The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa is about a housekeeper tasked with taking care of a professor whose memory lasts eighty minutes. The memory loss had been caused by a car accident and now he lives in a tiny dilapidated house where he toils away at math prizes. A beautiful relationship emerges once the son of the housekeeper, nicknamed Root, comes into the equation. The professor cares for Root and is highly protective of him, trying to stop the bleeding from a cut on Roots hand to protecting him from a baseball. Both Root and the professor are enamored with baseball, but in two different ways through math and though the athleticism of the game. Throughout the novel, the housekeeper takes the professor and Root to a baseball game, she learns the tragic nature of the professor’s past, and in the end throws a birthday party for Root as well as for the professor winning a huge math prize. However, as the novel progresses, the professor’s memory shortens. In the end, the professor’s sister-in-law admits him to a living facility where he eventually dies.
Ogawa is a master at creating strikingly quiet and profound moments whether in the discussion of math or in the small details of the professor. I was charmed by the relationship between the professor and Root, implying that love and friendship go beyond time and memory. It’s a heartwarming and tender novel that I am glad I revisited. Final Rating: 5/5
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Love Poems by Anne Sexton is a collection of poems centered on the subjects of desire, love, pain, and departure. The majority of the poems work to provide a context of the desire for the final poem, ‘Eighteen Days Without You’. The poems provide imagery with lines such as, “The small animals of the woods/are carrying their deathmasks/into a narrow winter cave.” from ‘It is a Spring Afternoon’ to “I have walked through a door in my dreams/and she was standing there in my mother’s apron.” in ‘The Interrogation of the Man of Many Hearts’. Other poems I found powerful were ‘In Celebration of my Uterus’, ‘The Nude Swim’, ‘Us’, and ‘December 9th’ of ‘Eighteen Days Without You’. There’s an intensity these poems possess in their frankness with sex or in the way desire leaks out in the final poem.
Final Rating: 4/5 If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery is a collection of short stories focusing on the lives of Jamaican Americans living in Florida. The stories feature a tight cast of characters, Trelawny, Delano, their parents, and their cousin Cukie. The collection shows these characters at their lowest points, living out of their cars while working for an apartment complex, a father who traffics drugs, and other moments where they simply need to find a way to get by. I found the whole collection to be striking, but in particular, I enjoyed, ‘In Flux’, because of its comments on how Blackness is perceived in America, ‘Pestilence’, ‘Spashdown’, ‘Independent Living’, and ‘If I Survive You’. In the last story, it provides an intense look at how people view and take advantage of the Jamaican American population. I found the tension and dynamic of the brothers to be powerful. Highly recommend this book.
Final Rating: 5/5 In Cold Blood by Truman Capote is a non-fiction novel about the Kansas murders of the Clutter family in 1959. It follows the lives of the Clutter family leading up to their deaths, as well as describing the murders, Perry and Hickock, as they decide to rob and kill the family. Both Perry and Hickock had been in and out of trouble with the law, and in one such case heard about Mr. Clutter who owned a farm and had a safe with at least ten thousand dollars in it. With that, Hickock concocts a plan to drive to their house once they’re out of prison, rob and kill the family, and disappear. Perry has an idea of them going to Mexico to discover gold after the murders, which they decide is their next course of action. Both Perry and Hickock are described as having tolerated each other, in part because they believed they’d get a big payout. However, once they get to the house, and tie the family up, they can’t find the safe. They collect forty dollars from Mr. Clutter’s wallet, and while Mr. Clutter is tied up, Perry has a momentary psychotic episode and slits Mr. Clutter’s throat. Then, knowing there can’t be any witnesses, he shoots the rest of the family. Then, they escape from the house, begin to cash fraudulent checks, steal from stores and pawn those items off, and finally make their way to Mexico. However, due to Hickock’s spending, they find they have lost all their money, so they decide to return to the US. All the while, the detective on the case, Dewey, searches for clues in the footprints left and the photos of the crime scene. Dewey finally gets a lead when an inmate who previously bunked with Hickock had told him about the Clutter family and how he described the safe to him. Eventually, they catch Perry and Hickock in Las Vegas, where they are brought back to Kansas to stand trial. Their trial is short, with the death sentence being the final verdict. They are on death row for about five and a half years where they appeal the verdict. However, the novel ends with their hangings while Dewey observes them.
Capote masterfully crafts a vibrant and haunting world in this novel, and I felt severely conflicted with the main murderer it focuses on, Perry. It’s alluded he had some sort of schizophrenia, and had had a rough childhood. I liked how at parts of the novel, Capote takes excerpts of people’s conversations, and how both Perry views himself and the rest of the world views him. It’s imagery and conflict feel completely real, and I can see why this novel has existed in the literary cannon. Final Rating: 5/5 Afterparties by Anthony Veasna So is a collection of short stories focused on the lives of Cambodian Americans, their interlinking relationships, and the generational trauma of the Khmer Rouge genocide. ‘Three Woman of Chuck’s Donuts’ is about a family who owns a donut shop while a mysterious man comes to order a single fritter every night without eating it. ‘Superking Son Scores Again’ is about a badminton coach who owns a store and can’t stop reliving his glory days. ‘Maly, Maly, Maly’ is about two cousins who hang out and work at a bootleg DVD store, where they get high, watch porn together, and then go to a ceremony for the rebirth of their aunt. ‘The Shop’ is about a father who owns a mechanic shop, but the business begins to fail after one of the cars is stolen. Other stories I enjoyed were ‘The Monks’ and ‘Human Development’.
