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It had the potential to be a much stronger book if the childlike regression Christopher experiences due to trauma was more starkly revealed.

what a great and varied selection you offer. i've read some and loved almost all (banana yoshimoto and mieko kawakami are some of my all time favorite authors). i have kirino's books on my tbr for a year now and you just gave me the extra push to finally pick them up! really enjoyed hearing you talk about these titles. wishing you well ~

I'm going to start a petition to get you to come back

The cat violence put me off Kafka On The Shore.

This is a book that will stick with you forever. I'm rereading it for the umpteeth time. It never gets old.

Funny spin of the title at the end there. Interesting! 12:20

I just finished the book and I had the same thoughts as you. I was surprised at the last scene at the end of chapter 10 where Etsuko says to Mariko “we can always come back” as if she’s the one who’s leaving the country with Mariko. At that moment it occurred to me are they the same person???

Just finished reading it. It struck me as a story told by an unreliable narrator, who has mental health issues. Perhaps paranoid schizophrenia. When she's more lucid earlier in the story, she claims to have been married and had a child, now in her ex-husband's care. Later, when she's mentally unwell, she claims to have been in a relationship with a married man, who forced her to have an abortion. So, what is the truth? The lucid or the deranged admission? At the end, I felt some foreboding about Joe and their unborn baby's future.

Thr whole way through I kept thinking and hoping and expecting " This has got to get better." But I was disappointed. It felt like a waste of time. The book can provoke good discussions, but I did not like it. I much more enjoyed the movie The Island with similar themes.

Really enjoyed your video

This was so extensive and wonderfully critical. What a lovely video essay! ❤

absolutely love this

What I wonder is...Were Iris and Alex truly in love? In the Blind Assassin book they seem to not be fully honest with their feelings. There are several instances were each character is frustrated or longing for something from the other without stating it clearly. This to me makes his death even more sorrowful. Even though real Iris seems to be far more practical minded than the girl depicted in the novel and she mentions their affair almost as a side note, just one of the pieces that helps to wrap it all together. Did she actually loved Thomas and if so, can we assume her LOVE was reciprocated? Was it truly her in the Blind Assassin or a version of her intentionally fabricated to resemble Laura?

This was a great and concise analysis. I didn’t really enjoy this book until the end when I started crying my eyes out. I am giving it a second go. I think my experience will be different this time around.

IMHO, the best choice, anything by Sayaka Murata and Yoko Ogawa

I think it’s interesting about your point about it could be a “utopian.” Yes, the Crakers are superior in so many ways, no existential dread, not needing to eat anything but plants, sex only to procreate, yet those are all the things that make us ~human~ food and culture, contemplating our own existence, romance. The part that stuck out to me in the book was the part when Crake edited out humor as “unnecessary”

Can we all just agree that men geeking out about books is just seriously got 🤗

Nice summary. I've just finished this book, and something you didn't touch on which I think is worth mentioning is the influence of his father, and the cycle of becoming your parents. Stevens inherited his father's ambitions, imprinted on him not by the stories of the perfect butler his father told him, but by how proud it made his father to recount these tales. Stevens wanted to make his father proud by becoming that butler himself. We know his father was an incredibly stoic man, and none of Stevens' skills in running the house seemed to impress him. It was only on his deathbed that he revealed how proud he was. This confirmed to Stevens that he was living his life correctly, and propels him to lean into his own emotionlessness even more, even though he doesn't see his father as a happy man. It's another example of him 'leaving his fate in the hands of great gentlemen', but in a way he's not even aware of. He wasted his life by never challenging the assumption that those with power know best - but those indoctrinated rarely do... which links back into the political themes of the book.

I'm currently reading Alias Grace. I'm close to the end of the novel. It has certainly been an interesting read.

Started reading, well, listening to the audio book, and felt so utterly confused. Wasn't sure if I was missing something. Came to RUclips to gain some clarity. I'm now even more confused. My biggest confusion atm, who the hell is narrating the book? The book starts with what appears to be poetry and random snippets of, well, I'm not entirely sure. I can't say I have ever been so confused by a piece of literature in my life.

Never Let Me Go is #1

Thanks !!!

Reviewer it's specifically says in the book that the boatman will take both together which is something both you and I forgot but axl didn't

Not a good review because one you forgot to give a spoiler warning two no accurate analysis of the final important scene which is exactly why I was watching three you get the story of ishiguro's wife wrong

I really loved 'The Testaments'. I agree that hearing Offred's personal account and experiencing her imprisoned existence along with her is more compelling. ps. It seems to me the gender ideology - encompassing puberty blockers for children, very destructive surgery, and the enforced speech codes surrounding pronouns 'Trans Women are Women' are all a much bigger threats to women's rights than Donald Trump. I'm not a Trump fan (& I'm 'Pro Choice'), but IMO Trump's critics should get a sense of perspective. It seems to me that Gilead much more similar to rigid Muslim regimes & societies than anything existing in the U.S. (even in its most socially conservative periods in the past.)

