​Masquerade by Mike Fu is a novel about a man, Meadow, who upon housesitting for his friend, Selma, finds a novel titled, The Masquerade, which begins to eerily parallel his life. Meadow travels to Shanghai to meet up with Selma on her recent art exhibit, returning back to New York City, only to be told that Selma has gone missing. Back in New York, Meadow had once had a month-long fling with a man, but was ghosted at an aquarium. As Meadow continues to house-sit weird things begin to happen: the mirror becomes a liquid, one of the men in the novel turns up to give similar advice, and he thinks he sees his doppelgänger so tries to chase him down in the streets. However, Selma has never been a reliable person, sometimes dipping in and out of places, and lying to seem favorable. When Meadow finds his fling under a different name as a performer for the theater, he is thrown off and decides to attend a show to confront him. Though when they do finally talk, the fling gives a competent reason as to why he ghosted Meadow. Though in the end, when Meadow sees a photo that questions the legitimacy of what the fling had said, much of the novel’s coincidences and odd happenings coalesce around Selma.
 
The novel inside a novel was a fun and inventive way to provide mystery and momentum to the novel. I also thought that the dynamic between Selma and Meadow felt real in the sense that it read one-way. I also liked the weird things that happened, but because the novel didn’t fully describe the reasons why, it was a little hard for me to see how they related in the end. Though, on the whole I enjoyed this novel.
 
Final Rating:3.5/5

​Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami is a novel about a fifteen-year-old boy, Kafka Tamura, who has become fed up with his life and his father in Tokyo, so he runs away. While he doesn’t know where he plans on ending up, along the way he meets a girl, Sakura, on the bus. One night, when he comes to and finds blood on his shirt, he calls up Sakura to ask for help in trying to figure out what happened. Eventually, Kafka finds a library in Takamatsu where he meets the assistant, Oshima, and the main librarian, Miss Saeki. Because Kafka is worried that he killed someone, he tries to lay low at the library. Miss Saeki is an elusive woman who had lost the love of her life when she was younger and was stuck in time, while it’s later revealed that Oshima is trans. Kafka stays at the library, going back and forth from his hotel until Oshima offers a room in the library for him. As the room is getting prepared, Oshima takes Kafka to his family’s old cabin with a forest that two soldiers had once gotten lost in. Then, when Kafka assists Oshima in his library duties and sleeps, on some nights a ghost of a young Miss Saeki sits in the room gazing at a painting. Miss Saeki had once been a singer, producing only one song, from the time her love went off to university, soon to be killed. She had disappeared for some time, which was when Kafka believe that her and his father had him before she ran away with his sister. Eventually, Kafka has sex with both the young Miss Saeki and the older Miss Saeki, falling in love with her. When Kafka learns that the police are after him due to his father’s death, Oshima sends him back to the cabin. At the cabin, Kafka decides to walk into the forest so far that he meets the soldiers that were lost. It turns out they were guarding an entrance to a town that seemed to be in the spiritual world. Upon arriving in the town, Kafka meets both Miss Saeki’s, with the older one telling him he needed to leave before the entrance closed. So with a torn heart, Kafka leaves and returns to the library, a new man, and decides to return back home. The whole time Kafka remembers what his father had said to him, how he would kill his father and sleep with his mother and sister. All of which seemed to come true.
 
In addition to Kafka, a second storyline emerges with an older man, Mr. Nakata, who has both lost his memory and is mentally challenged. This was due to an event when he was a child where he fell unconscious for three weeks on top of a hill during a school field trip picking mushrooms. After he woke up, Mr. Nagata was different and could never achieve the goals that his family set out for him. Though, the one thing he could do was talk to cats, which he uses to look for a missing cat called Goma. Along the way Mr. Nakata meets other cats who tell him that Goma may have been kidnapped. It’s only when a dog leads Mr. Nagata to a man called Johnnie Walker where he learns that the cats are being killed and their hearts eaten to create a flute that controls living beings. Johnnie Walker goads Mr. Nakata to kill him, though Mr. Nakata is unwilling until one of the friendly cats is about to be killed. Mr. Nakata then stabs the man with a knife, saving Goma and the other cats. However, it turns out that Johnnie Walker is Kafka’s father, which means that Mr. Nakata must leave Tokyo to evade. And while he did tell the police, they didn’t believe him. Along the way out of Tokyo, Mr. Nakata makes fish and leeches fall out of the sky, eventually meeting up with a trucker named Hoshino. They get along well and while Mr. Nakata doesn’t know where he’s supposed to go, they drive to Takamatsu where Mr. Nakata realizes he must find the entrance stone. They take a few days to look for it, and not until a concept called Colonel Sanders points Hoshino in the right direction, do they find it and open it. From there, Mr. Nakata continues to search for what he needs to complete, and only finds it at the library where Kafka had stayed. When they talk with Miss Saeki, Mr. Nakata realizes that she’s the one that he needs to talk to. She enlists Mr. Nakata to burn her life’s writing, all her memories, before she passes away. That day, as Mr. Nakata and Hoshino are back at their apartment, Mr. Nakata dies and it’s up to Hoshino to close the entrance. The two days after, a black cat tells Hoshino he must kill it before it can reach the entrance stone or else. Late at night, Hoshino finds out what it is, which is a white mucous thing that climbs out of Mr. Nakata’s dead mouth. Hoshino closes the entrance stone, kills the thing, and eventually makes his return back to his job.
 
