A Certain Slant of Light

I love books that delve into the customs of other countries, so of course I had to read Marie Kondo’s Letter from Japan, written with Kondo’s interpreter Marie Iida.* The book is a collection of essays exploring various Japanese customs, practices, ways of seeing the world, often with an exploration how these concepts influenced Kondo’s tidying method, but the focus remains on exploring the customs themselves.

*Slightly unclear to me if Kondo wrote the book in Japanese and Iida translated into English, or if Kondo wrote in English and Iida helped with the English as she wrote. I waffled and decided to tag it as a Japanese translation.

Some essays I particularly liked:

The one about Japan’s traditional calendar, which breaks each season into six segments, which are further divided into five-day ko, or microseasons. If there’s a book in English just about the microseasons, I’d love to read it.

The concept of mottonai, the regret over wasting something that could still serve a purpose - Japanese mothers will cry “Mottonai!” if their children try to discard something still useful.

The Japanese tea ceremony. I knew about the tea ceremony but enjoyed getting more details about the theory behind the tea ceremony (although clearly this could also fill a book!), and also I was tickled when Kondo explained why she chose the tea ceremony as her extracurricular in high school: she had heard that students in the tea ceremony club got to eat a sweet treat every day!

The concept of do, the way - not any specific way, but the concept itself, the joy of striving for mastery. Currently (on the English-language internet, at least), there’s often an emphasis on the dangers of perfectionism and the joy of accepting good-enough, so it was invigorating to read Kondo’s assertion, “When you make a decision to perfect something, your life opens to a kind of meditative stillness and satisfaction… Continue on with faith in your own joy and soon enough, a path will emerge.” The concept of mastery/perfection as an expression of joy - of loving something so much that you want to take the time to do it right.

Kondo also notes the contrast between American English and Japanese, particularly the fact that American English tends to reward and value speaking loudly and confidently - to frame being able to speak loudly and confidently as inherently freeing. But Kondo comments, “When I speak in Japanese, I feel I can get away with speaking softly”; and it struck me that being able to shout your views is one kind of freedom, but being able to speak softly and still get a hearing is another.

Work has been a madhouse this week, so Wednesday Reading Meme is alas a day late.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Emi Yagi’s When the Museum Is Closed (translated by Yuki Tejima), a short novel about a woman who is hired to chat in Latin with a bored Venus statue, and inevitably ends up falling in love with her. High hopes for this one, but did not end up liking it as much as I hoped. ( ”Spoilers” )

However, I approached E. F. Benson’s Queen Lucia leerily, and I ended up really enjoying it! The omnibus at the library includes the cover blurb that Benson’s Mapp and Lucia novels are “the most enchantingly malicious works written by the hand of man,” which put me off, but I can only assume that either the books change radically in character over the course of the series, or Mr. Gilbert Seldes and I have very different standards for what malice looks like.

Queen Lucia is a social comedy about English village life, like a slightly more biting Miss Marjoribanks or Miss Read. The characters can be petty, at times even spiteful, and Benson is certainly poking a bit of fun at Lucia’s cultural pretensions (she likes to pretend she can speak Italian, for instance) - but despite their foibles they’re basically decent people, who can imagine no higher level of cruelty than snubbing someone’s garden party. The human species would be greatly improved if that was the worst thing we ever did.

Finally, I read Clay Risen’s The Crowded Hour: Theodore Roosevelt, the Rough Riders, and the Dawn of the American Century, a chronicle of the bungling incompetence with which the US Army approached the Spanish-American War in 1898. Fortunately for them, the Spanish bungled even harder. A striking number of military conflicts seem to be decided on this scale of “which side displays slightly less shambling incompetence?”

What I’m Reading Now

Stephen Brusette’s The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World. Like many small children, I loved dinosaurs, so I thought it would be fun to catch up on the latest developments in the field. So far we’re in the earlier Triassic, which is marked mostly by non-dinosaurs species, like the salamanders the size of cars.

What I Plan to Read Next

I’m just about to wrap up the last 2026 Caldecott book, and then I’d like to turn my attention to the 2026 Newberies.

