The Friends - Kazumi Yumoto | Japanese YA Novel Week

I am reviewing this book as part of the Japanese YA Novel Week I am co-hosting with Nina at Death Books and Tea.

If you would like more information about the week, head over here.

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Summary from Amazon:

Kiyama and his friends Kawabe and Yamashita become fascinated and curious about death when Yamashita's grandmother dies. They wonder what a dead body looks like and if the dead person becomes a ghost. They hope to see death firsthand by spying on an old man who looks like he will die soon. But while they watch the old man, he watches them. Soon their fascination for each other turns into a friendship that will change their lives forever.

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This is one of the most beautiful stories I ever read about friendship.

Kiyama, Kawabe and Yamashita are three young friends who spend their time between school, cram school and sports. Neither has the best of situations at home or is the most popular at school, but they rely on each other. When Yamashita's grandmother passes away, the boys voice their concerns, beliefs and questions about death. It turns out that they are all fascinated by it, not in a morbid way, but they are just afraid of the unknown.

Kawabe's mother talks about an old neighbour who is on the verge of death, and the boys decide to see for themselves what death is about and start spying on the old man. When the old man realises what the boys are doing, an interesting friendship develops.

I haven't read many YA books which talk about death the way this one does. The boys are young and innocent and they have genuine concerns about death. They don't really know what it's like to grow old and they certainly don't know what happens when a person dies.

In a theme linked to death, the book also mentions old age and by observing the old man, the boys understand better what happens when a person grows old. The friendship they have with the old man is so adorable and shows just how much people can benefit from inter-generational contacts. The story also stresses the point how people can change throughout their lives and how one day's action doesn't mold your personality forever. There really is a before and an after in the boys' personality and it really is quite interesting to see this develop in a 100 pages or so.

The book is also about friendship and there really isn't anything like your childhood friends who know you for who your are, flaws included, and who accept you without ever judging you. The three boys don't have the perfect family or school life but they have each other and that's what matters. Their friendship progresses as the story goes and you know that what happens during that summer when they are spying on the old man will stay with them forever.

This is a very short book and unlike The Girl Who Leapt Through Time where I would have wanted more, I felt that the length was just right in this one. All the aspects of the story are balanced and there is enough character description and depth to the story that I didn't feel the story needed anything more.

The writing is also very subtle and because the story is seen through Kiyama's eyes, it is also very believable. There are some very emotional moments in the book and I have been very touched by the story (read = I cried my heart out). 

This is a truly beautiful book and I just want to share it with as many people as I can (really, that's how much I loved it!). It is brilliant for both boys and girls, for middle grade and older readers, and it is also a brilliant book to discuss (may it be the friendship, solidarity, death and the relations between younger and older generations). Trust me on this one, read it! 

The Girl Who Leapt Through Time - Yasutaka Tsutsui | Japanese YA Novel Week

I am reviewing this book as part of the Japanese YA Novel Week I am co_hosting with Nina at Death Books and Tea.

If you would like more information about the week, head over here.

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Summary from Amazon:

One of Tsutsui's best-known and most popular works in his native Japan, The Girl Who Leapt through Time is the story of fifteen-year-old schoolgirl Kazuko, who accidentally discovers that she can leap back and forth in time. In her quest to uncover the identity of the mysterious figure that she believes to be responsible for her paranormal abilities, she'll constantly have to push the boundaries of space and time, and challenge the notions of dream and reality.

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The Girl Who Leapt Through Time is a collection of two short story by Yasutaka Tsutsui, who s one of the most famous science fiction writer in Japan. These two stories are some of those light novels I was mentioning in the intro post of this week: they are very short and, in the case of The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, have an animated film based on it. 

The first short story, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, tells the story of fifteen year old Yazuko who discovers by accident that she can leap through space and time. 

After an accident in the biology lab, Yazuko inhales a product and faints. She doesn't think much about it but feels different ever since. Then when she is about to be crushed by a truck, and wakes up in her bed, she realises that she can leap through time. with the help of her friends Kazuo and Goro, she will try to understand her power.

I truly liked the story, especially after reading the end and how she came to have her power but I would have preferred reading an entire book rather than a novella! There's only so much you can fit in 50 pages so I thought there wasn't enough.

I felt that the dialogues were a bit off (which I didn't think in the second story) so I don't know whether it's the writing or the translation.

It is a sweet story and opens new perspective when you read the end.

As for the second story, The Stuff That Nightmares Are Made Of, it follows Masako, a high school student who has an irrational fear of heights and Prajna masks and who wants to get to the bottom of it with the help of her friend Bunishi. Masako also wants to help her little brother Yoshio with his night terrors.

I like this story better and I found really interesting how Masako would try to face her fears and help Yoshio face his. It is also interesting how both of them came to have those fears. It is quite fascinating how the mind works and through Masako and Yoshio we have two examples of why some things or ideas come into our mind and mold our behaviours.

