Stay updated with breaking news from யோகோ ஓகாவா. Get real-time updates on events, politics, business, and more. Visit us for reliable news and exclusive interviews.
Dec 19, 2020 As 2021 approaches, six Japan Times book reviewers look back on their top reads released in English this year. Breasts and Eggs, Fiction, Mieko Kawakami (trans. Sam Bett and David Boyd), Picador, 432 pages If you missed “Breasts and Eggs,” Mieko Kawakami’s expansive and lively omnibus, put it at the top of your 2021 reading list. The book is made up of two connected novellas that were combined and translated into English this year, and together the story explores the human condition by examining what it means to be born. No one delves into humanity quite like Kawakami, who adroitly balances social issues with humor and juxtaposes philosophical questions with streetwise answers. Kawakami’s sprawling, soaring, sometimes stumbling prose always rights itself into a sly meditation on human flaws and fallacies, taking on single motherhood, social isolation, gender norms and sexual abuse. ....
NYRB: 216 pages, $30 Paul’s memoir will disabuse you of any notions about the glamour of being an artist’s muse. She met famous painter Lucian Freud in 1978, when she was 18 and he was 55. She fell in love with him, and he painted her for a decade; in the meantime, her own creativity dried up entirely. In “Self-Portrait,” she writes about that stalling out, and then of how she came to create her later portraits, creamy and alive. She explains her own needs as an artist silence and solitude, even a separate apartment from her husband, who doesn’t have a key. It’s a captivating mix of memories, notebook pages and musings, proof that while Freud may have captured her on the canvas, she owns her image on the page. ....