Thursday, August 8, 2013

Bookquest: Tokyo, Japan

8/1/2013 - Book-Off (Shinjuku location)


Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto

Kitchen is an award-winning Japanese novel from 1988. It is short, simple, and very popular. Some say it is TOO simple: it has been dismissed as simplistic and superficial.

I was disappointed by the English language books at this used bookstore. The foreign language section was a random assortment of English and French best-sellers. None of the Japanese authors I've been looking forward to reading were there: no Murakami, no Basho, no Mishima, no Soseki. Yoshimoto's Banana was the only English-language book I saw by a Japanese author. 

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