I didn't notice the writing as much as in the first story, and I thought the writer could really build the tension through the various events in the book. 

Those two stories are short and sweet and present interesting concepts: time-travel and the psychology of fear. Judging by the language and the action, I think these books are for younger readers. I am told the film of The Girl Who Leapt Through Time is better to watch than reading the book because it goes deeper in the character description etc.

Schoolgirl - Osamu Dazai | Japanese YA Novel Week

I am reviewing this book as part of the Japanese YA Novel week I am co-hosting with Nina at Death Books and Tea. 

If you would like more information about the week, head over here.

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Summary from Amazon:

The novella that first propelled Dazai into the literary elite of post-war Japan. Essentially the start of Dazai's career, Schoolgirl gained notoriety for its ironic and inventive use of language. Now it illuminates the prevalent social structures of a lost time, as well as the struggle of the individual against them - a theme that occupied Dazai's life both personally and professionally. This new translation preserves the playful language of the original and offers the reader a new window into the mind of one of the greatest Japanese authors of the 20th century.

A day in the life of a teenage girl, on the verge of becom­ing a woman. She is deal­ing with a depressed mom, cop­ing with the recent death of her dad, school and the other prob­lems girls like her deal on a daily base. While her inner tur­moil is boil­ing, she keeps a cool façade when it comes to por­tray­ing what she feels. Some­times hyp­o­crit­i­cal, some­times sad but always interesting.

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Schoolgirl takes you on the emotional rollercoaster that is a day in the mind of a teenage girl. The girl might seem like a regular teenager on the outside, whining like a spoilt child and preoccupied by mundane things, but on the inside she lays bare her personality. It is slightly voyeuristic to read as we are privvy to her most intimate thoughts. The girl is on the verge of womanhood and you can feel how desoriented she is by the whole process of growing up and dealing with her isolation and grief. Her father has passed away and she is trying to live with her grieving mother and without her sister who has moved away to live with her husband.

This very short coming of age story is quite simply perfect. In one day of the girl's life, we can get a glimpse of her personality, her aspirations and her sadness. All her emotions are more intense as if everything was seen through a magnifying glass. Happy moments are lived ecstatically and down times take a form of gloomy depression which seems to drain the life out of her. This entire day spent in her head is an exercise of introspection where she thinks about herself and how she can improve her actions to be the person she aspires to be.

A sort of duality comes out when we realise that the girl is conscious of her own flaws and of being quite unremarkable, but at the same time craving for more and for something extra-ordinary to take place. Her opinion of herself is quite bad as she is aiming for purity and anything less looks "uninspired". On that account, she is wholly uncompromising and that is why she is quite severe in her opinion of others. She wants to be herself and genuine but at the same time she realises that she doesn't have much to offer the world. "I want to live beautifully" is her aspiration but she knows that "genuine beauty is always meaningless, without virtue".

The girl also wants to be taken seriously and as an adult. Away from the innocence of youth, she is old enough to see when her mother lies or pretends not to be hurt by her grief. By wanting to be taken seriously she also wants her mother and others to pay attention to her. She loves reading and thinking about someone else's life as she says "The sly ability to steal someone else's experience and recreate it as if it were my own is the only real talent I possess."

This is a very short book whose message seems to me quite universal. It is definitely a must read for teenage girls (and parents of teenage girls for that matter). The writing is beautiful and I spent the whole time highlighting sentences (that's why I have been quoting the book during the review). The first person point of view is a trademark style for Osamu Dazai. He is considered as one of the most important fiction writer of the 20th century Japan.

It is as much a work of fiction about a teenage girl as a very interesting basis for a discussion on the various themes present in the book: individuality, feminity, beauty, etc.

Real World - Natsuo Kirino | Japanese YA Novel Week

I am reviewing this book as part of the Japanese YA Novel week I am co-hosting with Nina at Death Books and Tea. 

If you would like more information about the week, head over here.

~~~

Summary from Amazon:

In a suburb on the outskirts of Tokyo, four teenage girls drift through a hot smoggy August and tedious summer school classes. There's dependable Toshi; brainy Terauchi; Yuzan, grief-stricken and confused; and Kirarin, whose late nights and reckless behaviour remain a secret from those around her.

Then Toshi's next-door neighbour is found brutally murdered and the girls suspect Worm, the neighbour's son and a high school misfit. But when he disappears (taking Toshi's bike and cell phone with him) the four girls become irresistibly drawn into a treacherous vortex of brutality and seduction which rises from within themselves as well as the world around them.

