Yume no Q-SAKU: Suehiro Maruo

Buckle up, my book-loving friends! This book is not for the faint of heart, or the squeamishly inclined. No, seriously. If you haven’t heard of ero-guro before, here is a quick lesson: erotic + grotesque = horrifying shit you cannot unsee that is often hauntingly beautiful. So you can see how Yume no Q-SAKU by ero-guro master Suehiro Maruo might not be exactly safe for work. Or safe to read over breakfast. (Seriously. I made that mistake.) If your stomach turns at the mere mention of knife wounds, you should probably skip this one.

(I’m not going to post any NSFW images or anything, but I will be discussing various aspects of some pretty graphic stuff, violent and sexual, so if you have any triggers, just assume that I will be hitting all of them and go back and read about Akino Kondoh. You’ll like her! So pretty!) 

Hakoniwa Mushi: Akino Kondoh

Remember how I said I try not to gush? That whole blah-blah-blah about how I only talk about books I enjoy, but that doesn’t mean I’m here to rave about them? Yeah, I lied. Or at least, I am breaking that self-imposed rule once again, because holy smokes! Akino Kondoh makes my heart beat faster and puts stars in my eyes. I triple, quadruple heart her! So put your cynical pants aside and join me in a round of unabashed adoration.

Hakoniwa Mushi is her first collection of manga stories, and I was literally thrilled when I came across it at the oddly amazing bookstore I found in Nakano on this last trip to Japan. Why I never went into this place before I will never know (actually, probably because that sprawling Mandarake is in Nakano and I always end up going there), but their manga section on the second floor had one of the best selections of alternative stuff I’ve ever seen. It is where I found the previous lovefest manga, Papa ga Mo Ichido Koi o Shita. And when I was poking around in their alt-manga section, after having grabbed the latest issue of Erotics f off the shelf, I saw Akino Kondoh’s name and for a moment, I actually couldn’t believe my eyes. Her stuff is never anywhere. (Her publisher needs to do something about that!)

Sabiru Kokoro: Natsuo Kirino

Natsuo Kirino is one of those authors that always manages to surprise me while still having a strongly identifiable voice of her own. Ostensibly a mystery author, she’s always struck me more as a painter of portraits. I mean, the mysteries she writes tend to start off with the solution to the mystery, like in Out or Grotesque, and she manages to zoom right in on the salient features of each character, deftly giving them depth and making them interesting with a few words on the first page. But she also has this distance from them, she steps back. She tends to tell her stories in the third person, although she did use the first-person to great effect in Grotesque (the hatchet job of the English edit/translation of which still makes me stabby).

Her use of the third person doesn’t mean she doesn’t get inside her characters’ heads, though. She creates opportunities for omniscience, moments to sneak in and see what they are thinking. But it always feels like she is watching from the sidelines, which is what makes her so effective at creating that haunted atmosphere you see in so much of her work. I’ve only ever read her novels, though, where she has plenty of time to build and create that atmosphere, so when I came across Sabiru Kokoro (roughly “Rusted Heart”), a collection of six short stories, at Book Off for only two hundred and fifty yen, I snapped it up, eager to see what she would do within the confines of the short story.