Kitchen

[Seraphina]

I just read this and enjoyed it a lot, however I'm still pondering what I actually think of it. It's very short and although it's not a 'short story' as such, it makes you think in much the same way as a short story does. It gives out ideas without going into them too much, leaving the reader to mull it over in their own minds. An Amazon reviewer described the writing as 'deceptively simple' which I think was quite apt.

Sometimes the language jarred a bit, however I think this is just something that was lost in translation unfortunately as apparently the Japanese reads like 'poetry'.

[Grammath]

Interesting. This has been sitting on the TBR mountain for several months, after my BGO-prompted discovery of Haruki Murakami resulted in a brief Oriental literature buying spree to see if there were more like him. I am a short story fan who likes the deceptively simple writing of Raymond Carver and Ernest Hemingway, so this sounds appealing to me.

[tagesmann]

I am afraid I gave up on this.
The book is very well written and the translation is good. It conveys the style and intonation of Japanese conversation very well. It is a shame that I could not get involved with the characters or the story. There was a lot of promise early on but it fizzled…

I'm not sure whether I have missed out on a great book or if this is another book that has been over-hyped and is good just not brilliant.