Thanks for the review. I read this one awhile back and enjoyed it.

In fairness Soseki Natsume wrote ‘I am a Cat’, and Junichiro Tanizaki has ‘A Cat, a Man, and Two Women’, so can’t necessarily dismiss Japanese works just because they feature a cat 🐈

I started Ishiguro with this one and just loved it. I did find it incredibly hopeful but I'm not sure why, given her eventual abandonment . Klara's innocence was so compelling. That she was set aside is very sad but somehow did not blot out her lovely positivity. She still shines in my heart! 💜🧚‍♀️💜 PS I have just finished Never Let Me Go. I guess Klara and the Sun could be seen as a rehashing of certain themes and devices but it was so, so hopeless. Klara and the Sun is a step beyond that ievitable blotting out of sentient beings.💜😔💜

Excellent discussion. Thank you!💜🧚‍♀️💜

I got this book and I assumed things would get intense as the story progresses, but I 'm only halfway and am really disappointed so far. Came to see if there were any good reviews/ spoilers for the book and your video summed it up pretty well for me. Thanks man!!

i have to present an analysis for this book for a school project...🫠🫠🫠 undoubtedly hard because I'm in a time crunch, but thank you for helping clear things up!

Please talk about Japanese books all day and post videos about them! =D

Please do more of these videos and more recommendations! Love it!

Just the premise for the plot sounds like the dull idea that an infertile imagination would generate through some mechanical process of "creative brainstorming". Like a guy who has no inner drive to write.

I don’t use this term often, but this book is a masterpiece

just finished the book today and I felt like I was being suffocated towards the end of it...

Great summary of a great book. I think some of the setting was inspired by Rates of Exchange by Malcolm Bradbury (who ran the creative writing MA that Ishiguro did at UEA).

I’ve read them all and will obviously disagree but that was fun to watch! We agree on the bottom two and my top two would be Artist and Unconsoled. The latter is like Radiohead coming out with Kid A after OK Computer and I’m one of the weirdos who prefers Kid A. I think my opinion of Remains comes from reading it shortly after Artist (back when they were shortlisted for Booker prizes) and it felt like the same story retold in a less convincing setting. There shouldn’t be anything wrong with an author going over similar ground in their novels but that’s what I felt at the time. Maybe it’s time for me to reread a couple of these and change my ranking! Never let me go is wonderful and gets my number 3 slot.

Glad to hear you mention Kitchen - I read it when it first came out in English and you are right when you said it was ahead of its time - I’d never read anything like it. I was amazed to find a new book by her last week in my local bookshop.

I’ve only just found your channel. PLEASE COME BACK. This is the sort of excessively-categorised stuff I live for!

i got chills from the quote about being a “place”

I'm a hugeee Soseki and Kawabata fan and have read all the former's work (my favorite is probably 'Grass on the Wayside', 'Kokoro', 'Ten Nights of Dreams', or 'And Then') and the majority of the latter's. 'The Old Capital', in my opinion, is way better than 'Snow Country' and I'm so glad you've given it recognition! I've watched some of your videos and they're phenomenal. Keep it up!

jus ja Camara c******

Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, to the strangers scattered throughout Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia. 1 Peter 1:1

Thank you 🎉

I can’t believe you don’t have more traffic to your channel. I love your content!

Hey. Did you read her "Cleaned out"? If so, where did you find the English version? Thanks!

I wouldn't call this a fantasy novel. There's not much of a magical system, and any sense of excitement felt very restrained. I liked how the prose style conveyed the sense of everything happening within a fog of uncertainty, but then once the dragon is slain, shouldn't that uncertainty go away? Instead we get this boat crossing chapter that's just as ambiguous as anything that came before it. If this boat symbolizes the crossing to the afterlife, that means there is no boundary in this book between reality and symbolism, since we never saw Beatrice and Axl die. Kind of underwhelming from a fantasy standpoint.

But...Common ground is by naomi ishiguro!!!

The worst book I've attempted to complete reading in the past 10 years is a Japanese book, much hyped by the youngsters here on RUclips, called 'There's No Such Thing as An Easy Job'. I read a great deal of Japanese literature and love the effortless 'quirkiness' that is impossible for writers from any other culture to replicate authentically; it's distinctly, uniquely Japanese. Their classic literature also has a very unique, unmistakably Japanese sensibility. I'm very drawn to Japanese authors and the better translations (no easy task, I acknowledge). TNSTAAEJ is not a charmingly quirky 'slice-of-life' meets magic realism book. It's by far one of the worst novels I've ever attempted to battle my way through. In the end I literally threw it from my sudsy bubble bath last winter all the way into the hallway. Any grown adult who liked this book I narrow my eyes at and am unlikely to take recommendations from (same goes for anybody reading deep in the corrupt, characterless, anodyne land of woke-- you can stick your sensitivity readers). Cheers for this video, I love hearing about cool new things to check out and enthusiasm is by far one of the most attractive qualities a person can demonstrate. Contagious! 😊📚📚🗾