Posts Tagged Japanese literature

little labors
By Ava Kofman • 7 years ago

Feministing Reads: Rivka Galchen’s Little Labors

Before Rivka Galchen’s Little Labors (May 2016, New Directions), I had never read a book explicitly about babies and literature. I soon learned that this was likely because babies have historically occupied a marginal place in most books—and in most art generally.

Before Rivka Galchen’s Little Labors (May 2016, New Directions), I had never read a book explicitly about babies and literature. I soon learned that this was likely because babies have historically occupied a marginal place in most ...
By Katherine Cross • 9 years ago

Feministing Readz: Getting inside patriarchy’s head with Natsuo Kirino’s Out

What if The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo were about ordinary people rather than Jason Bourne-like superwomen and counter-conspirators? Oh, and, if it were actually written by a woman?

Natsuo Kirino answered the question long before The Millennium Trilogy was even drafted. Her 1997 book Out is by no means new, but for a first-time reader it still leaps from the page with an arresting freshness. The issues she addresses in the novel are both depressingly urgent and familiar, and Kirino is a masterful psychoanalyst of her characters’ inner lives.

Out begins as the story of four women who share the night shift at a factory in suburban Tokyo making boxed lunches. When one of them kills her abusive husband, she avails ...

What if The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo were about ordinary people rather than Jason Bourne-like superwomen and counter-conspirators? Oh, and, if it were actually written by a woman?

Natsuo Kirino answered the question long before The ...