~~~

Real World is a small book which creeps up on you. The story is in turns narrated by four teenage girls: Toshi who always wants to do the right thing, the intellectual Terauchi, Yuzan who is trying to overcome the grief after her mother passed away and who has to deal with her homosexuality and Kirarin who isn't a sweet innocent girl as she would like to let on. Toshi's neighbour gets killed and the teenage girl thinks she knows who did it: the woman's son, Worm. When Toshi's phone and bike are stolen by Worm and he contacts the four girls, a psychological thriller develops as he tries to plays one girl against the other and as each girl tries to play him. 


The book is as much about the murder of Worm's mother as it is about the teenage girls. Natsuo Kirino's talent is to really get those teenagers in all their angst and boredom and how they build a world around them to shroud their real selves. While reading, you get a strong sense of discrepancy between the girls' "social" self and what you can hear inside their heads. You do wonder how those four very different girls could ever be friends, but they have at least in common the masked personality and a willingness to hide it. You get a real sense that no matter how different those 5 teenagers are, they share the same culture and a lot of beliefs.

The book is quite haunting in the sense that you want to shout to the girls to stop playing with Worm, or to Worm to get a life, but you can only stand and watch while they continue getting deeper and deeper. You don't really understand if this attraction the girls have for Worm is a mix of fascination for violence or boredom, but you realise that the four girls are a bit more than they let on to the others and not as naive as one might think. Each girl has her own issues and they are all trying to fight society's expectations in them and get away from the conformity that is demanded of them.. You can see their curiosity to the outside world and how they just want to get out of the boxes they live in, no matter how comfortable those boxes are.


Worm is as affected by people's expectations as the girls are and even imprisons himself in them when he wants to give a meaning to what he did. Japan isn't a stranger to those crimes and there has been some anxiety in the country over a possible youth crisis where teenagers would lean to violent behaviours because of the rigidity of the school system.


The writing is very good and you can't even tell this is a translation of a work originally written in a foreign language. I have read this more than six months ago and I can still remember what I felt when I read this book.


I definitely recommend the book in general to people who are interested in Japanese culture because there are some very interesting scenes about the girls' lifestyles in there, but fans of noir fiction/psychological thrillers will definitely fall for this book.




Info: There are some violent and upsetting scenes in the book so I wouldn't recommend the book to anyone under 14 years old.

Japanese YA Novel Week - 5th to 11th December 2011

Hi everyone, 

I am kicking my Japanese YA Novel week with a little intro post telling you why on earth Japanese literature is my new obsession and give you some interesting websites I keep stalking browsing.

As you can see from the gorgeous logo, I am co-hosting this week with Nina from Death Books and Tea who is a fan of Japanese young adult literature and manga. As you probably guessed from my lack of drawing skills, she is the talented person behind the creation of the logo, not me! We have chosen different books for this week so don't hesitate to go on both blogs to discover them and maybe become as obsessed as we are! I'll try to link to Nina's reviews as they get posted.

I started becoming interested in Japanese literature not a very long time ago to be honest. I knew about Haruki Murakami and Kazuo Ishiguro (though he isn't translated and writes in English) but never really had a specific motivation to read their books, or to even think about Japanese literature as something I would like to read. I love reading foreign literature and I am fascinated by the entire process of translation so I would have gotten there at some point but it never really attracted me.

Then I went to an event with Melvin Burgess organised by Spinebreakers (read Becky @ The Bookette's fantastic event summary) and he talked about the fact that when he first started writing there was hardly any young adult novels (for 15+) and that many teen novels did not talk about what actually happened to a lot of teenagers (sex, violence, drugs, etc.) or if they did, they would present things in an unrealistic way. In this talk, he mentioned Japanese young adult literature which he loved and how they presented serious subjects and had a very gritty and dark aspect to them. He named Snakes and Earrings by Hitomi Kanehara (my review here) and the novels Out, Grotesque and Real World by Natsuo Kirino and that was my revelation.

I already thought that there was a real lack in young adult literature for young adult books (as in from 15 to 18 years old and more) and when I read Snakes and Earrings I felt there was something more in the story, the same something I then found in Natsuo Kirino's books. I am not exactly sure how I could describe it, I think it probably is just one aspect of Japanese culture in general or just in these books, and I am quite simply fascinated by them. 

Japanese culture is very rich and I bet you could spend years trying to get your head wrapped around it and still learn new things everyday. I just got into Anime (Japanese animated cartoons) and realised that a story could be presented in various media: novel, manga and anime. And this is especially true for young adult novels. A Light Novel is a style of novel in Japan which is quite short and mainly targeted at teenagers/young adult. They can be serialised in magazines/journals and often come with illustrations (hence the strong link with manga and anime since the stories can be easily adapted in other medias). This genre is extremely popular in Japan and most of the young adult popular culture is centred around these stories. [Read this article on the subject: Publishing heavyweights see light in growing 'light novel' market | Asahi Japan Watch | November 2011]

Ever since I got interested in Japanese literature, it just opened new perspectives for me as a reader and as an aspiring writer. I am a fan of good stories but also love anything original and I've definitely found new stories or styles of writing I could obsess about - and I hope I can share them with you!

