Rental Person Who Does Nothing by Shoji Morimoto (translated by Don Knotting)

Ariel talked about buying Rental Person Who Does Nothing by Shoji Morimoto on the Books Unbound podcast and it sounded like a crazy premise, so I immediately ordered it from the public library. By the time I listened to the episode where she said she didn't love it, I was already invested in reading it.

Morimoto was tired of the corporate life, where it didn't matter if he was there or not. So he stopped working and started a service where he was available to just show up, as long as he didn't have to do anything. 

In this book, Morimoto is interviewed by the editor who then actually wrote the book. He gave simple answers and the editor wrote it up. Mostly it's a series of anecdotes about the types of situations he played a part in - helping someone get their stuff after a breakup, trying a new drink at Starbucks with someone, going to concerts or other events with people, etc. 

I thought this was going to be a super duper fun book, but instead it just felt like it was written by a fifteen-year-old with a deadline. I'm not sure if that's the fault of the original answers by Morimoto or if it's the fault of the translation, but it seemed full of contradictions and repetitive stories. 

Consider: 

So what I really want as Rental Person is to have no defining attributes - no good points, no bad points. (page 54)

AND THE NEXT PAGE:

After a while I got fed up with it, and so I tried to dilute my ice-cream soda image, tweeting that I'd decided to switch my allegiance to lemon squash. I think it's good to tweet about changes like that. It makes Rental Person seem human. (page 55)

Pick a lane, Rental Person, pick a lane.

Anyway, it was an interesting diversion, but I think this is really a story about a disaffected, lazy man who doesn't actually think about things very hard. I wouldn't recommend this book unless you really love all things Japanese. 3.5/5 stars

Line of note:

There's certainly a difference between childhood and adulthood in terms of the cost of stress that friends or friendship involve. Friendship for an adult seems very complicated. Rather than all-around friends, people seem to have friends for specific purposes - friends to go drinking with, for example, or friends to play computer games with, and friends to go to concerts with. (page 143)

I think this is an interesting observation. Do you have all-around friends or specific-purpose friends? 

Hat mention (why hats?):

So I think I was very lucky that the first bit of headwear I bought wasn't a hat, a beanie, or a baseball cap - just a work cap. (page 53)

Diary of a Void by Emi Yagi

I heard about Diary of a Void by Emi Yagi, translated by Lucy North and David Body on the Books Unbound podcast and I was so amused by the premise of the book that I stopped walking Hannah in the middle of the sidewalk to request it from the library.

First of all, when I borrowed the book, I found a checkout slip from a previous borrower. Here it is:

Look, I really liked this book. I thought it was hilarious and insightful. But I also feel like it's obscure Japanese literature and I'm not sure why a person goes to the library in JULY and the first book they check out this one? Or maybe by session they mean only this one library visit?  I don't know. This slip of paper made me laugh. 

Okay, onward to the book itself. 

Shibata is a lonely young woman who works at a Japanese company that makes cardboard tubes. She has to do her actual work, but is also expected to do all the menial tasks that make the world go around, but no one wants to do. She makes coffee for meetings, cleans up after meetings, answers the phones, and distributes messages around the office. One day she is infuriated at having to make the coffee AGAIN when she announces that she just can't handle the coffee anymore because she is pregnant and the smell nauseates her. 

Only...she's not pregnant. But she documents every week of her pregnancy. This book is a biting satirical look at office culture in modern Japan (I mean, we might argue it's the entire modern world, but Shibata gets an entire YEAR for maternity leave). I enjoyed every second of the book, from wondering if she would ever get found out to wondering why she would bother with pre-natal aerobics classes. I thought it was a fascinating character study of a woman whose unhappiness permeated her entire world leaving me wondering if she actually thought she was pregnant at times. 

I liked this a lot. I thought it was quite funny and I loved the social critique. It was not quite a workplace comedy, but it was telling about modern office culture. It has that sad, haunting feeling that I associate with novels translated from the Japanese that makes you think about a book long after you've finished reading it. It was also just over 200 pages, so I was able to finish it during a time when reading has been quite a challenge.  

If you liked Convenience Store Woman or Ueno Station, give this one a shot. 4.5/5 stars

Hat mentions (why hats?):

They all had elf hats on. (page 79)

...once they'd handed us our jumpsuits, masks, and hard hats, he could hardly contain himself. (page 158)

Days at the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa

Days at the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa is the debut novel from Yagisawa, but the translation by Eric Ozawa was just released this year. 

Look at this cover! Cats! Books! A bicycle!

