(Translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori)Following the massive loss of life of WW2, women helped the war effort by being artificially inseminated. With the biological need for sex eliminated, it started to be considered unclean and incestuous, though people still marry to raise children and people vent their romantic feelings on commercialized romantic cartoon characters. As …
The interconnected night time lives of different in habitants of Tokyo are explored in this slim book, with each chapter starting at 1AM. Mitsuki works at a movie prop warehouse and has to source loquat fruits in the middle of the night. Kanako works at a 24 hour advice call centre and has a brother …
A set of lightly intertwined stories about people from different stages and walks of life who are looking for a new direction to take or are facing change. The characters all end up walking into the small local library, where they are led to Sayuri Komachi, a special librarian, who asks them what they are …
Continue reading What You Are Looking For Is In The Library by Michiko Aoyama
Fuyuko is an introvert. She lives alone and has trouble making friends and being social, so she jumps at the chance to turn freelance and work from home. Her life revolves around her routine and her editing job, until one day she seeks out change. But its not easy for her, with her low self …
Continue reading All The Lovers ln The Night by Mieko Kawakami
When Natsuki is a child, she believes that her toy hedgehog is an alien and wants her to save the planet using magic. When she tells her beloved cousin, he is a life line who understands her and tells her his secret, he's also an alien. We come to understand that this story helps them …
A Socratic style dialogue between a youth and a philosopher, this book is the bestselling follow up to The Courage to be Disliked, both of which are a runaway success in Asia. It explores the teachings of Alfred Adler, who is an oft overlooked contemporary of Jung and Freud, but whose ideas ended up being …
Continue reading The Courage To Be Happy by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga
London, 1883, three lives are drawn together. Thaniel, a young man who works for the Home Office as a telegraphist, an eccentric Japanese watchmaker who may have links to a bomb set my Irish revolutionaries, and Grace, a woman at Oxford who longs to be able to work on her science experiments in peace. When …
Continue reading The Watchmaker Of Filigree Street by Natasha Pulley
I love stationery. I love journals, and pens and coloured paper with matching envelopes. I can't go past a stationery store without going in, and then it's very hard for me to leave without buying anything. Being a Australian who lives in London, I do have people to write to and I always have a …
Continue reading Stationery Obsession: Writing Paper, Journals and the Joy of Letter Writing
Perhaps rather than review this book, I should just launch into a rant? This year I created a reading list for myself of books that were my friends absolute favourites. I have some amazing books on this list, and many of them have already been reviewed. Two that forced their way onto the list are …
Continue reading The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle – Haruki Murakami
Murakami's novels are kind of an acquired taste and are generally a normal story that's a bit weird. In this story, the narrator feels compelled to return to a hotel he stayed in years before, because he feels that someone is calling him back there, possibly a girl he used to be in a …
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