![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() It's a mistake, of course, to generalise too much about a national character, but a cursory look at Japanese pop culture in the last century suggest the ghosts of a complex past constantly shifting beneath the orderly modern face of the country. One quality that runs through much of the Japanese fiction I’ve recently read is the juxtaposing of old-world mysticism with the banality of modern-day existence: the present in perpetual conflict with the past. As long-time readers of this blog will know, I’m a big Kazuo Ishiguro fan – I know he can’t really be called a Japanese writer (he’s lived in Britain since the age of five), but some of his work (notably The Unconsoled and A Pale View of Hills, my two favourites among his books) blurs the border between the real world and a dream-world in a way that I’ve now come to associate with much of Japanese writing. It’s difficult to track exactly how one gravitates towards certain types of writing over a period of time (in some cases it’s a deliberate seeking out of genres/distinct writing styles, in others it’s a subconscious process, or even just serendipity), but it occurs to me that I’ve developed a certain affinity for Japanese fiction of late, and for some of the themes that run through it. ![]()
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