No cats or bicycles actually appear in the book, but let's not be picky.

Takako is a twenty-something and when her love life and job explode, she takes some time to regroup in her uncle's bookshop. Along the way, she encounters new ideas, friends, and a totally new perspective on life. 

It's a weird little book, but much like how I can't stop thinking about Convenience Store Woman, I can't stop thinking about this book. The idea of an entire neighborhood of secondhand bookstores, each with its own specialization, just really makes me want to visit Japan. 4/5 stars

Lines note:

And yet for all I read, I found book after book that I still wanted to read. (page 35)

Oh, the life of a reader. My TBR list grows longer every day.

At some point in the past, someone reading this book had felt moved to take a pen and draw a line under these words. It made me happy to think that because I had been moved by that same passage too, I was now connected to that stranger.
Another time, I happened to find a pressed flower someone had left as a bookmark. As I inhaled the scent of the long-ago-faded flower, I wondered about the person who had put it there. Who in the world was she? When did she live? What was she feeling?
It's only in secondhand books that you can savor encounters like this, connections that transcend time. (page 36)

I think you get this same shared reading experience with library books!

And yet with her perfect posture, her expressive face, and her brisk way of talking, she still seemed young. Rather than getting older, she looked more like she'd shed anything that was unnecessary. (page 72)

What a lovely way to describe someone. 

Thing I looked up:

Noh mask (page  81) - Noh is a major form of classical drama - dance in Japan that has been performed since the 14 century. It is the oldest theater art that is still performed today. Noh masks are carved from Japanese cypress and painted with natural pigments. They signify the characters' gender, age, and social ranking, and by wearing masks, the actors may portray youngsters, old men, female, or nonhuman characters. 

By Wmpearl - Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5920279

Hat mentions: None

Math Girls by Hiroshi Yuki, Translated by Tony Gonzalez

 

Math Girls by Hiroshi Yuki is a strange combination of teen romance and math textbook.  Our unnamed narrator is a shy young boy who spends most of his free time doing math problems in the library. He meets Miruka as she starts spitting sequences at him and they have a rousing conversation of noticing patterns.  Tetra comes across his radar as she comes up to him to beg help with understanding mathematics. In between this lackluster love triangle, our narrator and his two would be admirers solve math problems ranging from simple algebra problems to concepts that went way over my head.

It's a weird, weird book. The romance is barely passable as such. The math is so varying in difficulty that it's hard to know exactly who the audience is for it. I think it could be useful in teaching about math - there are excellent scenes showing collaboration among the three main characters in solving problems - but the question of what level of teaching someone would be doing is still always there.  It's too high level for high school, but maybe college students who enjoy a stretch?  I do like the message that math is not about just solving equations and memorizing formulas, but that math is about deriving patterns and hidden messages in a playful way.  It's just...it's a strange format, you.

It gets glowing reviews on Goodreads, so I do think there's an audience who is interested in this type of book and would love it. If you're a STEM-orientated person, this might be a great fit for you. Even if some of the mathematical concepts go over your head, the sheer enthusiasm of the three leads will definitely resonate with you. If you're a person who just enjoys reading about other people's enjoyment about a topic, deep rabbit holes on obscure topics, and panegyric's on Leonhard Euler, this might also be for you.

I did enjoy it. I don't think I'll be hunting down copies of the rest of the books in this series, including Math Girls Talk about Trigonometry and Math Girls 2: Fermat's Last Theorem, but I love that these books exist.  

Lines of note:

"Through equations, I can share the experience of mathematicians from ages past." (page 1)

"Language is extremely important in mathematics. Math uses language in a very precise way to make sure there's no confusion." (page 18)

"'...If you shout a 0, it becomes a 1.  See?'" I wrote in the notebook:

                            0!

(page 189)

The above is an absolutely nerdy math joke and if you don't get it, don't worry about it. I chuckled.  

The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa

 I feel like I have unintentionally fallen into the world of Japanese literature and I can't get out. I've recently read A Tale for the Time Being, Convenience Store Woman, and Tokyo Ueno Station and have fond feelings about all of them, what with their melancholy, haunting qualities.  It was not a surprise that when I read the excerpt of The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa (translated by Stephen Snyder), I was immediately hooked.  

A mathematics professor gets into a car accident and his memory is only 80 minutes long.  A housekeeper is hired to care for him and she and her son become friends with the man. It's a lovely celebration of found family and mathematics.  A brief 180 pages, this book is an endearing look at the connections that bind us all. It's charming and lovely.