What I Just Finished Reading

Michiko Aoyama’s Hot Chocolate on Thursday, which begins with a woman who goes to the cafe every Thursday to have a hot chocolate and write letters. “OMG TWINSIES!” I shrieked. “I also go to the cafe once a week (my day is Saturday) to have a hot chocolate and write letters!”

The book continues its gentle meander from character to character: from the cafe manager to the mother of a kindergartner who often gets a hot chocolate at the cafe, to the kindergartner’s teacher, to the teacher’s supervisor, and so forth and so on, all the way to Sydney where a young artist gets a kiss from what appears to be the spirit of the Royal Botanic Garden. (The book is not exactly fantasy but also not not fantasy.)

Continuing the fantasy theme, I read William Bowen’s Merrimeg, a 1920s children’s fantasy, largely in the nonsense fantasy mode that was so popular at that point. I largely thought it was fluff, but then the final chapter (each chapter is pretty much a short story) featured the nymph who lives behind the waterfall taking Merrimeg on a journey in a glass carriage, asking the driver to stop at “15, 30, and 80,” which turns out to be those years in Merrimeg’s life - and Merrimeg is not merely looking at her life in those years, but actually being that age briefly… I found it unexpectedly moving. So well played, William Bowen.

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve begun Simon Sebag Montefiore’s The Romanovs, having decided that it would behoove me to learn more Russian history pre-1890. So far I’ve pretty much just read the introduction, but already learned that Ivan the Terrible and Boris Godunov were both pre-Romanov tsars. (I must confess to my shame that I previously had the vague impression that Boris Godunov might be fictional, probably because I knew Pushkin wrote a play about him, but this play was clearly in the tradition of Shakespeare’s Henriad rather than his King Lear.)

What I Plan to Read Next

Michiko Aoyama’s The Healing Hippo of Hinode Park.

This Wednesday Reading Meme covers the last two weeks, so it is perhaps a bit longer than usual, although not so long as it could be as I intend to write a whole post devoted to George Gissing’s New Grub Street. Will I manage this? Unclear. Not sure I ever truly did justice to The Odd Women either.

What I Read Over the Past Two Weeks

Patricia C. Wrede’s Caught in Crystal. I was excited about this book because I loved Wrede’s Enchanted Forest Chronicles, but I found Caught in Crystal a disappointment. The characters spend a lot of time moving from location to location without ever giving much sense what makes any particular location interesting and unique, and it takes about 75% of the book before we finally get started on the quest that we could all see coming from about chapter two.

Eleanor Hoffman’s A Cat of Paris, illustrated by Zhenya Gay. Another lavishly illustrated cat POV children’s book from the 1940s, which seems to have been a highwater mark for this sort of thing. Delightful as books in this genre almost invariably are, with the extra delight of taking place on the Left Bank of Paris! I was only sorry that our cat never got to pose for the patissiere who yearned to sculpt him in marzipan.

Scott Eyman’s Hank and Jim: The Fifty-Year Friendship of Henry Fonda and James Stewart. During a long wait at the airport I sorted through my Kindle and found some books I’d forgotten about, including this one! I love Golden Age Hollywood and Jimmy Stewart especially, so I found this a lot of fun, even though Henry Fonda is the kind of guy who says things like “I’ve never liked myself very much” and you go mmm yeah I don’t think I like you very much either. Apparently if someone got too emotional in front of Fonda, or asked for help, his characteristic move was to silently walk away.

However, I did find Fonda’s needlepoint hobby endearing.

Ngaio Marsh’s Enter a Murderer, the second Inspector Alleyn novel, which I approached with trepidation because I’ve found the early Alleyn books hit or miss. (IMO Marsh hits her stride in Artists in Crime, when Alleyn falls head over heels for murder suspect Agatha Troy.) However, this one was a surprise pleasure. The story is set in a theater, and Marsh’s theater mysteries are almost always good, and although Alleyn doesn’t seem to have quite settled into his characterization yet, it is extremely funny to watch him flippantly flirting with starstruck reporter Nigel Bathgate.

”Here’s the warrant,” murmured Alleyn. He struggled into his overcoat and pulled on his felt hat at a jaunty angle.

“Am I tidy?” he asked. “It looks so bad not to be tidy for an arrest.”

