life in a modern Tokyo apartment with her husband and two sons: she does the laundry, goes on tris to the supermarket, visits friends and gossips with neighbours. Tracing her conversations and interactions with her family and friends as they blend seamlessly into her own internally buzzing internal monologue, Mild Vertigo explores the dizzying reality of being unable to locate oneself in the endless stream of minutiae that forms a lonely life confined to a middle-class home, where both everything and nothing happens. With shades of Clarice Lispector, Elena Ferrante and Lucy Ellman, this verbally acrobatic novel by the esteemed novelist, essayist and critic Mieko Kanai – whose work enjoys a cult status in Japan – is a disconcerting and radically imaginative portrait of selfhood in late-stage capitalist society.