Mieko Kawakami: ‘Women are no longer content to shut up’

Fiction in translation

Mieko Kawakami: ‘Women are no longer content to shut up’

Traditionalists in Japan hated her feminist novel, but Breasts and Eggs was a huge bestseller. The author talks about taking on male privilege, orientalist cliches … and Haruki Murakami

David McNeill

Tue 18 Aug 2020 11.20 

Mieko Kawakami began writing partly to explore the “randomness and strangeness” of life – so it is oddly fitting that the release of her novel Breasts and Eggs (Chichi to Ran in Japanese) has suddenly been upended by a worldwide pandemic. After building up a loyal following in Japan over the decade, Kawakami was all set to go global, attending festivals in the US and Europe, before Covid-19 hit. Still, being stuck at home with her young son has provided plenty of grist for her feminist mill.

 

Kawakami Mieko: Amplifying the Voices of Japanese Women Through Fiction

Richard Medhurst
20 November 2020

The Ethics of Reproduction

Since making her debut in 2007, author Kawakami Mieko has written prolifically and won a number of literary prizes. In 2020, her novel Breasts and Eggswas published in English to media acclaim. It has been heralded as a feminist work, with its strong narrative focus on women’s bodies.

Japan’s Literary Treasures

Genji’s People: Customs of the Heian Nobility (3)

29 March 2019 

One of the pleasures of reading Japanese books is the chance to learn about local culture and customs. Usually there are enough points of similarity between the reader’s milieu and the scenes depicted in the story to ease the process along. With a work like The Tale of Genji, however, written over 1,000 years ago about and for the aristocrats of the Heian period (794–1185), there is even more distance from the modern non-Japanese reader. A basic idea of customs among the nobility of the time helps in understanding the story.

Men Without Women by Haruki Murakami / Review by Kate Kellaway

Haruki Murakami

Review

Men Without Women by Haruki Murakami – review

Haruki Murakami’s long-awaited return to the short story is a masterclass in pacing and the tragicomic revelation

Kate Kellaway

Sunday 14 May 2017

C

uriosity, in Murakami’s supremely enjoyable, philosophical and pitch-perfect new collection of short stories – his first for more than a decade – is what motivates many of his characters. Their curiosity becomes ours and propels each narrative onwards. But curiosity is shown to be complicated. Is it healthy, necessary, wise? Or does it kill the cat? In the first story, Drive My Car (Murakami’s Beatlemania has outlasted the success of his bestselling novel Norwegian Wood), curiosity is in every sense a driving force. A veteran actor and widower is obliged to hire a chauffeur for his ancient yellow Saab 900 convertible (Murakami always supplies manufacturing details of his characters’ cars). Kafuku has been banned from driving after a scrape in which he was found to have been drinking, and his theatre company is now paying for his transport during a run of Uncle Vanya. He is compelled therefore to put himself in the competent hands of a plain chauffeur, a woman with ears “like satellite dishes placed in some remote landscape” (the glee with which Murakami alights on such similes is infectious). 

Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami / review

 

Norwegian Wood: 'languorous, visually striking movie about love and loss'.

Norwegian Wood – review

Philip French

Sunday 13 March 2011

I

n Haruki Murakami's bestselling novel of 1987, the 37-year-old narrator, Toru Watanabe, is transported back to his student days in late 1960s Tokyo by hearing the Beatles' "Norwegian Wood" on the loudspeaker system of an airliner as he flies into Hamburg. It is a time of student unrest and strident demonstrations, but in the lengthy novel and the film carved out of it, this is merely the background to a delicate love story, or series of love stories. The central tale concerns the reserved Watanabe's devotion to the mentally disturbed Naoko, the former girlfriend of Watanabe's only close friend, Kizuki, who committed suicide at the age of 17. It is a doomed affair that after a single night of love is conducted during visits to an asylum outside Kobe where Naoko is being cared for by an older woman, Reiko, a musician who's also recovering from a breakdown. It is Reiko who sings, in English, a rather beautiful version of "Norwegian Wood" which is later sung by Lennon and McCartney over the final credits. Meanwhile, Watanabe is given a dubious sentimental education at the hands of Nagasawa, a suave, promiscuous fellow student bound for the diplomatic corps, and a more beneficial one from the pretty, witty, intelligent Midori, who attempts to draw him out of his solipsistic shell.

Men Without Women by Haruki Murakami, book review / The unassuming quietness of these stories

 

Men Without Women by Haruki Murakami, book review: The unassuming quietness of these stories doesn’t mean they don’t hit home with when they need to

A new collection of short stories by Murakami explore the lives of men who find themselves alone 

Lucy Scholes

Wednesday 17 May 2017 16:21 BST

I have something of a love/hate relationship with short stories. Too many mediocre offerings leave me despairing of the genre, but then a collection like Men Without Women comes along and all is forgiven, my faith restored in the recognition of how utterly perfect the medium can be – in the right hands.