Nigel thought dispassionately, that he looked remarkably handsome, and wondered if the chief inspector had “It.” “I must ask Angela,” thought Nigel.

Must you, Nigel? I think you can tell damn well that Chief Inspector Alleyn simply oozes sex appeal.

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve begun Takuya Asakura’s The Vanishing Cherry Blossom Bookshop, which I bought because it was a mere $5 with a drink at the Barnes and Noble cafe (deal lasts till the end of March!) and I was weak to the beautiful cherry blossom explosion of a cover. I feel that a bookshop that only appears when the cherry blossoms are in full bloom ought to feel a bit more numinously magical than the one in this book, but nonetheless I’m enjoying it enough to keep reading.

What I Plan to Read Next

Continuing my Provincial Lady journey with The Provincial Lady in America.

What I Just Finished Reading

Kate Seredy’s The Open Gate. Driving toward their destination for summer vacation, a New York City family pauses at a farm auction. No one is bidding on the farmland itself, so Granny cunningly suggests to Dad, “Why don’t you bid? Just to get things started?”

“DON’T YOU DO IT, BOY!” I shouted, but as so often happens, the characters ignored my wise advice.

Of course Dad wins the farm. Of course, the family has to stay the night, and having stayed one night, they have to keep on staying. And then Granny goes to another farm auction, promising piously not to open her mouth to bid–

“YOU DON’T HAVE TO OPEN YOUR MOUTH TO BID AT AN AUCTION!” I shouted at Dad, who once again foolishly failed to listen to me. He accepted Granny’s promise, and Granny promptly rules-lawyered the farm into two cows (both pregnant) and two horses (also both pregnant) by bidding with a twitch of the hand.

I am all for people going back to the land if they want to, but I prefer stories about it to feature people who actually want to, rather than people who get bamboozled into it by Granny.

Multiple people have recommended Uketsu’s Strange Houses (translated by Jim Rion), and it did NOT disappoint. The book is a mystery based around floor plans, and I am happy to report that there are indeed MANY floor plans (I love a floor plan), which makes the book an even zippier read than you might guess from its size.

Now, do I think the mystery is “plausible” or “makes psychological sense”? Well, no, not really, and if it took longer to read that might have bothered me. But the floor plans and the pacing make the book fly by, and I enjoyed it for what it was, which is an amusingly bizarre puzzle box mystery with, let me repeat, enough floor plans to satisfy even my floor-plan-mad self.

What I’m Reading Now

After years of procrastination, I’ve begun Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose. Happy to report that this ALSO features a floorplan in the endpapers. All the rooms are lettered, but curiously the key only includes some of the letters, so we are left guessing just which room Q might be.

What I Plan to Read Next

Obviously I need to read Uketsu’s Strange Pictures, too.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I picked up Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s William S. and the Great Escape intending to read a chapter or two, and then accidentally gulped down the whole thing. William S. Bagget (he add the S after playing Ariel in a production of The Tempest last spring) and his siblings run away from their horrible family to live with their Aunt Fiona. As always, Snyder writes great little kids (even children’s authors often stumble on four-year-olds), and I loved the way that Shakespeare-obsessed William found ways to compare his everyday life to Shakespeare scenarios.

I also read Daphne du Maurier’s The Winding Stair: Sir Francis Bacon, His Rise and Fall, which mostly about Sir Francis Bacon’s political and literary career, but features a few forays into not-quite-full-blown Baconian theories. Now du Maurier is not saying that Bacon wrote ALL of Shakespeare’s plays, but what if he talked the plays over with Shakespeare while he was writing them? What if he contributed some of the witty quotes during tavern arguments? What if maybe he actually DID write the plays that were never printed during Shakespeare’s lifetime…

Du Maurier doesn’t so much provide an argument for this as just say “Hey guys what if?”, but I find it delightful on the same level of “What if Audubon was secretly the escaped dauphin of France?” What if indeed! Don’t believe it for a second actually! But you shine on, you crazy diamond of an author.

What I’m Reading Now

Sachiko Kashiwaba’s The Village Beyond the Mist, the book on which Spirited Away is very (very) loosely based. Really enjoying this! Rationing it out a bit because I don’t want it to end… However the library does have Temple Alley Summer so I might move on to that.

