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Prison Hotel #4
プリズンホテル ４ 春
幸之介の義母・富江は心の底から喜んでいた。息子が文壇最高の賞「日本文芸大賞」の候補になったのだ。これでもう思い残すこともないとまで思っていた。息子を気遣ってか富江は忽然と姿を消してしまった。幸之介が賞の発表を待つのはご存知プリズンホテル。特別な日にもかかわらず、この夜も因縁つきの人びとが泊り込む。懲役五十二年の老博徒から、演劇母娘など、またしても起こる珍騒動。物語は笑って泣ける大団円へ。
360 pages, Kindle Edition
First published November 20, 2001
10 people want to read
About the author
Jirō Asada
229 books27 followersJirō Asada (浅田 次郎, born December 13, 1951 in Tokyo) is the pen name of Kōjirō Iwato (岩戸 康次郎), a Japanese writer.
Inspired by Yukio Mishima, who tried to stage a coup d'état among Japan Self-Defense Forces then committed suicide after the coup was failed, Asada enlisted in the SDF after finishing his studies. He changed jobs many times while endeavoring to find writing opportunities, submitting his works to literary competitions.
In 1991, his novel Torarete tamaruka! (とられてたまるか!) started his literary career. After writing several picaresque novels, his novel Metro ni notte (地下鉄に乗って) was awarded the Eiji Yoshikawa Prize for New Writers and made into a 2006 film; a short story collection The Stationmaster and other stories (Poppoya (鉄道員)) was also awarded the Naoki Prize.
He writes not only standard fiction and picaresque novels, but also writes historical and Chinese historical novels such as The Firmament of the Pleiades (Sōkyū no subaru, 蒼穹の昴).
Inspired by Yukio Mishima, who tried to stage a coup d'état among Japan Self-Defense Forces then committed suicide after the coup was failed, Asada enlisted in the SDF after finishing his studies. He changed jobs many times while endeavoring to find writing opportunities, submitting his works to literary competitions.
In 1991, his novel Torarete tamaruka! (とられてたまるか!) started his literary career. After writing several picaresque novels, his novel Metro ni notte (地下鉄に乗って) was awarded the Eiji Yoshikawa Prize for New Writers and made into a 2006 film; a short story collection The Stationmaster and other stories (Poppoya (鉄道員)) was also awarded the Naoki Prize.
He writes not only standard fiction and picaresque novels, but also writes historical and Chinese historical novels such as The Firmament of the Pleiades (Sōkyū no subaru, 蒼穹の昴).
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
April 4, 2018
My review for the preqeual: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
I can't help but mentioning this again: I picked this Prison Hotel series up again mostly because I'd just visited my first every Japanese hot spring hotel last month.
And who can resist Japanese traditional hot spring hotel plus yakuza!?
This time, the ill-tempered novelist returns to Prison Hotel with his mistress (now his newly wedded wife) and her six years old daughter to wait for the result of an important book award contest.
The novelist's yakuza uncle, his wife and daughter and his editors are all optimist about him winning the award, but at the same time, the novelist suffers a emotion meltdown when he learns his long suffering stepmother had gone missing. After years of treating said stepmother like a lowly maidservant and a punchbag, finally the novelist realizes how much he loves and relies on the older woman?
Okay...so we now have the final book of the Prison Hotel series. The author, Mr. Asada, continued to make fun with the yakuza stereotypes and the novelist's family dramas (his problem with his mistress, his own birth mother and said mother's boyfriend, his uncle, his stepmother...) To be very honest the jokes are getting a bit old so I'm glad Mr. Asada had decided to end this series with only four books. I will miss these amazing, comical characters.
As to the main character, this novelist guy who writes yakuza novels...I am amused by his unreasonableness all the time but damn! As a man, a husband and a son he is such a failure! He used to beat his stepmother and his mistress and used them both as punchbags! This is unforgivable! And more annoying still, the women around him just keep excusing his bad behaviors! At least his yakuza uncle and some of the male characters always call the guy out!
Still, it is an enjoyable finale for a highly amusing, creative comedy series.