Murakami weaves so many fantastical and magical things into the modern world it feels truly surreal. There are characters that take on the faces of brands, talking cats, and ghost sex. The novel also isn’t afraid to break form as in the use of interviews for Mr. Nakata’s unconsciousness, the use of the boy named Crow as Kafka’s inner voice/strength, or when the narrative switches to a second person POV during the intimate moments with Miss Saeki. The taboo nature of the sex between mother and son is explicitly referred to when Kafka reveals the curse his father put on him when talking to Oshima, which made the narrative all the more aware of itself. Because Kafka is initially horror-stricken with this curse and the inevitability of it being played out speaks to the way destiny and fate are referred to in the novel. And while I’m not trans, it felt that the reveal of Oshima only worked to deepen his character rather than him being used as a prop. In part, because Kafka is a boy, the language around women does seem a little misogynistic, though makes sense for his character. And while there weren’t definitive answers to if Kafka and/or Mr. Nakata killed Kafka’s father, why the kids in the forest went unconscious, if Kafka’s father was also Johnnie Walker, or if the town was a spiritual middle world, I felt satisfied with leaving those questions unanswered.
 
Final Rating: 5/5

​The Factory by Hiroko Oyamada is a novel about three workers who all have strange jobs that soon become meaningless. One works as a paper shredder, another works as a copy editor for factory documents, and the third studies the moss growing around the factory. Their lives are surrounded by the meaningless tasks that are set out before them. The man who studies the moss, at one point put on a moss hunting event for children, where a grandfather and boy joined in. The day after, they ask the man to read and edit the kid’s school project about unique animals within the factory. The man reluctantly agrees, and eventually after reading about the Factory Shag, the man decides to photograph them. At the same time, the paper shredder is asked to take a day off, so she walks to a bridge on the factory premises and meets the man who studies moss.
 
The novel relies on its strangeness to propel the narrative along. Questions that arise from its strangeness were What does the factory actually do? What do their jobs have to do with anything? Why are there so many strange creatures around? Did the paper shredder woman actually turn into a bird in the end? I particularly enjoyed the kid’s report on the Washer Lizards, and generally got the vibe of the slightly surreal, slightly macabre aspect of modern workplace life. Though quite different, the workplace strangeness reminds me of the show Severance, in that the purpose of what the workers do is obscured, seemingly done for no other reason than to give people a salary. The Factory also jumps POVs between the three characters and I found it worked particularly well when the two workers met on the bridge. The novel overall was a fun and quick read.
 
Overall Rating: 4.5/5

​Small Wars Manual by Chris Santiago is a collection of poems that upends the Small Wars Manual published by the USMC through erasure. These poems are about the history of America invading the Philippines, the lives of Black soldiers, and the speaker’s understanding of war as a child. There were quite a few poems that I liked, in particular, ‘1.2’, ‘Boondock Suite’, ‘6.4’, ‘3.3’, ‘Hitler Moves East’, ’11.1’, ‘Golden Age’, and ’14.1’. Though, ‘Hitler Moves East’ with its imagery of the brothers playing with toy soldiers and their return to their childhood home in search of their toys felt powerful in how it describes a fascination and then a disgust of war. I was fascinated with how this collection plays with and rewrites a history that America has tried to hide. And in a way, the form of erasure works to take back the voice of America’s victims.
 
Final Rating: 5/5