I often think of Japan as a land of declining birth rates, high suicide rates, overworked employees, and lenient criminal justice sentences, not to mention gross depictions of women in anime. So, overall, my impression of Japanese culture is pretty bleak, so it didn't surprise me that the portrayals of the world in Convenience Store Woman, A Tale for the Time Being, and Tokyo Ueno Station were heartrendingly spare and melancholy.  It was an utter delight and shock to me that this book was so charmingly upbeat. There's actually a lot of conflict in it, but everything is wrapped up quickly and lovingly by the end.  If you need a shot of light in you reading diet, this might be for you.  

There's also a tremendous amount of love for mathematics in the pages of this book. As a girl who would like nothing more than to sit down and solve a series of equations for you, this book spoke my language.  There's nothing like a book that pays homage to your interests this directly.

Lines of note:

"The professor never really seemed to care whether we figured out the right answer to a problem. He preferred our wild, desperate guesses to silence, and he was even more delighted when those guesses led to new problems that took us beyond the original one." (page 2)

Doesn't he sound like an awesome teacher?

"I wondered why ordinary words seemed so exotic when they were used in relation to numbers. Amicable numbers or twin primes had a precise quality about them, and yet they sounded as though they'd been taken straight out of a poem.  In my mind, the twins had matching outfits and stood holding hands as they waited in the number line." (page 63)

"He would vanish into the study as through he were literally retreating into his mind, and I imagined that his body might actually vaporize into pure contemplation and disappear." (page 132)

If you've ever lived with someone who really, really gets into their work, this might speak to you.

Mathematical concepts that come up:

Amicable numbers (page 19): Two numbers in which the sum of each of its proper divisors (a positive factor of the number other than the number itself) is equal to the other number.  For example:

The divisors of 220 are 1, 2, 4, 5, 10, 11, 20, 44, 55, and 110. If you add these numbers you get 284.

The divisors of 284 are 1, 2, 4, 71, and 142. If you add these numbers you get 220.

Therefore, 220 and 284 are amicable numbers.

Perfect number (page 44): A number in which the sum of its proper divisors is equal to itself.  For example:

The divisors of 6 are 1, 2, and 3 and 1+2+3 = 6, so 6 is a perfect number.

Twin prime (pages 61-62): A prime number that is 2 more or 2 less than another prime number.  A twin pair is 3 and 5 or 41 and 43.  

Mersenne prime (pages 61-62): A prime number that is one less than a power of two. Mn = 2^n - 1.  So, in this equation, n must be a prime number because if it's composite, there will obviously be a divisor.  3, 7, 31 are the smallest Mersenne primes (3 = 2^2 - 1, 7 = 2^3 - 1, 31 = 2^5 - 1). 

Tokyo Ueno Station by Yu Miri translated by Morgan Giles

 

Tokyo Ueno Station by Yu Miri is the second book I've recently that has had a misleading cover. Bright colors! Big primary objects! Flowers! I assumed this would be about something like teenagers being annoying at a train station or parents complaining about their kids or the Japanese equivalent of a Boy Scout troop. I was wrong. Ahem.

Kazu is dead. He wanders around a homeless encampment by a train station telling the stories of the homeless, particularly his own story. His rootless upbringing, his negligence as a father and a husband, and how he ended up in this green space trying to make friends with a man whose only friend is a cat named Emile. You wonder about how his spirit ended up here and if it will ever be able to leave.

It's what I've come to think of as the Japanese style of bittersweet melancholy that will leave you feeling sad after just a few pages, but you're not really sure WHY you're so sad. I think of A Tale for the Time Being or Convenience Store Woman in the same way.  Those are both books that I end up thinking about all the time. Convenience Store Woman has even worked its way into my dreams on occasion. My husband and I spent some time imagining that Japanese culture is just so depressing right now that their literature just reflects that. 

It's a short read, just 180 tiny pages.  I'm not sure who should read this, but maybe we all should? It's weird to think about homelessness in Japan compared to that in the United States, but that doesn't seem to be the point the author is making. Is it about terrible things happening to good people? How if you don't have the "right" start in life you're doomed?  That people become invisible through no fault of their own?  I don't know. Maybe it's all of it. 

Just the beginning:

"I used to think life was like a book: you turn the first page, and there's the next, and as you go on turning page after page, eventually you reach the last one. But life is nothing like a story in a book. There may be words, and the pages may be numbered, but there is no plot. There may be an ending, but there is no end." (page 1)

"Each and every one with different minds, different faces, bodies, and hearts.