I can't help but mentioning this again: I picked this Prison Hotel series up again mostly because I'd just visited my first every Japanese hot spring hotel last month.
And who can resist Japanese traditional hot spring hotel plus yakuza!?
This time, the ill-tempered novelist returns to Prison Hotel with his mistress (now his newly wedded wife) and her six years old daughter to wait for the result of an important book award contest.
The novelist's yakuza uncle, his wife and daughter and his editors are all optimist about him winning the award, but at the same time, the novelist suffers a emotion meltdown when he learns his long suffering stepmother had gone missing. After years of treating said stepmother like a lowly maidservant and a punchbag, finally the novelist realizes how much he loves and relies on the older woman?
Okay...so we now have the final book of the Prison Hotel series. The author, Mr. Asada, continued to make fun with the yakuza stereotypes and the novelist's family dramas (his problem with his mistress, his own birth mother and said mother's boyfriend, his uncle, his stepmother...) To be very honest the jokes are getting a bit old so I'm glad Mr. Asada had decided to end this series with only four books. I will miss these amazing, comical characters.
As to the main character, this novelist guy who writes yakuza novels...I am amused by his unreasonableness all the time but damn! As a man, a husband and a son he is such a failure! He used to beat his stepmother and his mistress and used them both as punchbags! This is unforgivable! And more annoying still, the women around him just keep excusing his bad behaviors! At least his yakuza uncle and some of the male characters always call the guy out!
Still, it is an enjoyable finale for a highly amusing, creative comedy series.
May 8, 2010
Amazing--
This was the best in the series. I laughed so hard and cried. I was hooked and couldn't put it down. Jiro Asada is a master storyteller without a doubt. Granted, his style isn't literary, his descriptions are minimalist, there's no philosophical rumination. But there's human drama. It moves you and makes you laugh. We get to know all the characters so well that it feels like we're part of a large family.
Reading his novels makes me wonder what stories should accomplish. Having read a fair number of literary novels, only a handful of them made me feel so wide a range of intense emotions as this awesome tragicomic tetralogy. No work I've read came this close to the sheer emotional resonance of Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. Although he doesn't reach the depths Dostoevsky did in plumbing human psyche, I must say Asada Jiro might even surpass Dostoevsky in pathos and - definitely - humor.
So what should novels accomplish? I'd like to write books that move people, change their lives, make them laugh, and make them forget everything - in short, make them happy.
A line from this book speaks volumes: "A truly great thing does not impress, but makes people laugh - it makes them happy."
I couldn't agree more. Take Shakespeare. His works combine rich human drama, humor (comic reliefs), and love of language (word play, poetic cadences). They may not make people laugh and happy, but they move people. In other words they have emotional resonance.
Every great work has to have emotional resonance.
And Jiro Asada's works do.
His Prison Hotel series is a must read.
This was the best in the series. I laughed so hard and cried. I was hooked and couldn't put it down. Jiro Asada is a master storyteller without a doubt. Granted, his style isn't literary, his descriptions are minimalist, there's no philosophical rumination. But there's human drama. It moves you and makes you laugh. We get to know all the characters so well that it feels like we're part of a large family.
Reading his novels makes me wonder what stories should accomplish. Having read a fair number of literary novels, only a handful of them made me feel so wide a range of intense emotions as this awesome tragicomic tetralogy. No work I've read came this close to the sheer emotional resonance of Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. Although he doesn't reach the depths Dostoevsky did in plumbing human psyche, I must say Asada Jiro might even surpass Dostoevsky in pathos and - definitely - humor.
So what should novels accomplish? I'd like to write books that move people, change their lives, make them laugh, and make them forget everything - in short, make them happy.
A line from this book speaks volumes: "A truly great thing does not impress, but makes people laugh - it makes them happy."
I couldn't agree more. Take Shakespeare. His works combine rich human drama, humor (comic reliefs), and love of language (word play, poetic cadences). They may not make people laugh and happy, but they move people. In other words they have emotional resonance.
Every great work has to have emotional resonance.
And Jiro Asada's works do.
His Prison Hotel series is a must read.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews