Mieko Kanai Ordre des livres (chronologique)

In den neunziger Jahren in Tokio kämpft Natsumi mit der Monotonie ihres Alltags als Ehefrau und Mutter. Trotz der Routine und der Herausforderungen des Mittelschichtslebens behält sie ihren scharfen Humor, ihren Eigensinn und ihre Leidenschaft für Hitchcock-Filme und Fotografie. Mit innerer Überzeugung kümmert sie sich um ihre Familie, während sie in Gesprächen mit Nachbarinnen versucht, ihrem Leben eine gewisse Lebendigkeit zu verleihen.

With shades of Clarice Lispector, Mavis Gallant and Lucy Ellman, this late- period novel by the esteemed novelist, essayist, and film and literary critic Mieko Kanai – whose often dark and cynical work occupies something of a cult place within the Japanese canon – is a disconcerting and astute portrait of life in late-stage capitalist society.

Like the surfaces of a jagged crystal, each story in this collection shows an entirely different facet when viewed from a different angle. Playing games with the basic units of both life and fiction—the solid certainties of the self, the world around us, and the words we use to describe these things to one another—Mieko Kanai creates a reality where nothing is certain, and where a little boy going out to run errands for his mother might find that he’s an adult, and his mother long dead, at the end of a single train ride. Using precise language to describe dreamlike plots owing as much to Kafka and Barthelme as to Kenzaburō Ōe and the long tradition of the Japanese folktale of the macabre, The Word Book is an unforgettable voyage to absurd, hilarious, and terrifying locales, and is the English-language debut for one of the greatest and most interesting Japanese writers working today.