The Word Book (Japanese Literature Series) by Mieko Kanai

The Word Book (Japanese Literature Series) Reviews

• 
  Sebastián

  Short stories that radically transform details of mundanity (waiting for a train, going to get milk) by forcing us to reconsider time, identity, and the medium of prose itself. Almost every work is bewitching in its own way, but together they challenge the form of "short story collection" by not only complementing and contrasting each other in tone and topic, but in the way that certain moments, whether a tiny sensuous detail or a whole subjectivity, break free from their stories and persist subtly and affectingly throughout the book, turning it some ways into a playfully, often painfully fragmented novel. I say painful because of the waves and surges that assaulted me with the violence that only the very best writing can achieve: this is prose with spears and daggers of brilliance unexpectedly embedded in its web of impressions. Loved it.
• 
  Fraser Simons

  Fantastic bits of writing that are thematically interlinked, conflate or playfully, artfully distinguish between the person consuming the written word and the person who wrote it. Borges-esk at times in its fluidity in moving from story to story without typical framing to alter the readers perspective of the narrator, using their inbuilt assumptions.
  
  Major themes are grounded in memory and the act of writing, but it ranges broadly on that theme and often in surprising ways. A character’s reliability can be called into question at any given time, and the character may be the author. And the author could be a woman calling the author, complaining about a “bad” piece of writing that was published. There is a frustration, it feels like, with the way people internalize stories and what that act then reflects in the author. And the inability of people to reckon with the notion of two completely separate selves performing the act of writing and reading. Mix that with the fragility and subjectivity of memory and a kind of awe in the verisimilitude and you get a pretty unique style of writing.
  
  It’s always engaging and very artful. It very much feels like an artist displaying their craft. The prose, especially with first person does feel slightly formal—I’m wondering if that is due to translation or due to the time period, as it is a collection and she has been writing for quite some time. Anyway, the stories went in delightful directions and were moving.
  
  “You were looking at the moon, weren’t you?”
• 
  Bill Hsu

  From the description, I was expecting quirky short stories with uncanny elements (right up my alley). I'm not sure what to make of this. "Fiction" for example has several POV switches between first and third person, the last mid-paragraph. It's not clear whether the same character is involved. The writing is reasonably engaging, though I'm not sure much of it is sticking with me.
  
  There are also some odd word choices in the translation. The translator seems very fond of "cavil".
• 
  Stefania

  "The Word Book" is a collection of short stories which took me ages to read because of their unreadability. The stories seem like a stream of consciousness of multiple people who are really nobody. Most stories are about time, existence and mundane experiences which seem life changing to the character featured in the story. The narrative voice is distant in a very self conscious way...the confusion of being which the stories are about is made clear by abrubtly changing the narrative point of view: at times the same sentence starts with an "I" and suddenly changes in a "he" while speaking of the same situation and the same one person. This makes both the narrator and the story nihilistic: like they're trying to cancel each other. It's definitely not a light read and very much confusing. The last 3 stories draw elements of each other...one finds repeated sentences, or the same experiences described differently, from different points in time across the 3 stories.
• 
  Alice Jennings

  I love love love this book. Feminist author of 1970s who wrote fantastic pieces in stream of consciousness. Half her stories are about the relationship between the author and reader, and the others are filled with blood, guts, and women using their submissive roles to trick men.
  Well written, easy to read and not just for women! Written from the male perspective, Kanai does not make men look weak, rather she demonstrates how power can corrupt any gender if it is absolute. A female Raymond Carver in terms of style. Any budding authors should take a gander. The stories are short and powerful.
  My only critic is this book does not include some of her best work such as 'Rotting Meat' and 'Rabbits'.
• 
  Edward Rathke

  Wasn't really sure what to rate this. All day I've been bouncing between a three and a five, so four seems like a good rating. It's a great collection and Kanai is an excellent writer.
  
