Tedium, meaninglessness, and alienation abound in this urgent but unsubtle fiction about the Japanese precariat.
In Oyamada’s cautionary English-language debut, three recent hires at an inscrutable industrial factory find themselves bewildered by their strange new world.
“In times like these, a job’s a job,” Yoshiko thinks before signing on as a contractor who will shred documents all day in the basement of the eponymous factory. Her brother has taken a temp position proofreading the factory’s paperwork, a task so dizzying and incomprehensible that he can’t stop falling asleep at his desk. The factory itself is staggeringly large and byzantine; its bureaucracy is predictably opaque; and strange new species are mutating within its walls. This phenomenon we observe mostly through Furufue, a moss scientist hired to green-roof the factory complex, who, given neither direction nor deadline, is left to languish in an unstructured sinecure. But as the narration judders disorientingly across time and multiple perspectives, we realize that neither characters nor plot are the point of this book; rather, Oyamada is interested in crafting an atmosphere—somewhere between mind-numbingly mundane and mind-bendingly surreal—to explore and illuminate the depersonalizing nature of work in contemporary Japan. This results in a kind of lobotomized Kafkaesque quality: The novella’s protagonists are so disaffected that they don’t have any depth or agency; and after a century-plus of modernity and its discontents, the satire comes across as tame rather than trenchant. What’s new and interesting here is the ecological aspect of the critique: Oyamada deftly ties together the plights of human and nature, both becoming unrecognizable in an inflexible industrial economy. But with so few moments of intimacy or optimism, the novella is ultimately a document of deadpan despair, resigned to exaggerate the absurdities of the present rather than try to change them.
Tedium, meaninglessness, and alienation abound in this urgent but unsubtle fiction about the Japanese precariat.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8112-2885-5
Page Count: 128
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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