 

Men Without Women by Haruki Murakami review – a quiet panic

There are shades of Hemingway in these stories about men who choose loneliness in the avoidance of pain

M John Harrison

Friday 5 May 2017

A

quiet panic afflicts the male characters in Hemingway’s 1927 collection Men Without Women, that touchstone in the development of both Hemingwayism and the short story. Men should never put themselves in the position where they can lose someone, a bereaved Italian soldier warns Hemingway’s long-running protagonist Nick Adams: instead, a man “should find things he cannot lose”. Ninety years later, Haruki Murakami’s men without women have come to the same conclusion, polishing it into a postmodern lifestyle.

 

Review: 'Men Without Women' by Haruki Murakami

By Shoshana Olidort

Chicago Tribune

•May 08, 2017 at 1:06 pm

Loneliness, studies show, can be lethal. But while most of us won't die of being alone, many will experience, at some point, the dull, gnawing ache of it. This ache pulsates through each of the seven stories in Haruki Murakami's newest collection, "Men Without Women." In every one, a male protagonist suffers the loss of a woman he loves, or is compelled to recognize that he will never have her in the first place.

The Elephant Vanishes by Haruki Murakami

 

The Elephant Vanishes
by Haruki Murakami

WHEN THE ELEPHANT disappeared from our town’s elephant house, I read about it in the newspaper. My alarm clock woke me that day, as always, at 6:13. I went to the kitchen, made coffee and toast, turned on the radio, spread the paper out on the kitchen table, and proceeded to munch and read. I’m one of those people who read the paper from beginning to end, in order, so it took me awhile to get to the article about the vanishing elephant. The front page was filled with stories of SDI and the trade friction with America, after which I plowed through the national news, international politics, economics, letters to the editor, book reviews, real-estate ads, sports reports, and finally, the regional news.

Landscape with Flatiron By Haruki Murakami

Landscape with Flatiron 

by Haruki Murakami

Junko was watching television when the phone rang a few minutes before midnight. Keisuke sat in the corner of the room wearing headphones, eyes half closed, head swinging back and forth as his long fingers flew over the strings of his electric guitar. He was practicing a fast passage and obviously had no idea the phone was ringing. Junko picked up the receiver.

Tokyo / « Norwegian Wood » and « Drive My Car » by Haruki Murakami and « Breast and Eggs » by Mieko Kawakami

Tokyo: « Norwegian Wood » and « Drive My Car » by Haruki Murakami and « Breast and Eggs » by Mieko Kawakami

Posted on November 14, 2023 by Damien

After more than ten years, I finally returned to Japan and was able to stay a little longer than on my first visit. I was there again for a conference held at a university located in the Roppongi district, just across from Tokyo’s superb National Arts Center

Shapers of Japanese History

Kawabata Yasunari: Finding the Harmonies Between Literature and Traditional Art　

Oct 1, 2021

Taniguchi Sachiyo 

Kawabata Yasunari won the 1968 Nobel Prize in Literature for works written with narrative mastery and sensibility. Academic Taniguchi Sachiyo explores the connections between art and Kawabata’s literary world.

What sparks the idea for a literary work? How is this transformed through the creative process into the text itself? While there may be many different answers to these questions, in some cases, inspiration comes from an encounter with a painting.

Shapers of Japanese History

Tea and Aesthetics: Kawabata Yasunari’s Nobel Lecture

Oct 13, 2021

Taniguchi Sachiyo 

Kawabata Yasunari received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1968. In the lecture he gave at the award ceremony on December 12 that year, he surfaced the connections between his own writing and Japan’s traditional culture, including especially the tea ceremony.

The Limitless Possibilities of a Literature Beyond Borders: A Conversation with Tawada Yōko

Oct 5, 2021

Tawada Yōko’s many accolades include the prestigious Kleist Prize, awarded to an outstanding work of literature written in German. Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit is one of Germany’s leading scholars of Japan, who has received the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz-Prize, Germany’s most prestigious academic award, for her scholarship on Japanese literature. The two met in Berlin for a wide-ranging discussion that covered adventures real and imaginary, translation, gender, and the future of the human race.

Bilingual Author Tawada Yōko: Crossing Political and Linguistic Borders

Tawada Yôko / Écrire en deux langues pour la promotion d’une littérature mondiale

Taniguchi Sachiyo 

December 10, 2020

Tawada Yōko, a Japanese writer who lives in Germany and writes in both Japanese and German, has become one of the world’s leading literary voices, winning Germany’s Kleist Prize in 2016 and an American National Book Award in 2018.

