Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

If you like your coffee with extra saccharine

Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi

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CBR 17 BINGO: Work, because the stories take place in the coffee shop where Kei, Nagare, and Kazu all work Before the Coffee Gets Cold is a collection of four short stories loosely combined into a novel. The characters overlap from story to story, and some incidents in earlier stories come into play later in the book, but for the most part, each chapter stands alone. The Funiculi Funicular, run by husband and wife team Nagare and Kei, appears to be an ordinary cafe, but […]

I’m on a roll with Japanese stories containing cats! (This review is cat approved)

The Blanket Cats by Kiyoshi Shigematsu

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CBR 17 BINGO: “B” (for “Blanket”) On a recent visit to my local library, I was attracted to this book by the adorable illustration on the cover. Reading the book jacket, I learned that The Blanket Cats is a collection of seven stories about a pet shop in Tokyo that rents out cats for three days and two nights. Each cat comes with a special blanket to which they are very attached (do not lose or wash that blanket!). Some customers have practical reasons for […]

A detective story you can actually (maybe) solve before the end.

The Tokyo Zodiac Murders by Soji Shimada

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This is another book I got from the recommendation section of I Don’t Even Own a Television. It is an admitted failing of mine that I haven’t read a whole lot of non-western fiction. We own more than a few untouched Haruki Murakami books. I’ve seen a fair amount of Korean and Chinese film, but that’s not at all the same thing. So probably the biggest hurdle I had to get over in reading this was getting past the frequent digressions into memories and emotions […]

Aging down the line

Plum Rains by Andromeda Romano-Lax

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In the not-too-distant future , Japan is faced with an aging, ailing population and a declining birth rate. With few young people willing to care for the elderly, they allow migrant workers in, with the promise of citizenship vaguely dangled in front of them. The migrant workers have a series of ridiculous and near-draconian rules and regulations placed on them, needing to navigate language testing, paying off loans, and unfair labour conditions just to survive long enough to send money back to their families abroad. […]

Murakami goes oddly normal

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I’ve had this on my shelf a while and I finally got around to feeling like reading something weird. Interesting thing is though, this novel is actually not, at least compared to a lot of Murakami’s other works. Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and his Years of Pilgrimage has a lot of the expected Murakami elements, such as a main character in some kind of life rut, a sort of mysterious female who helps him (that’s Sara), some unusual dreams, and a trip somewhere for literal and […]

Iyamisu. That’s all you need to know.

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According to Wikipedia, one critic called this novel the “Gone Girl of Japan”, which is interesting because it was originally punished in 2008, four years before Gillian Flynn’ s most popular novel. At any rate, they both fall into the iyamisu category of fiction, which is Japanese for “eww mystery”, and is reserved for the deliberately shocking form of storytelling familiar to anyone who has read Gone Girl (which is most of us). If you take nothing else from this review – please incorporate that […]



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