Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

People who love to eat are always the best people

La cantine de minuit (Shinya Shokudō) by Yarō Abe

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Known in English as Midnight Diner (although I don’t believe the manga has been published in English, or maybe it has but it’s out of print, I wasn’t able to find any precise info), this is the manga that inspired the Netflix show Midnight Diner: Tokyo Stories.   The titular diner is open from midnight to 7 am, and even though it has a very modest menu, the chef will prepare anything you want as long as he has the ingredients. The diner is located […]

The Thrill of Banality

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I read Hideo Yokoyama’s Six Four at the start of 2018. I was expecting it to be one thing (a dense, layered murder mystery) and instead got another (a character study and bureaucracy-heavy police procedural). It wasn’t what I would normally read but I appreciated that it was something different. I appreciated the inflections of the main character and how Yokoyama could inject such nuance about life in Japan in the midst of a professional crisis. I had difficulty focusing in the beginning of Seventeen. Yokoyama takes his sweet […]

“Happiness? He wasn’t even sure what that meant.”

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Sometimes a year feels fast, and sometimes a year feels slow. Sometimes a year feels like both! That’s been my year with Murakami. It feels like he’s always been a favorite author of mine, but when I look back, I hadn’t read a word of his until early this year. Now I average a Murakami book every couple of months.  This particular book is different than the previous works I’ve read simply because it’s not a novel. It’s a collection of seven stories about, you […]

Food and Flowers; Love and Politics

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Read for CBR10Bingo: Food I began a new call to a church last year. One of my parishioners is a Japanese native; perhaps the first person I know on an intimate level from the island itself. This has led me to read more about Japan, both fiction and non-fiction and I find the more I read, the less I know. Japan has a rich history and a deep, diverse culture. I learn something every time but I still feel wanting.   I won’t pretend to […]

I don’t want to review this book

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Pachinko, Min Jin Lee’s novel following multiple generations of a Korean family through most of the 20th Century, has received a lot of positive attention: finalist for the National Book Award, 10 best books of 2017 for the New York Times Book Review, Roxane Gay’s favorite book of the year (according to the Washington Post). And from what I’ve seen, the reviews here at CBR have been universally positive. So I’m at a bit of a loss, because I really didn’t enjoy it. At all. […]

A Year in Japan

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Tracy Franz’ memoir, My Year of Dirt and Water chronicles the year her husband, Koun attends intensive training in a cloistered temple to become a Zen Monk. Alone with only intermittent access to Koun during his residency, Franz is left to navigate the foreignness of an unknown culture as well as the foreignness she feels in herself. The book is structured in a set of running diary entries broken up by seasons, chronicling both the linear time of Japan’s holidays and climate, as well as […]



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