Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

I have become a functioning part of the world.

Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata

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When I first started here, there was a detailed manual that taught me how to be a store worker, and I still don’t have a clue how to be a normal person outside that manual. ― Sayaka Murata, Convenience Store Woman Keiko is stuck in a dead-end job. She works at a Smile Mart (a chain convenience store) in Japan. She has worked there since it opened eighteen years ago. She is an exemplary worker, showing up on her scheduled work days, always early. She […]

Surprisingly modern for stories written over 30 years ago.

Terminal Boredom by Izumi Suzuki

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Izumi Suzuki is a bit of a counter-cultural cult icon in Japan, though I’d never heard of her before reading this book. Born in 1949, she arose in a society itching to break away from American occupation and western influence. This was the era of Yukio Mishima, actor, model, and poet who attempted to overthrow a right-wing, ultra-nationalist overthrow of the government before failing and committing seppuku. The ’60s were a tumultuous time in Japan, as they were in many parts of the world. In […]

A perfect little novel

The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa

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Growing up in the 1980s and 90s, the son of Boomer parents, I collected baseball cards. It was a hobby my father and I enjoyed together. Like many of his generation, my father amassed a collection of cards that, today, would be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. And, like many of his generation, they were all thrown away when he joined the military and moved away from home. Trying to rekindle that magic, as many parents do, he started buying them again when he […]

A nice anthology of mildly gruesome stories

Revenge by Yoko Ogawa

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This is an anthology of interconnected short stories that takes place in Tokyo in an indeterminate time, but presumably sometime in the 1990s. Each of the stories (of which there are eleven) is from the perspective of a different character, and shares some commonality to the story that immediately precedes it. In “Afternoon at the Bakery”, for instance, the narrator enters a bakery for some strawberry shortcake. It’s her son’s birthday who (it is revealed) is now dead. That is what his last birthday cake […]

The girl who won’t quit

Asadora!, Volume 8 by Naoki Urasawa

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Due to some of the “extras” in the story itself, and the multiple story lines happening at once, things are a little slower than I would have liked, making Asadora!, Volume 8 by Naoki Urasawa a 3.5 or even 3.75 and not a “pure four.”  However, this edition shows more of the history of Japan in the 23 years after the war and what the later 1960s looked like. This has not been as explored due to the fact we have been monster hunting up […]

“Didn’t you know the insides of dogs and cows and birds and fish are exactly like that of man? The only difference is the clothes we wear!”

The Narrow Cage and Other Modern Fairy Tales by Vasily Eroshenko, Adam Kuplowsky (translator)

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CBR16 Bingo: Dreams – Eroshenko’s fairytales give us glimpses of his dreams for a more compassionate and peaceful future where all are respected no matter their gender, race, class, or ability – and the fears he has about what may have to be done to achieve them. Fairytales as oral traditions bear the stamp of the cultures that tell them; fairytales when written by an individual bear the stamp of culture channelled through that individual, which is a different thing altogether. There really are some people […]



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