What I Plan to Read Next

Going absolutely ham on the Christmas books this year. Besides the picture book Advent calendar, I’m planning Ruth Sawyer’s The Long Christmas (a collection of Christmas short stories), Tasha Tudor’s Forever Christmas (a book about Christmas at Tasha Tudor’s place), Janice Hallett’s The Christmas Appeal, Ngaio Marsh’s Tied Up in Tinsel, and Ally Carter’s The Most Wonderful Crime of the Year, although as I am 25th on the hold list for that last book it may have to wait for next year.

Recently littlerhymes reviewed Asako Yuzuki’s Butter, “a novel of food and murder,” to quote the cover. “Food AND murder?” I said. “Two of my favorite things in one book?” AND the book was translated by Polly Barton, who translated Aoko Matsuda’s Where the Wild Ladies Are, which absolutely clinched the deal.

This book is fantastic. It is a novel of food and murder, but also about the impossible demands of femininity, fat-shaming, the extent to which it is possible to be responsible for another person, the difficulty of truly embracing your own desires (starting with the surprisingly difficult task of figuring out what you even want), the brutal hours demanded by Japanese companies, the meaning of friendship, and also what the heck is UP with Manako Kajii.

Manako Kajii is in prison, convicted of murdering three men. The evidence is entirely circumstantial: she was dating all three men, having met them through a website for people looking for marriage, except instead of marrying them she got them to give her loads of cash in exchange for gourmet meals and, one presumes, sex. Unfortunately for her, three of her boyfriends died in quick succession, and although there’s no evidence she pushed one off the railway platform or snuck the other that lethal overdose of sleeping pills, people are so mad about her lifestyle that she’s convicted of the murders anyway.

They’re especially mad because Kajii managed all this while being (by Japanese standards) FAT. The siren who lured three men to their deaths is not even pretty. This terrifies everyone: men because they shudder over the humiliation of potentially being murdered by a girl who is not even a perfect 10, and women because this only strengthens their belief that what men really want is not an equal partner but a mommy-wife who feeds them, cleans up after them, and coos over their boring rants about work.

Although the book may sound like a murder mystery from the summary, it’s notably uninteresting in actual evidence about Kajii’s supposed killings. The details I mentioned above we learn almost incidentally, and our heroine Rika, a magazine reporter working on a profile of Kajii, makes no attempt to follow them up. Her interest is in the mystery of Kajii herself: what makes her tick?

In trying to figure out Kajii, Rika reads Kajii’s food blog (a lush wonderland of luxury brands and fancy restaurants), interviews Kajii, begins to learn to cook herself, falls in love with food and flavor and maybe also a little bit with Kajii, or at least what Kajii represents to her, which is the willingness to embrace one’s own desires, whether that means eating what one wants to eat or (in Kajii’s case) giving up on “employment” to be supported as essentially the mistress of a variety of rich old men.

The problem, as Rika repeatedly discovers, is that like Kajii’s old men, what Rika sees in Kajii is what she’s projecting onto Kajii. They saw her as a sweet traditional girl who just wants to please men; Rika sees her as an avatar of chasing your own desires, even if those desires are socially disruptive. Kajii herself is both those things, as well as an outspoken misogynist who longs for a daughter, a daddy’s girl who never went back to her hometown after she left at eighteen, a walking contradiction who revels in manipulation but also, perhaps, longs for the connection that has thus far eluded her.

Or maybe not. Maybe Rika is projecting that longing for connection onto a basically heartless sociopath. Yuzuki maintains all these tensions, juggling all these different facets of Kajii without ever simplifying her to one single Kajii.

This is a very Kajii-centric review, because it was Kajii who most blew me away, but I also loved Rika and her friendship with Reiko, both for their own sake and because they allow Yuzuki to develop her themes about societal expectations about femininity in so many directions that the theme becomes almost fractal. Here is a writer who has a lot to say and is saying all of it at the same time in a way that’s so engrossing that I barely resisted the desire to take a sick day just to keep reading.