I know that, of course.

But seen from a distance, they all look just the same, or similar." (page 3)

The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa

 

The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa, translated from Japanese by Stephen Snyder, is a lyrical, dreamy novel that is inexplicably hard to describe. Our unnamed protagonist lives on an unnamed island writing novels with unnamed characters. But this island is strange because things get "disappeared" and then most people on the island slowly lose memories of those things. At first, it's just things like perfume and music boxes, but then the roses are disappeared. Then the ferry is disappeared and there's no way off the island. Then the books are disappeared.  What is going to happen to our heroine?

It's a fascinating look at the power of the state to suppress thought. If you take away tangible things and you can't use words and phrases, it has the power to change your very thought. We see this in the use of slurs today - if we don't use words that denigrate entire groups of individuals, those words will slowly go away and then the stereotypes of those ideas will also erode in use. And, generally speaking, that's a good thing. But we also see it the way that we talk about other things, particularly in the political arena.  There seems to be a discourse that it's left/right, liberal/conservative, good/bad, without really examining the nuances and in betweens. It's what causes misunderstandings about the differences between communism, socialism, democratic socialism, and fascism.  Maybe it's because I'm married to a political theorist, but the discourse is so filled with anger and hate and absolute wrongness that it makes me wonder what has happened to civic-minded disagreements.

Back to the book, though. There's this melancholy feeling suffusing it that fairly seeps off the page. It's beautiful and feels like poetry, but the overall impression is suffocation by prose. By the time you get to the last page, you know what the ending is going to be because there's no other possible ending, but that's not bad, it's just...sad.

Notable lines:

" 'If you read a novel to the end, then it's over. I would never want to do something as wasteful as that. I'd much rather keep it here with me, safe and sound, forever.' " (page 17)

There is something about the anticipation of reading a good novel. There's also something delicious about having finished a novel and knowing its secrets.

"To tell the truth, the sound of the bell had terrified me ever since I was a little girl. It reminded me of the groans of a dying man." (page 126)

The church by my house rings bells every fifteen minutes, 24/7. There's also the addition of hymns for services on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays. And don't get me started on the extra bells during services like weddings and funerals. Suffice to say, I would like to go to the bell tower and go all Luke and Lorelai on those things.

A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki

 

Describing A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki is a challenge. Nao is a Japanese girl who grew up in California, but returned to Japan after her father lost his job in the dot-com bubble collapse.  We read her diary as she's bullied in school, watches as her father becomes a suicidal shut-in, and her life becomes harder and harder.  Meanwhile, on a small island in Canada, Ruth and her husband Oliver live a quite life with their cat Pesto and Ruth finds Nao's diary washed up on shore. She thinks maybe it's from the 2011 tsunami.  We cut between the dual perspectives.

But that description isn't really enough. It's a story about the past and the present and how we respect time and family. It's a story about writing, but not in a preachy way, but in the way that writing is challenging, but important to do. It's about the role of parents, the role of technology, and the role of dreams in a modern world.  It's about hope when hopelessness is ubiquitous. It's about a mystery and research and a marriage.  

I recommend this book, but it took me a long time to read because you can't rush through it. It's sad and painful at times, which made me sometimes not want to turn the page. But Ozeki's writing is also something you want to linger over because it's stark and spare, but insightful and full of emotion and charm.  If you're looking for a lighthearted 2020 read, this isn't for you, but if you want something immersive that will make you think outside of yourself, this is a great option.

Things of note:

Chanson (page 3): A French song

Van Willebrand's disease (page 73): A blood disorder in which the blood does not clot properly.

Kotatsu (page 80): A Japanese appliance consisting of a low table, a futon or a thick blanket or quilt, and a heating appliance. The futon is placed over the table and the heating unit is under the table. I want one of these desperately.

Image taken from Amazon.

"The sea is filled with plastic confetti. It floats around and gets eaten by the fishes or spat up onto the beach. It's in our food chain. I don't envy the anthropologists, trying to make sense of a material culture from the bright hard nuggets they'll be digging out of the middens of our future." (page 94): I think about this so much with respect to clothing. So much of our clothing is plastic and people buy and throw away so much clothing and that's the tip of the iceberg. Plastic is everywhere and impossible to get away from, even if you want to.

Permacoach composted a pair of stretch jeans to show exactly how much plastic it takes to make one pair. Too much is the answer.

"The past is weird. I mean, does it really exist? It feels like it exists, but where is it?  And if it did exist but doesn't now, then where did it go?" (page 97)