タグ: ENG_History

Hotarugawa, Doro no Kawa
Teru Miyamoto
螢川
宮本 輝
208 pages
Read in 2025 .01
(Not Published in English)


✔ Post war in Japan
✔ Children's views of poverty 


🔽 Review summary 🔽
★★★★☆  What is means to live in the post war Japan, to live at the bottom of the society, and to be awaken to the bitter sweet but honest self discovery. It's a layer of emotions, that blossoms in the end with fireflies.


🔽 Book review and notes 🔽
Short stories, Doro no Kawa "muddy river" won Dazai Osamu Award and Hotarugawa "River with fireflies" won Akutagawa Award.
Doro no Kawa tells a story of post war Osaka. A boy from a modest family befriends with a family one summer; a girl, her younger brother and her mother who is a prostitute, who live on a boat floating on the muddy river. 
What is means to live at the bottom of the society during the post war, where everyone was poor, and a delicate momories of growing up. It's so calm and subtly unforgettable.

Hotarugawa is about an adolescence. The protagonist is already big enough to know love. 
His detest towards his old father whose business got busted, and his frustration towards the fact that his best friend fell in love with the same girl he loved - the messed up adolescence, the tangled up layers of emotions that everyone experience, but one day, your life will flourish, the cloud of the post war will clear. 

what is amazing is the description of the scenes the characters are watching, you experience the post war Japan together, and in a weird way you feel nostalgic of the past you didn't experience.

🔽 Where to buy 🔽

●●● Amazon.com (US) ●●●
螢川 (角川文庫) Paperback Bunko

Amazon.co.uk (UK)
蛍川・泥の河 (新潮文庫) Paperback Bunko 

Amazon.it (Italy)
螢川 (角川文庫) Paperback Bunko

(Wild Soul)
Ryosuke Kakine, 2006
ワイルド•ソウル
垣根涼介 2006
1040 pages (512 + 528)
Read in 2024.6
(Not available in English)


✔ Novel about Japanese immigrants in Brazil 
✔ Struggle and poverty of people dumped by the government 
✔ Revenge


🔽 Review summary 🔽
★★★★★ After WW2, 40,000 Japanese people crossed the ocean to Brazil to start better lives promised by Japanese government. Instead, they lived and died at the bottom of the society and jungle. Let the revenge begin.


🔽 Book review and notes 🔽
1000+ pages in Japanese, but it's nonstop explosion of excitement that you can't put the book down.

After the second world war, Japanese government encouraged people in villages to move to Brazil, assuring them they would have land and work guaranteed.
Instead the 40,000 people were left in the amazon forest to survive alone.
Those who did survive and escape, lived at the bottom of various south American towns and cities.

That's the first book, then, we move on to the second book where they start their revenge.

Today's Japan, you meet 3 wild men, their faces look like Japanese but their eyes are dangerously bright; they have one mission, one target, the Japanese government.

You spent one chunk of a book following their horrible lives so you are 100% on the side of these men, and you've also learned that this really was how many of those Japanese lived in Brazil.

The book also reminds you how small we are in the huge endless nature of the amazon, one person is nothing. The nature would easily swallow you.
Yet, we still live, we still regret the actions we did in the past, we still love.

It's an epic and 1000 pages full of drama, action and love. A must read (if it becomes available in English!)

🔽 Where to buy 🔽

●●● Amazon.com (US) ●●●

Wild Soul [1] [In Japanese Language]

●●● Amazon.co.uk (UK) ●●●
--

●●● Amazon.it (Italy) ●●●
--

Grave of the Fireflies
Akiyuki Nozaka, 1968
アメリカひじき
火垂るの墓
野坂明之
Japan
Read in 2024.10
check on amazon.com (movie, not book)

✔ Made into a Ghibli movie
✔ Effect of the war on children 
✔ Collection of short stories


🔽 Review summary 🔽
★★★★★ I still cannot watch the Ghibli film. Guilt disappears, but your hunger doesn't. You can visualise the horrible views the kids are seeing, and smell the death. They cannot live without help and death is too familiar.


🔽 Book review and notes 🔽
The Ghibli film is too well known, but I still cannot watch it and even less now that I have kids of my own.

Poverty, but extreme poverty where the war took everything and there's no other way than eventually die.
There are no beautiful things like family or childhood, it's about how to survive that day, and if possible saving the little sister also.

The book also contains other short stories, about kids who did survive - but it doesn't mean they are not struggling.
A vivid complex about the victorious Americans, or the guilt they carry because you are the only survivor among the siblings, or their will to do anything to live in the post war period.

Guilt disappears, but your hunger doesn't. 
What would you do to survive the day, or what can you do if you are only a child?

The most unexpected thing about the book is the description of sex and female body. America Hijiki talks about sex shows, yes that's an obvious one, but in one of the stories it talks about menstruation that starts even if your whole body is burned and wrapped, or they talk about removing ovary, or about pregnancy and raising children in general during the war.
All the things that's absolutely normal, especially if you are a woman, but never talked about in the history, which is more often written by men.

🔽 Where to buy 🔽

●●● Amazon.com (US) ●●●

Grave of the Fireflies Steelbook (bluray)
I couldn't find English book link so adding a link to the Ghibli film

●●● Amazon.co.uk (UK) ●●●

Grave of the Fireflies: Akiyuki Nosaka
book

●●● Amazon.it (Italy) ●●●
Una tomba per le lucciole (Italiano)
book