  I suppose I don't have a lot to say here. Some of the stories are truly excellent and peculiar in an awesome way. Others are sort of a miss for me, but I'd say it's well worth a read.
• 
  Peter

  One of the truly great reading discoveries. This book will rank with a handful of books--Beckett, Rulfo, and Schulz come to mind--as revolutionary. I will be rereading it many times.
• 
  lyell bark

  half these short stories were about sitting on the train. ttrains ftw
• 
  Matthew

  short stories like dreams
• 
  Tuck

  supposedly from the borges/godard herd, but i felt it typical japanese style of everyday ordinariness until.........
• 
  Phil

  The first story was good, but I wasn't able to get into any of the others.
• 
  Brian

  It was the family custom to go to the movies together once a week, on Saturday afternoon, and he was wild about them. The lions, who showed the bright red inside of their mouths when they roared, and the horses and blue skies and ocean—all these mysteries appearing on the screen of the darkened movie theater as light and shadows of black and white thrilled him. When the circus came to a nearby park and he saw the feeble reality of a live lion (the fur at the base of its tail had fallen out from some skin disease) and the laziness that is the basic characteristic of a real lion, he was deeply disappointed. When he went into the theater from the street whose asphalt was melting in the strong afternoon sunlight—“the darkness of night was there, another darkness within the darkness, another night within the night, countless nights and days were there. After several days, or several years, or several centuries, he emerged into the street, dim in the long summer twilight, breathed into his lungs the sundry odors of the town mingled with the cool air, and felt the sensation of the still-warm asphalt through the rubber soles of his sneakers.” [40]
  
  I knew, of course, that poets write their poems by inlaying (or interweaving) the words of others, and I had read Yoshioka’s poem with a kind of thrilled interest. The words quoted in brackets in the poem were ones that I had once written—yet that fact seemed lacking in reality, which made me feel somehow free, liberated. To put it more simply, I experienced an infinitely sweet joy at those words being set free from the spell that intones “I have written this.” I had the sense that there was no need to test the flavor of those words; that the meanings I had tried to give them had vanished; that the words came before me as naked objects, purified anew. [81]

  
  
  c.f. Borges, Schultz, Kafka, Murakami, a blender
• 
  Stephen Wong

  "Never mind. There's no one to cavil at this." There are twelve narratives in Mieko Kanai's "The Word Book" (translated). The narratology is diegetic if not exclusively so of any mimesis of action and sense reality of categories. Unlike the frame stories of Scheherazade, tales which have for us for so long freshly woven in and out of delights of fantasy and allure, in the legerdemain of surviving or postponing the night of après-lovemaking of her execution, Kanai's do not pretend to a narrator-preserving aim but perhaps rather seizes, or tries to anyway, upon every chance at erasing the narrator who can be as lost in it as any reading by feeling for the stones across the night's river fording. A phenomenology is at work in the reflexive storytelling that does not quite verge into the existentialist. So it proceeds not at all to startle in any particularly absurd way if one might consider a more intricate process unfolds for, or rather folds in, the reader in and out of tight intimate spaces where plenty more in infinite time ought and indeed do happen -- like at such a painting by Joan Miró. As one reads the surrealisms of the legible, what frivolity to bring to bear the illegibilities of one's reading for cavilling in, but if a button has been lost it is the gap in the buttonhole that suggests the place of neither's buttoning.
• 
  Brian

  You’ll have to really want to read something like this to enjoy it. Metatextual to metaphysical, blurring the line between fiction and essay; between short story and novel. Blurring age, perspective, timeline, Mieko Kanai’s collection is an exciting find. Her prose swirls steadily from the page and then explodes. Then, pink dust snows back onto the page and vanishes. Nobody will believe me when I tell them this, but I know it is true because some of the dust tickled my nostrils just before the last time you sneezed.
• 
  Nata

  my (very loose) ranking of the short stories:
  the rose tango
  vague departure
  the time of one’s life
  fiction
  the moon
  kitchen plays
  rivals
  windows
  the voice
  picnic
  the voice of spring
  the boundary line
• 
  Magpie

  A single ⭐️. The Word Book held some promise, and if you like poetical, self absorbed musings that feel like a snake eating its own tail, then you’ll love it
  M 2022
• 
  Rose Adams

  No idea what I just read, but I can say it was very beautifully written and poetic. It just left me feeling very hopeless.
• 
  Selam

  I love books that play with your sense of time and narrative structure. This was so cool and sometimes confusing but I think that was part of the point.
• 
  Claire Torak

  (3.5/5)
• 
  bhen adrecra

  What a weird little book. What a weird, wonderful little book.
  
  Allow me to start again: Dream. Dream. Dream. It is 3am. I haven't slept. I have been reading through the dream journal that is Mieko Kanai's The Word Book. It is not a literal dream journal; it is a book of short stories. A book of short stories which, when read together in one sitting in the depths of the night, run together to form a whole. Phrases repeat and ideas, images, double back on themselves. Characters move in and out of focus.
  
