James Nicoll Reviews

Hiromi Kawakami’s 2002 Parade is a modern fantasy story. The Allison Markin Powell English translation came out in 2019.

Tsukiko and her former high school teacher enjoy eating somen together. Now Sensei demands entertainment… in the form of a story from long ago.

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Hiromi Kawakami’s fantastical 1996¹ Record of a Night Too Brief is billed as the third volume in Pushkin Press’ Japanese Novella series². Record of a Night Too Brief isn’t really a novella, but a collection of works that are either novelettes or short stories. The 2017³ English translation is by Lucy North.

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Hiromi Kawakami’s 2016 People From My Neighborhood is a collection of novellas and.. um… something like vignettes. The 2020 English translation is by Ted Goossen. 

The narrator lives in a town filled with marvels, marvels they are determined to share with the reader.

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Hiromi Kawakami’s The Briefcase is a stand-alone¹ slice-of-life romance novel. Translation is by Allison Markin Powell.

Thirty-eight-year-old office worker Tsukiko Omachi lives alone. It’s by pure chance that she encounters a near-stranger whom she only barely recognizes from her long-ago school days. As a result, their lives are transformed.

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Hiromi Kawakami’s 2016 Under the Eye of the Big Bird is a stand-alone science fiction novel. The 2024 translation is by Asa Yoneda.

Mother lives a perfectly conventional life, raising legions of animal-derived children created in the very factory where the latest of her short-lived husbands works. Mother sometimes has questions, but nothing truly upends her placid life. A life sometime in our future.

How did the world get to this state? Consider the first law of history: people are the problem.

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