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 still no prompt this week, I decided to feature books written by female East Asian writers. This is in line with this month’s theme, Women’s History Month, and also my ongoing reading journey, i.e., reading works written by East Asian writers.

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: Untold Night and Day
Author: Bae Suah
Translator (From Korean): Deborah Smith
Publisher: The Overlook Press
Publishing Date: 2020 (2013)
No. of Pages: 152

Synopsis: 

t’s twenty-eight-year-old Ayami’s final day at her box-office job in Seoul’s only audio theater for the blind. The theater is shutting down and Ayami’s future is uncertain.

Her last shift completed, Ayami walks the streets of the city with her former boss late into the night, searching for a mutual friend who is missing. Their conversations take in art, love, food, and the inaccessible country to the north. The next day, Ayami acts as a guide for a detective novelist visiting from abroad. Almost immediately, in the heat of Seoul at the height of the summer, order gives way to chaos as the edges of reality start to fray. Ayami enters a world of increasingly tangled threads, and the past intrudes upon the present as overlapping realities repeat, collide, change, and reassert themselves.

Blisteringly original, Untold Night and Day upends the very structure of fiction and narrative storytelling and burns itself upon the soul of the reader. By one of the boldest and most innovative voices in contemporary Korean literature, and masterfully realized in English by Man Booker International Prize-winning translator Deborah Smith, Bae Suah’s hypnotic novel asks whether more than one version of ourselves can exist at one, demonstrating the malleable nature of reality as we know it.

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.
Lawrence’s powerful description of Paul’s single-minded efforts to define himself sexually and emotionally through relationships with two women – the innocent, old-fashioned Miriam Leivers and the experienced, provocatively modern Clara Dawes – makes this novel as much for the beginning of the twenty first century as it was for the beginning of the twentieth.

Title: Woman Running in the Mountains
Author: Yūko Tsushima
Translator (from Japanese): Geraldine Harcourt
Publisher: New York Review Books
Publishing Date: 2022 (1980)
No. of Pages: 275

Synopsis: 

Alone at dawn, in the heat of midsummer, a young woman named Takiko Odaka departs on foot for the hospital to give birth to a baby boy. Her pregnancy, the result of a brief affair with a married man, is a source of sorrow and shame to her abusive parents. For Takiko, however, it is a cause for reverie. Her baby, she imagines, will be hers and hers alone, a challenge that she also hopes will free her. Takiko’s first year as a mother is filled with the intense bodily pleasures and pains that come from caring for a newborn. At first she seeks refuge in the company of other women – in the hospital, in her son’s nursery – but as the baby grows, her life becomes less circumscribed as she explores Tokyo, even ventures beyond the city into the countryside, toward a mountain that captures her imagination and desire for a wilder freedom.

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.

Title: Can’t I Go Instead
Author: Lee Geum-Yi
Translator (from Korean): An Seonjae
Publisher: Forge
Publishing Date: 2023 (2016)
No. of Pages: 369

Synopsis: 

Two women’s lives and identities are intertwined – through World War II and the Korean War – revealing the harsh realities of class division in the early part of the twentieth century.

Can’t I Go Instead follows the lives of the daughter of a Korean nobleman and her maidservant in the early twentieth century. When the daughter’s suitor is arrested as a Korean Independence activist, and she is implicated during the investigation, she is quickly forced into marriage to one of her father’s Japanese employees and shipped off to the United States. At the same time, her maidservant is sent in her mistress’s place to be a comfort woman to the Japanese Imperial Army.

Years of hardship, survival, and even happiness follow. In the aftermath of World War II, the women make their way home, where they must reckon with the tangled lives they’ve led, in an attempt to reclaim their identities and find their place in an independent Korea.