Category: magical realism
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Book Review: Tokyo Ueno Station
This post contains major spoilers. This post also contains affiliate links. If you buy through Bookshop.org, I may earn a small commission—at no extra cost to you. Thanks for supporting the blog and indie bookstores! Tokyo Ueno Station by Yu Miri, translated to English by Morgan Giles, is a 168-page contemporary fiction. From the publisher: A surreal, devastating story of a homeless ghost who haunts one of Tokyo’s busiest train stations. Kazu is dead. Born in Fukushima in 1933, the same year as the Japanese Emperor, his life is tied by a series of coincidences to the Imperial family and…
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Book Review: Before the Coffee Gets Cold
This post contains spoilers. This post also contains affiliate links. If you buy through Bookshop.org, I may earn a small commission—at no extra cost to you. Thanks for supporting the blog and indie bookstores! Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi (translated by Geoffrey Trousselot) is a 213-page book focusing on four characters. There’s some magical realism involved, but it is primarily contemporary fiction. It’s also the first book in a series. Within the book there are four short stories, each story focusing on one of the characters, but all of the characters intertwine between stories, which I really…