Describing a world as amoral and fascinating as the landscapes of Less Than Zero and Trainspotting, this novel about a young woman living in the violent world of Japan’s underground youth culture is both shocking and strangely beautiful.
Enchanted by the snakelike forked tongue of a stranger called Ama, nineteen-year-old Lui takes a walk on another side of life. Following Ama home the night she meets him, Lui straightaway moves in with him and begins making plans to have her own tongue pierced. Determined to push her boundaries further, she asks Ama’s strange friend Shiba to design an exquisite dragon tattoo for her back. But when Lui and Shiba begin an affair, Ama’s jealousy is stirred and the situation becomes explosive.
This book is described as a cult classic, very controversial, but also an Akutagawa Prize winner. I’m interested in Japanese counterculture, which this book promises a lot of. Also, it’s a short read, and it’s not a mystery novel. The language also doesn’t seem too difficult from the few pages I looked at, so it seems like a quick and intriguing read to shake things up.
I already read this, definitely has some dark motives, and lot of 18+ scenes. But the language is not that difficult (once you checked those 18+ words in the dictionary), I think it could even be passed to the intermediate book club.
Well I’m not very experienced in the usual pacing of the book club, but I read it in 4 days (next to work, etc.), and in the first post I see that 40 is within the aim, so I think 3 weeks is totally doable.
Just a quick heads up that I will start the poll probably around 2022-04-14T16:00:00Z so if anybody wants to get another nomination in
@Jfredel78 I‘d definitely be up for reading the first book (have it sitting on my shelf actually ^^). Not sure about the second one as I‘m still struggling with older texts (but that shouldn’t keep you from nominating it!) and the third one indeed sounds like a silly funny mystery
I couldn’t manage to set up the poll yesterday evening (I’m just sooo busy holidaying right now ) but here it is:
It’s a Poll!!
Have a look at the List of Proposed Books section in the first post for details on each book. Every book has a difficulty associated with it (based on the book club members’ votes, thus subjective) out of 5, where 1 means “no effort at all” and 5 means “so much effort my head might explode”. The difficulty is annotated in the poll in square brackets after the book’s name.
Do not rely solely on difficulty when making a choice. Please have a look at the nomination posts and text samples if you haven’t already.
Expected reading pace: The proposals fall into two categories, Fast and Hard. We aim to read fast books at 30-50 pages per week and hard books at ~15 pages per week (that number might vary a bit throughout, depending on the book’s breaks and chapters). For manga, depending on difficulty and chapter length, we will probably read one to several chapters per week. The pick’s exact reading schedule will be negotiated before the book club kicks off.
Start of Book Club: We will start the next book on May 28th (after a one-week break).
Poll duration: The poll will be closed within a week (and most likely before that), whenever it looks like voting has dried up. You can choose up to 5 options.
I’m a bit torn if I should remove my vote for Masquerade Hotel, since there is no e-book, and haven’t really found an affordable way to get it . Probably going to read it at some point, and been reading a lot of Keigo anyway lately…
I was actually a bit hesitant on that one just because I’m about 2/3 of the way through the movie version (I’ll finish it eventually ) and was worried about not being able to discuss as much since I might know some spoilers.
On the note of no ebook though I went to check what books he does have in ebook form and oh man - プラチナデータ was a fun movie adaptation. But honestly for how prolific of an author he is, he has so few in ebook form.
Yeah, that’s really annoying, sorry for that Some authors just don’t seem to like ebooks.
Luckily Murakami made up his mind about 18 months ago or something and released all of his books as ebooks. Therefore you can find the current poll leader here: 海辺のカフカ @ Bookwalker
(I’d like to update the nomination post but unfortunately Discourse won’t let me, grrr )
I’ll probably sit this one out because I’ve read it too recently in English, but it’s an excellent book and I envy anyone reading it for the first time.
I read it in my native language a few years ago and it’s one of my favourite Murakami’s books (along with 1Q84), so I relate to @jhol words so much! I don’t know if I would be able to keep up with an ABC anyway (maybe in the future:), but have fun reading!
More of a general question - if I understand correctly people can nominate a book pretty much whenever and it will be up in the next voting so long as we have 20-or-fewer nominations in total - Is that accurate?
Yes, that’s correct! If you absolutely want to make sure that it gets into the next voting, then you could add it to the list in the OP already - usually I do that at some point, but I’m waiting for the day where I will overlook one of the nominations and cause it to be skipped, which would be very very sad. But usually I check at least 3 times or so…