Susanna Jones
Haunted In Tokyo
In Search of a Distant Voice
By Taichi Yamada (Translated by Michael Emmerich)
Faber & Faber 183pp £9.99 order from our bookshop
Taichi Yamada’s In Search of a Distant Voice was published in Japanese in 1989, completing a trilogy of novels which includes the ghostly Strangers, published to acclaim in English last year. His third novel brings us another beguiling story of guilt and longing.
A group of immigration officers raid a house outside Tokyo one morning and a strange, possibly magical, event occurs. Tsuneo Kasama, a young immigration officer, is chasing a Bangladeshi man through a graveyard when a mysterious force freezes him to the spot. He then experiences an inexplicable rush of sexual ecstasy, ‘a gunshot of delicious sweetness’. It leaves him humiliated, confused and haunted.
Kasama is a typical young man of his generation in Japan, with a stressful job and a home in a company dormitory. His friends are his colleagues and his boss is the matchmaker behind his planned marriage. Work and home life are all one, and Kasama views arranged marriage as
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'We must all "shoot down the canard", McManus writes, that the World Cup is going to a nation "that doesn’t know or appreciate the Beautiful Game".'
Barnaby Crowcroft on the rise of Qatar.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/full-of-gas
Delighted to make my debut in @Lit_Review with a review of Philip Short's heavyweight new bio, Putin: His Life and Times
(Yes, it's behind a paywall, but newspapers and magazines need to earn money too...)
https://literaryreview.co.uk/vlad-the-invader
'As we examined more and more data from the Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters ... we were amazed to find that there is almost never a case for permanently moving people out of the contaminated area after a big nuclear accident.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying