Jonathan Peto’s Reviews > Great Japanese Stories: 10 Parallel Texts > Status Update

One more story to go. I may just read the English and skip most of the Japanese. I'm ready for a new adventure.

The Smile of a Mountain Witch by Minako Oba takes an interesting turn. We learn about her childhood!

I'm finally finished the story about Hiroshima, which was great. It is a close up view of surviving and enduring the day of the bombing. The next story, which I'm a few pages into, is called The Smile of a Mountain Witch - so very different!

I haven't read too much recently, because I need to be able to concentrate and the current story is a long one about the bombing of Hiroshima. It is weighty. I thought I might not force my self through a 50 pager like this, but what I've read so far has been very well done, with an interesting panoramic view and history of the city for the first pages. It begins as an essay, but clearly becomes a non fiction account.

I've read an entire novel in Japanese by Kawakami Mieko, so this long story shouldn't have been trouble. Unfortunately, it was a little too long, at least for me. Again though, I'm less capable when reading in Japanese. An epiphany ending that utilizes an image...? Meh.

The fifth story, by Kono Taeko, was also a winner! Repeated kanji due to similar situations about a highly interesting conflict between an odd narrator and a stranger in the elevator of their residence building.

The fourth story was a winner. Entertaining and intelligent while simultaneously friendly to non-native speakers because of repeated vocabulary!

Finished that third story. My opinion of it hasn't changed. The last line was interesting and maybe worth it if I'd been reading in English, but I'm reading in Japanese and getting to that last line was a lot of work, so...

The third story is a bit of slog. Interesting, but the narrator is very introspective and that makes the Japanese tough. It'll be awhile before I get to the fourth story...

The second story by Shinichi Hoshi was a funny commentary about the use, or rather the declining use, of honorifics in Japanese.