And she does it all AND includes some great food descriptions, too. I was so carried away by her enthusiasm that I actually tried Kajii’s recipe for rice with butter. It didn’t have the same transformative effect on me that it had on Rika, but maybe if I used the very fancy butter that Kajii recommended…

Sayaka Murata’s Life Ceremony: Stories (translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori) is a mind-bending experience and with certain caveats I highly recommend it. Many of the stories are built around the question “What if this really weird thing was just a totally normal custom that almost everyone takes for granted?”, and by “really weird” I mean that in the first story, “A First-Rate Material,” the custom in question is “what if after people died we took their hair and skin and bones and nails and made them into fashionable high-end clothing and furniture?”

A lot of stories of this ilk are designed to leave the reader thinking “thank God we don’t do that,” but Murata plays her premises totally straight. The title story, “Life Ceremony,” refers to a custom where the mourners at a funeral gather to eat the deceased. The mourners are supposed to try to find a partner for the night, and they go outside and have some nookie right there in the hopes of getting inseminated to increase the falling birthrate.

The above-mentioned caveat arises from the fact that I realize not everyone wants to read a story where mourners enthusiastically inform a widow, “Your husband is really tasty!”, or the heroine muses tenderly over seeing her work friend’s body transformed into meatballs. What could be a greater act of love than eating the dead? Well, uh, that’s certainly a culturally specific way to look at things. “It really is a good custom,” muses a mourner. “We partake of life, we create life…”

“I feel like it’s human instinct to want to eat human flesh,” someone else comments.

Maho, our narrator, recalls an incident when she was a child, when cannibalism was still taboo: as a joke, she said she wanted to eat human flesh, and the teacher scolded her as the other kids in the class cried. “Instinct doesn’t exist. Morals don’t exist. They were just fake sensibilities that came from a world that was constantly transforming,” she grumps.

But her coworker (the one who will later be meatballs) tries to help her see this in a new perspective: “Everyone always says that things like common sense or instinct or morals are carved in stone. But that’s not true - actually, they’re always changing… And this isn’t something that happened all of a sudden, like you seem to think. It’s always been that way. Things keep transforming.”

This is the theory that animates many of these stories: most people, most of the time, consider the customs of their society natural, instinctual, right. Of course there are outliers. In both “A First-Rate Material” and “Life Ceremony,” there are people who oppose these customs on principle, and also people who don’t partake for personal reasons. One of Maho’s friends got food poisoning at a life ceremony and therefore can’t stand the taste of human flesh - a fact that he apologetically explains at the ceremony, so that no one thinks he’s one of those killjoy weirdos who think it’s wrong to eat the dead.

Some of the stories explore this idea with less cannibalism. In “Two’s Family,” Yoshiko and Kikue bought a house and raised children and grew old together - and people assume they are a lesbian couple, and grow very uncomfortable upon learning that they’re best friends who have never had sex with each other. (Yoshiko has never had sex at all; Kikue has lots of lovers.) It’s not that these people necessarily approve of lesbianism, even, but at least then Yoshiko and Kikue’s relationship would fit the established pattern of “life partners are supposed to have sex with each other.”

One of my favorite stories, “Body Magic,” has a very interesting take on the contrast between knowledge about sex as a social construct and expectation, and knowledge of sex as an internally experienced thing. “It’s not that you don’t want to know, Ruri, it’s that you want to be free, isn’t it?”

We are controlled by these social expectations; not just controlled but created. “We kept responding back and forth in our community, turned ourselves into a character, and started behaving according to that character. I began to think that maybe nobody had such a thing as a real self.”

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I have read MANY books this week, because my housemate tested positive for Covid, which means I also am stuck at home (currently I’m all right… just waiting to see what happens…) without much to do but read.

The Traveling Cat Chronicles, by Hiro Arikawa, translated by Philip Gabriel, with an adorable cat illustration at the beginning of each chapter by Yoco Nagamiya. I picked this up on a whim because the cover enchanted me, and I’ve enjoyed a number of Japanese novels in translation (maybe I should have a tag for that?), and it did not disappoint. Our narrator, Nana, is a cat with a crooked tail shaped like a seven (whence comes his name), and the story tells of his travels with his owner Satoru. Satoru is looking for a new home for Nana, and on the way we not only take a tour through Japan, but through Satoru’s past as he visits old friends.

