Asako Serizawa at the Hudson Review:
There is a certain privilege in looking at a group of novels-in-translation from a single country originally written and published across almost a century. What appears at first glance to be a disparate assortment of texts gathered solely by the date of their reissue in a new language reveals an unexpected coherence. That the following five short Japanese novels-in-translation are being made available to a wider audience now, in the middle of the 2020s, feels timely.
Whether written under overt authoritarian censorship or under the disempowering pressures of late modernity, these texts, taken together, beg the question of what art’s role might be in liminal times, what it can do—what should it do? Originally published in 1927, Kappa[1] is one of the last works Ryūnosuke Akutagawa (1892–1927), perhaps best known in the English-speaking world for “Rashōmon” (1915), wrote before his death later that year at the age of thirty-five.
more here.
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