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Programme for the week:

Monday - Intro post (which is what you are currently reading!)

Check out Nina's Intro post over at Death Books and Tea and her review of L Change The World by M

Tuesday - Review of Real World by Natsuo Kirino

In a suburb on the outskirts of Tokyo, four teenage girls drift through a hot smoggy August and tedious summer school classes. There's dependable Toshi; brainy Terauchi; Yuzan, grief-stricken and confused; and Kirarin, whose late nights and reckless behaviour remain a secret from those around her.

Then Toshi's next-door neighbour is found brutally murdered and the girls suspect Worm, the neighbour's son and a high school misfit. But when he disappears (taking Toshi's bike and cell phone with him) the four girls become irresistibly drawn into a treacherous vortex of brutality and seduction which rises from within themselves as well as the world around them.

Read Nina's review of Chain Mail - Addicted To You by Hiroshi Ishizaki over at Death Books and Tea

Wednesday - Review of Schoolgirl by Osamu Dazai

The novella that first propelled Dazai into the literary elite of post-war Japan. Essentially the start of Dazai's career, Schoolgirl gained notoriety for its ironic and inventive use of language. Now it illuminates the prevalent social structures of a lost time, as well as the struggle of the individual against them--a theme that occupied Dazai's life both personally and professionally. This new translation preserves the playful language of the original and offers the reader a new window into the mind of one of the greatest Japanese authors of the 20th century.

A day in the life of a teenage girl, on the verge of becom­ing a woman. She is deal­ing with a depressed mom, cop­ing with the recent death of her dad, school and the other prob­lems girls like her deal on a daily base. While her inner tur­moil is boil­ing, she keeps a cool façade when it comes to por­tray­ing what she feels. Some­times hyp­o­crit­i­cal, some­times sad but interesting.

Read Nina's review of Audition by Ryu Murakami over at Death Books and Tea

Thursday - Review of The Girl Who Leapt Through Time by Yasutaka Tsutsui

One of Tsutsui's best-known and most popular works in his native Japan, The Girl Who Leapt through Time is the story of fifteen-year-old schoolgirl Kazuko, who accidentally discovers that she can leap back and forth in time. In her quest to uncover the identity of the mysterious figure that she believes to be responsible for her paranormal abilities, she'll constantly have to push the boundaries of space and time, and challenge the notions of dream and reality.

Read Nina's review of Chibi Vampire Novel Volume 1 by Tohry Kai over at Death Books and Tea

Friday - Review of The Friends by Kazumi Yumoto

Kiyama and his friends Kawabe and Yamashita become fascinated and curious about death when Yamashita's grandmother dies. They wonder what a dead body looks like and if the dead person becomes a ghost. They hope to see death firsthand by spying on an old man who looks like he will die soon. But while they watch the old man, he watches them. Soon their fascination for each other turns into a friendship that will change their lives forever.

Read Nina's review of Vampire Hunter D by Hideyuki Kikuchi over at death Books and Tea

Saturday - Read Nina's review of Kamikaze Girls by Novela Takemoto

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Interesting Links:

Whenever I feel like reading anything Japanese, I go browse the blog Contemporary Japanese Literature managed by Kathryn Hemman who is a graduate student in the East Asian Language and Civilizations department at the University of Pennsylvania. She writes very thoughtful reviews on a variety of genres. Her blog is a must-read if you are interested in Japanese literature.

The author Cynthia Leitich Smith has a fantastic part of her website dedicated to "diverse reads" and in particular to books with an Asian Heritage. You can read what she writes about children's and young adult books with Japanese heritage or Japanese themes (here) but do browse the other tabs on her website as it is a truly fantastic resource.

As for most things, Wikipedia is a fantastic tool to gather information and resources. You can visit the article about Light Novels, Manga and the page with a List of Light Novels to browse those you might like. You can browse the Japanese Literature category to find articles on themes you are more interested in. 

For instance, I read a lot of LGBT / Gender and sexuality books and I found that it constitutes an actual genre in Japanese literature. The jargon used for those books is Yuri for any content in manga, anime or books involving love between women, and Bara for any content involving love between men.

UPDATE: I completely forgot to add the page for the Japanese Literature Challenge which has been hosted by Dolce Belezza for the past 4 years. You can participate in the challenge or read the review posted by other bloggers. There also is a suggested reading list if you don't know where to start!

There are probably many other websites on the subject, and I am happy to add any good links here, but those are the websites I mainly use as sources of information.

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That is all for today, stay tuned all week on this blog and on Death Books and Tea to read the reviews we will be posting and we hope we'll get some of you interested in reading Japanese Young Adult novels!

Have a lovely week,

Caroline x