Mishima Yukio is a fascinating figure in Japanese literature. As an author, he is one of the nation’s greats. He was very nearly Japan’s first Nobel Prize for Literature recipient, being nominated three times, and was ultimately only overlooked because his mentor, Kawabata Yasunari, won the prize instead. He also…
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Loneliness is a theme that has threaded its way through a great body of Japanese literature over the past 120+ years. It’s something that has been explored by the country’s greatest writers in several ways, showing it as a result of subjects as varied as fractured psyches, troubled marriages, and…
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She was Her host’s slave no longer. She was the mistress, nuclei Her servants. She would be able to create a daughter of Her own will, a life form even more perfect than She. An Eve for the new world. The goal of a lot of great horror is to…
Read MoreArticle by Matt S. China, as one of the oldest continuous cultures and nations on the planet, has a long and deep literary history. Some of its greatest masterpieces were written well before Europeans invaded places like America and Australia and re-drew the maps to suit their colonial expansion. Across…
Read MoreBook review by Matt S. Published a little over a decade ago (2008), Minato Kanae’s Confessions was the book that immediately established her as one of Japan’s pre-eminent crime fiction writers. Like many of the best modern crime fiction works, Confessions isn’t so interested in figuring out whodunnit – that’s…
Read MoreOpinion by Matt S. The other day I was in a book shop (I’ll admit that, thanks to my Kindle and online shopping, I don’t support the local bookstores as much as I might like to and should), and I was, oddly enough reminded on just how completely different our…
Read MoreBooks by Matt S. We talk a lot about Japanese games, films, anime and manga in western culture, but we talk about Japanese literature far less frequently, and that’s a pity, because as with all those other mediums, Japan has produced many of the world’s finest writers, and literature gives…
Read MoreArticle by Matt S. Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita is one of the greatest books in the history of literature. Nabokov’s observations on the American culture that underpin the book, and his subsequent deconstruction of it through darkly transgressive humour, is by turns humorous and shocking, but at all times it’s breathtaking…
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