( Spoilers )

William Dean Howells’ The Flight of Pony Baker is a book for boys in the style of Tom Sawyer, and it draws so heavily on Howells’ memoir A Boy’s Town that one really only needs to read one of the two books. Personally I found The Flight of Pony Baker much weaker: the plotting is clunky, and Howells has pruned back a lot of the detail that made A Boy’s Town so fascinating.

Jessamyn West’s The Friendly Persuasion is a series of interlinked short stories about Jess and Eliza Birdwell and their brood, a Quaker family in southern Indiana during and after the Civil War. Earlier this year I happened to visit their neck of the woods (Clifty Falls and the town of Vernon) and it was thrilling to see these locales in fiction, although I expect that they’re much changed.

Mostly these are tales of incidents from ordinary life: the time that Jess brought home an organ (when Quakers aren’t supposed to have musical instruments), a daughter of the family getting her first crush, a son breaking with Quaker pacifism to join the Vernon militia to defend the town against Morgan’s Raiders (only for the Raiders to pass Vernon by)... Of course in some ways a raid, even one that never comes off, is a big break from ordinary life, but West writes it as an extension thereof. Ordinary life stretched out to its edges.

AND FINALLY, Katharine Hull & Pamela Whitlock’s Escape to Persia, sequel to The Far-Distant Oxus. As often happens with sequels, this is not quite as good as the first, although in this case the fall-off is very slight: none of the children’s adventures are as epic as their week-long trek to the sea in the first book, but they still have lots of fun. It’s easier perhaps to write a good sequel when the first book was episodic: all you have to do is come up with more fun episodes, not a whole new plot just as good as the first.

What I’m Reading Now

In Dracula Daily, Dracula has spent the last couple of weeks eating the crew of a ship one by one, as chronicled in the captain’s log. It builds up such dread to read this as it happens, and makes it so sad when the ship crashed at Whitby, with the heroic captain lashed to the helm, dead… the journalist writing up the incident hints darkly that perhaps the captain killed his crew, but fortunately the townsfolk know better and are planning a hero’s funeral.

What I Plan to Read Next

Through carefully laid plans to abuse my parents’ library privileges, I have cut the number of Newbery Honor books I will need to interlibrary loan down from seventy-two to a mere forty!

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I’m glad that I read Amor Towles’ A Gentleman in Moscow first, because I didn’t like his earlier book Rules of Civility nearly as much. I didn’t dislike it or even find it a struggle to read - it flows on like a river while you’re in it - but ultimately it slipped out of my head almost as soon as I’d read it.

However, on balance I liked A Gentleman in Moscow SO much that I’m still excited to read Towles’ new book The Lincoln Highway when it comes out.

What I’m Reading Now

During my childhood, the Newbery Honor book Carolyn Coman’s What Jamie Saw haunted the library displays. I always avoided it (while also staring at it in morbid fascination) because the original cover gives the distinctive impression that what Jamie saw was something nasty in the woodshed.

If I had ever opened the book to the first page, I would have discovered that what Jamie saw was his mom’s boyfriend hurling Jamie’s baby sister across the room (but don’t worry, Jamie’s mom catches her). Mystery solved!

Changing gears entirely, I’ve been really enjoying Aoko Matsuda’s Where the Wild Ladies Are. Often I find story collections uneven, some stories great and other mediocre, but this one is consistently high caliber, and I’ve been parcelling out the stories like bonbons.

They’re all contemporary stories inspired by Japanese folktales. Sometimes the magic is front and center, like “Quite a Catch,” about a woman who goes on a fishing trip and catches a skeleton, which releases the ghost of a woman from the Edo period, and then the two start dating. (They’re so cute together!) Other times, the story is a riff on a folktale, like “My Superpower,” a story told in the form of a newspaper column. The columnist muses about how her own history of eczema has given her a sense of connection to the hideous women of folklore.

The stories have a lot of fun playing with form: aside from the newspaper column, there’s also a story in the form a recruitment letter sent from the afterlife to a jealous woman (“The Jealous Type”) begging her to hold onto that intensity of emotion, because they’re having trouble finding people passionate enough to recruit as ghosts these days.

What I Plan to Read Next

Thomas P. Lowry’s The Story the Soldiers Wouldn’t Tell: Sex in the Civil War.