The stories feature interlinking characters, though fairly loose in the specific plots between them. Thus, they create a tapestry of what it means to be Khmer, gay, and sometimes aimless. It’s a tender and powerful collection. Final Rating: 5/5 Poetry December 2023 is a collection of poems and a feature of Frank Marshall Davis. It’s a solid issue with Diane Seuss with ‘Cowpunk’, Okwudili Nebeolisa with ‘Innocence’, and Frank Michell Davis with ‘Giles Johnson, Ph.D.’. I especially enjoyed the interview, discussion, and short essay by Davis’s daughter. It was an in-depth look on how Davis’s work was heavily influenced by living in Chicago, the way people at the time saw his work as too political and bordering on propaganda, and how he viewed his work.
Final Rating: 3.5/5 Kangaroo Notebook by Kobo Abe is a surreal novel about a man who works at a products company and one day finds radish sprouts growing on his shins. He decides to go to the doctor where he is prescribed a bath in a sulfur lake. Then the bed he is on begins to move on its own volition, which takes him along the street, where he gets ticketed by a police officer for parking on the road in the bed, and is sent into a cave where he is nearly killed by an oncoming train. He then is taken on a boat by the bed along an underground sewage river where his IV bag turns into a reproductive organ of a squid and if it is smashed into another reproductive organ, it creates a bomb. Other adventures include the man going to an underworld tourist attraction where child-demons sing songs to visitors, meeting his mother in the underworld where she has no eyes, a nurse who tries to collect as much blood as she can from unwilling people, killing another hospital patient with nine other people because he was making too many noises, and finally going to a circus where the child-demons pack him in a box where he dies.
The novel takes many unexpected turns, and as with the narrator, it feels as though we are the patient strapped to the bed and are brought along to wherever it takes us. There are many moments of surprise, and I particularly enjoyed the way the man recalls the author who wrote about the squid bombs. It’s a weird and fun novel that doesn’t seem to take itself too seriously. Final Rating: 4/5 Life for Sale by Yukio Mishima is a novel about a copywriter, Hanio, who tries to kill himself, but fails. He then decides to put his life up for sale in the newspaper, which kickstarts a collection of desperate people who want to use him. The first man wants him to sleep with his young wife, get caught, and killed. Another woman wants him to test a poison concocted from beetles for a Western buyer. A boy wants him to sleep with his mother, who turns out to be a vampire, while the mother intends to kill both her and Hanio in a fire. Two spies enlist his help in testing out poisonous carrots and deciphering letters. And finally, a woman asks for him to live with her and pay his rent, while she intends to kill him with her. Many of these instances are connected through the Asia Confidential Service (ACS), who believes him to be an undercover cop trying to unravel their international murders. In the end, the ACS captures him, but he outwits them with a stopwatch in a box which he says is a bomb. However, when Hanio goes to the police to report the ACS, he is brushed off as he is seen as crazy and homeless.
The novel shows Hanio wanting to die, but through the course of its narration, he seems to stumble out of harms way. He cannot kill himself, the women that ask for his services intend to commit suicide with him, but he always inexplicably slips away from danger. This is what drives the story forward: Hanio’s desire for death and Mishima denying his death. The novel, however, depicts women in an oddly misogynistic light with its descriptions of their bodies, their singular desires to have sex with Hanio, and their melodramatic suicides either in the face of a gun, a fire, or poison. All that being said, it’s a fast-paced and tense novel throughout, and I found Hanio’s situation to be both surreal and ironic. Final Rating: 4.5/5 Japanese Fairy Tales edited by Philip Smith is a collection of five fairy tales from Japan during their years of isolation. Many of the stories involve older married couples wanting children, and fighting demons. I’m most familiar with Momotaro, but thought the Tongue-cut Sparrow was an interesting read as well. As with most of the stories, there are morals imbued within them, and because they are meant for a young audience, provide templates for children to act with their parents or loved ones.
Final Rating: 4/5 A Hundred Lovers by Richie Hofmann is a collection of poems focusing on the erotic, gay, and tender moments the speaker remembers with his past lovers. I particularly enjoyed ‘One Another’, with its lines, “How easily the earth closes / its cavities.” I also enjoyed ‘Spring Wedding’, ‘Mummified Bird’, ‘Opulence’, and ‘French Novel’. ‘Spring Wedding’ fractures its stanzas between the erotic (the first half) and the mundane with “We will have children. / We will buy another house.” The imagery is stark and the collection isn’t afraid to take on themes of sexuality with precision.
Final Rating: 4.5/5 |
AuthorMaxwell Suzuki is a writer, poet, and photographer based in Los Angeles. Archives
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