Yoko Tawada Conjures a World Between Languages

Writing one novel, Tawada alternated languages at five-sentence intervals.

Illustration by Pei-Hsin Cho

The Novelist Yoko Tawada Conjures a World Between Languages

Writing in Japanese and German, Tawada explores borderlands in which people and words have lost their moorings.

By Julian Lucas
February 21, 2022

According to Yoko Tawada, literature should always start from zero. She is a master of subtraction, whose characters often find themselves stripped of language in foreign worlds. They are, for the most part, at the mercy of circumstances: a literate circus bear betrayed by her publisher, an interpreter who loses her tongue, a nineteenth-century geisha discussing theology with an uncomprehending Dutch merchant. But their creator—a novelist, a poet, and a playwright—has chosen her estrangement. Tawada, who was born in Tokyo and lives in Berlin, writes books in German and Japanese, switching not once, like Vladimir Nabokov or Joseph Conrad, but every time she gets too comfortable, as a deliberate experiment. Her work has won numerous awards in both countries, even as she insists that there’s nothing national, or even natural, about the way we use words. “Even one’s mother tongue,” she maintains, “is a translation.”

Biographies / Yoko Tawada

AT WORK

Yoko Tawada

Tawada’s stories agitate the mind like songs half remembered or treasure boxes whose keys are locked within.

New York Times

Yoko Tawada was born in Tokyo in 1960, moved to Hamburg when she was twenty-two, and then to Berlin in 2006. She writes in both Japanese and German, and has published several books—stories, novels, poems, plays, essays—in both languages. She has received numerous awards for her writing including the Akutagawa Prize, the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize, the Tanizaki Prize, the Kleist Prize, and the Goethe Medal. New Directions publishes her story collections Where Europe Begins (with a Preface by Wim Wenders) and Facing the Bridge, as well her novels The Naked Eye, The Bridegroom Was a Dog, Memoirs of a Polar Bear, and The Emissary.

By Yoko Tawada

Three Streets

Scattered All Over the Earth

The Emissary

Memoirs of a Polar Bear

The Bridegroom Was a Dog

The Naked Eye

Facing the Bridge

Where Europe Begins

ND

 

Toddler Hunting and Other Stories by Taeko Kono review – sex lives of the quietly kinky

Written in the 60s, these disturbing but deft tales of Japanese women’s repressed desires are steeped in violence and masochism

John Self
Monday 24 May 2021

T

his unignorably strange collection of stories evokes warring responses of admiration and disgust in the reader: Taeko Kono is a writer who puts the toxic into intoxicating. The selection, written between 1961 and 1971, is a brave choice for one of the launch titles in W&N’s new list of modern classics. (Though the publisher that first gave us Lolita in this country has never shirked controversy.)

The recurring motifs are sexual violence and masochism, the protagonists women who occupy mid-century Japanese society quietly, but conceal taboo longings. “Fukuko liked physical pain during sex,” we’re told of one character; of another, “Yuko had never been able to be satisfied by ordinary sex... she would demand violent methods of arousal.”

The Overlooked Autofiction of Yuko Tsushima

 

Yuko Tsushima

The Overlooked Autofiction of Yuko Tsushima

By Abhrajyoti Chakraborty

April 9, 2019

At times, autofiction can seem to refer not so much to a genre as to our desire, collectively, to seek the author in a text. We group together novels by Rachel Cusk, Karl Ove Knausgaard, and Jenny Offill because they make it easy to presume that the writer is the protagonist. This freedom feels new, so we assume that autofiction must be new, too. For precedent, we reach for “Reality Hunger,” David Shields’s manifesto, from 2010, in which he called for a “deliberate unartiness.” We forget Flaubert, who declared “Madame Bovary, c’est moi”; or Virginia Woolf, who rejected the fictions of her predecessors because “on or about December 1910 human character changed”; or even J. M. Coetzee, who published three novels about a writer named John Coetzee at the turn of this century. We overlook not just history but intent. James Baldwin, for instance, is still characterized by his themes (blackness, America) and tones (“prophetic,” “angry”) but rarely recognized for the self-implicating imagination of his early novels. A character named Manto might show up repeatedly in the Urdu writer Saadat Hasan Manto’s stories, but the author’s reputation is still that of a chronicler of Bombay and the partition of the Indian subcontinent. With some writers, it is precisely their biography that gets in the way of a full literary reckoning. We can only deal with them in terms of what they are writing about.