Monday, November 07, 2022

Reviewing the Mail: Week of November 5, 2022

Two library books this time, which I expect to read immediately. (This should not be surprising; it's the nature of library books. You need to read them right away, so you only check out books that you're willing to jump right into.) Both are also translations from Japanese, for no obvious reason.

Tono Monogatari is the name of a major work of Japanese folklore, a serious work of scholarship and a central pillar of Japan's literary culture. The book I have in front of me with that title is famed manga-ka Shigeru Mizuki's adaptation into comics of that work - I gather that he retold some stories and interspersed them with tales of his own hunts for yokai, the mythological creatures of Japan. I think the only previous Mizuki book I read was Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths, so this will likely be surprising in multiple ways.

And A Journal of My Father is a fictional story by Jiro Taniguichi, about a man returning home for his father's funeral and the memories that stirs up. I read a cluster of Taniguchi books five years ago - the two volumes of A Distant Neighborhood and the first volume of The Summit of the Gods - but otherwise he's just been a name on my list of "people I really should read more of."

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