Hikaru Okuizumi, The Stones Cry Out, 1993

Tsuyoshi Manase is a haunted World War Two veteran who received his first lesson in geology from a dying Japanese soldier in a cave in the Philippines. After the war ends he indulges his passion for collecting stones, runs a small bookstore, marries unhappily and fathers two sons, but how he struggles with his memories of the war ends up shaping the present and the tragic destiny of his family. This was Okuizumi’s first novel to be translated into English. It’s delicate and sorrowful with elements of strangeness, particularly in how Manase’s memories, dreams and reality all blur in such a way that he never quite gets a grip on his life as his family falls apart. Okuizumi writes elegantly and he’s clearly meditated on the story he’s telling, although he requires a bit of patience from the reader as he ties up Manase’s inner story with his family life and the world beyond. A quietly powerful book.  PY

•  The Stones Cry Out won Japan’s Akutagawa Prize in 1994.

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Hitomi Kanehara, Snakes and Earrings, 2003

A character study of a young Japanese woman who inexplicably enters into the world of tattoos, body modification and a dysfunctional ménage-à-trois with two murderous male friends, one of whom has no redeeming qualities whatsoever and seems to live for opportunities to inflict pain. While this is a deliberately harsh work about the alienation of Japanese youth culture, whatever big statements are being made somehow get lost in translation, and for my money Kanehara, writing at age 21, only just makes the grade for descriptive writing, at least in English. Snakes and Earrings often feels like a fantasy of what the big bad adult world must be like to a curious teenager, which might explain its cult classic status in Japan. More than actually drawing a foreign reader in, I felt the writing was actually keeping such a reader on the outside of this world, being told a story of a way of being that one does not have the necessary privileges to access on a more sympathetic level. Hence I found the novel somewhat disappointing, but then the closer one lives to this particular counterculture the more meaning it probably takes on.  PY

•  Snakes and Earrings won both the Subaru Literary Prize and the Akutagawa Prize in 2003.

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