Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Aging down the line

Plum Rains by Andromeda Romano-Lax

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In the not-too-distant future , Japan is faced with an aging, ailing population and a declining birth rate. With few young people willing to care for the elderly, they allow migrant workers in, with the promise of citizenship vaguely dangled in front of them. The migrant workers have a series of ridiculous and near-draconian rules and regulations placed on them, needing to navigate language testing, paying off loans, and unfair labour conditions just to survive long enough to send money back to their families abroad. […]

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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