Two Japanese translated books in this year's long list, Under the Eye of the Big Bird by Hiromi Kawakami (tr. Asa Yoneda) and Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa (tr. Polly Barton).

#InternationalBooker #HiromiKawakami #AsaYoneda #SaouIchikawa #PollyBarton

The International Booker Prize 2025 | The Booker Prizes
https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/prize-years/international/2025

This is the first of 金井美恵子 Mieko Kanai's books I've read (unfortunately, despite having written more than 30 books and enjoying a cult following in Japan, very few of her works have been translated into English, and even this one was written 25 years ago but only translated into English last year), and I loved it. So much so that I already ordered her "Oh, Tama!: A Mejiro Novel" from the local bookshop.

It's almost entirely an inner monologue, written in long, meandering sentences, that quickly makes you feel you are right inside Natsumi's head, a middle-class housewife and mother in Tokyo, describing an often stifling, routine life. But it's not without humour, and there are some very funny and sharp observations that made me laugh out loud. And while it may seem chaotic on the surface, it's cleverly constructed - e.g. I loved how a passage where Natsumi lists the layout and exact contents of her local supermarket in painstaking detail makes an identical reappearance right at the end of the book.

And Polly Barton's translation is stunning - it can't have been easy to translate a book like this, whose dense sentences more often than not span multiple pages (the opening sentence alone is at least four pages long), and wildly skip between first and third person perspectives and narratives.

#金井美恵子 #MiekoKanai #軽いめまい #MildVertigo #PollyBarton