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Prison Hotel #4
プリズンホテル４ 春
「ついに俺の文化勲章受章が内定したか」「冗談は顔だけにしてください」冗談は顔だけにおさまらず、我らが木戸孝之介の小説が日本文芸大賞にノミネートされた。しかも・・ 押し寄せてくる編集者、失踪した義母富江、よどんだ気分で作家が向かったのは勧善懲悪キャンペーン中の悪の巣窟、プリズンホテルである。服役を終えた小俣弥一、競馬狂いの楠堀留、スターをめざす春野さくらとその母ふぶき、或る者は去り、或る者は留まったが、逃げた者はいない。人気シリーズ大団円。 監督/吉田純子・編集/三好達也
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First published November 20, 2001
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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