  I almost did not buy the book at all. Allow me to explain: I was in a book shop in Ikebukuro. I like Ikebukuro only a little bit, and this is why: in the main shopping street, smoky jazz plays eternally through speakers in the streetlamps, allowing you—if you are of such a persuasion—to imagine yourself as a character in a Raymond Chandler novel. I am very much of this persuasion.
  
  So, the bookshop, then. I took down The Word Book from the shelves because I liked the title, The Word Book. The cover blurb references Kafka, Oē, and Borges. Sold. But not quite. Flicking through the book and reading a few passages, I see the word ceasing. It was placed in the sentence thusly: 'He thought about photographs almost without ceasing for a moment'. I did not enjoy this sentence. I placed the book back on the shelf, blaming a perhaps poor translation
  
  Instead, I bought Sartre's Being and Nothingness for ¥150. That book is near 800 pages. ¥150 for all those thoughts. What a world. I left the bookshop and wandered back outside into a Chandler mystery, waiting for an email which never came
  
  Something about The Word Book nagged at me, perhaps the references on the back cover or that many of the stories themselves seemed to take place on trains. I returned to the bookshop and bought it without thinking thrice. On the train home I read the first few stories; they were strange and abstruse. The later stories were too; playing previous sentences like leitmotifs, and building upon them, word by word, sentence by sentence. The stories changed from first person to third person, often within paragraphs. This is explained away yet the resulting explanation yields more questions of its own. No matter. Who questions the logic of a dream. No one, that is who. Not at least until the dreamer has awoke and spent half the day thinking on other things then how is it that the spectacles I am wearing today were in the childhood home I have not visited for twenty years [if, for example, your dreams are very boring]. Already I was thinking of rereading the book while still reading it for the first time
  
  In my room I have a pile of ever-thickening philosophy tomes I will never read my way through, promising, though they do, some kind of truths for this tough little life. I put Being and Nothingness on the pile and continued to read The Word Book all night, until the very last page. I liked it a lot. At this moment in my life, it seems, I would rather have dreams than realities
• 
  Sandra

  Picked this up on a whim at the Gothic Bookshop, thinking it would be nice to have some short stories for a trip. I started it at the very beginning of November, and despite the fact that each of the stories is quite short and the volume itself is barely over 100 pages, it took me over a month to finish.
  
  Part of it, I think, was that I wasn't really prepared to read it - I've ready essentially no Japanese fiction, didn't do my homework about the author, and also didn't have the time to sit down and read it in one or two long sessions.
  
  I didn't much care for the book - the idea behind it (examining the different psychologies of being an author) is fascinating, and each of the stories had an interesting moment or two, but every.single.story seemed the same to me, and by the third or fourth go-round, the point of departure seemed tired.
  
  It'd be interesting to take apart a single story, perhaps, or chat it over in a book group, but as a book to work through in short snippets on my own, it wasn't a very enjoyable read.
• 
  Jacob

  At times I was reminded of Queneau's Exercises in Style or the Zukofsky poem in which the poet takes a line from Shakespeare and works through the permutations of its word order, over and over. Here, as I see it from my first reading, the antecedents of pronouns seem to be playing a game of musical chairs. Or, to pull in another strained comparison, the effect of reading this is at times like staring at a figure/ground illusion, your construal of what you see ponging back and forth, back and forth.
• 
  Hodges

  Impenetrable collection of "short stories" that has turned out to be the longest 140 pages I have ever read. Only reason I am not rating lower is that I recognize I may be missing something culturally and the possibility something gets lost in translation. Though I am doubting either is the case...
  
  Maybe some day I can give this a shot in the native Japanese, but if I ever follow through with learning Japanese, my list of untranslated want-to-reads is already long enough.
• 
  Oliver Ho

  A fascinating and very odd collection of short stories...or is it rather a linked collection of stories...or maybe it's actually a novel? Dreamlike, poetic, hypnotic, it reminded me at times of Murakami, Auster, Borges, while also feeling utterly unique. It's not mainstream, linear fiction, and I will definitely read this again.
• 
  Zach

  The last few stories in this collection (which are basically part of the same story) are fantastic. I wasn't particularly enamored with the earlier stories, but this is definitely a book worth reading, and the ending will reward you for your patience.
• 
  Andrew Bourne

  Curious stories. Terrible bookcover.
• 
  Jeffrey

  A challenging, brilliant writer of startling originality who thankfully, is finally just coming to us in translation!