Kills, thrills, love and loss: New titles from Japan make great summer reads

Wherever you find yourself this summertime — at home, at the beach or scrambling to find anywhere with air conditioning — there’s no better way to relax, indoors or out, than in the company of great summer books.

Here we give you all our recommendations of the best new books in, on, from, or about Japan to fill your free time and your imagination during the hottest of days. So, wherever you are, pull out that book, digital or paper and let it whisk you away.

Suspense and Mystery

If you need a little excitement to fill your summer then a mystery or suspense novel might do the trick and these three may well be the best ones released so far this year.

Fuminori Nakamura delves into the mysterious disappearance of a young girl who slipped into the cracks of an ominous local group in "Cult X"  (May 2018, Soho Crime, 512 pages, ¥2,794). Noir and mystery ooze out of Nakamura’s writing, while the book is revealing in its examination of a cult that can’t hide similarities to the Aum Shinrikyo cult that led the sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo subway and others — a story still making headlines this summer. You’ll be kept on edge to the very end and even after it’s finished you’ll be happy to know that many of Nakamura’s other novels have been recently released in English, including the Akutagawa prize-winning "The Boy in the Earth."

Another wild ride with connections to true events is Hideo Yokoyama’s newly released "Seventeen" (February 2018, Riverrun, 416 pages, ¥1,417), centered around the real life experiences of the author as a journalist during the 1985 JAL Flight 123 crash into the mountains in Gunma. This is an event that shook Japan, and Yokoyama shows us what it was like to be right on the frontlines. While not really a mystery (but with surprises for anyone unfamiliar with the actual crash) Yokoyama creates an incredible amount of tension in the decisions being made with the ticking clock of deadlines feeling as nerve-racking as any time bomb and the risk of losing integrity as awful as death for a journalist.

Or, if a murder mystery is more your style, pick up the recently rereleased "The Lady Killer" (April 2018, Pushkin Vertigo, 224 pages, ¥1,231) by Masako Togawa. The story is beyond simple description, blending mysterious deaths with a deeper mystery over whether this is the tale of a misogynist killer or something far more tricky. Togawa’s writing is slick as it never lets you get too confident about what’s about to happen until the twists spin you right around like a rollercoaster. Hard to put down, so you may finish this one during a single poolside sitting.

Click here to read more.

• External Link
• https://gaijinpot.com/

© GaijinPot