Cannonball Read 12

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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A detective story you can actually (maybe) solve before the end.

The Tokyo Zodiac Murders by Soji Shimada

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This is another book I got from the recommendation section of I Don’t Even Own a Television. It is an admitted failing of mine that I haven’t read a whole lot of non-western fiction. We own more than a few untouched Haruki Murakami books. I’ve seen a fair amount of Korean and Chinese film, but that’s not at all the same thing. So probably the biggest hurdle I had to get over in reading this was getting past the frequent digressions into memories and emotions […]

Aging down the line

Plum Rains by Andromeda Romano-Lax

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In the not-too-distant future (it’s about ten years from now) Japan is faced with an aging, ailing population and a declining birth rate. With little they can do about it, they let in migrant workers to take care of their elders, a task most Japanese-born people don’t seem all that eager to do. The migrant workers still have a series of ridiculous and near-draconian rules and regulations placed on them, and have to navigate testing, paying off loans, and more to survive enough to send […]

Murakami goes oddly normal

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I’ve had this on my shelf a while and I finally got around to feeling like reading something weird. Interesting thing is though, this novel is actually not, at least compared to a lot of Murakami’s other works. Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and his Years of Pilgrimage has a lot of the expected Murakami elements, such as a main character in some kind of life rut, a sort of mysterious female who helps him (that’s Sara), some unusual dreams, and a trip somewhere for literal and […]

Iyamisu. That’s all you need to know.

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According to Wikipedia, one critic called this novel the “Gone Girl of Japan”, which is interesting because it was originally punished in 2008, four years before Gillian Flynn’ s most popular novel. At any rate, they both fall into the iyamisu category of fiction, which is Japanese for “eww mystery”, and is reserved for the deliberately shocking form of storytelling familiar to anyone who has read Gone Girl (which is most of us). If you take nothing else from this review – please incorporate that […]

Elementary, my dear.

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Yoshitake Mashiba is the CEO of a Tokyo company, and despite being married to the “perfect wife”, he wants to end the marriage because she can’t provide him with children. He has put everything in his personal life on hold until he accomplishes this, his one and only goal. Needless to say, he isn’t a particularly sympathetic character. Ayame, his wife, leaves town to visit her family, and Yoshitake dies suddenly, two days later, from poisoned coffee. Though she has a motive, her alibi is […]



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