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A refreshingly raw conversation, revealing many things about Japanese culture circa 1994 and The Wind Up Bird Chronicle. Foreshadows some of 1Q84 and Killing Commandatore

Western reviewers sometimes miss the fact that most characters and occurrences in a contemporary Japanese novel are accurate depictions of life. That’s why — as I discovered when I moved to Tokyo — authors like Haruki Murakami aren’t well regarded in Japan; they simply tell stories from everyday life. Yes, there’s a number of plot points, such as the final transformation of the narrator into a bird, that obviously are fantastic or surrealistic. Yet it’s always in the context of a perplexing or broken society; the surrealism stands in for the many emotions people cannot express in this world. Once aware that a novel like The Factory serves more realism than fantasy, I think readers (or maybe it’s just me?) may be disappointed that the book doesn’t draw its criticism out into the open. But that wouldn’t be very Japanese, would it?

More extensive review to come (it’s going to take some work treating the main arguments appropriately and in some cases rerunning data analyses), but the tldr is that the author does an incredible job ignoring the evidence to expound a backwards view on gender inequality. The policy recommendations flatly contradict the data he presents. It makes you wonder why he bothered.

there’s a lot to criticize about this method from a pedagogical point of view, but I feel like it did make me much more comfortable with Kanji

I’m a fan of parallel texts. these stories aren’t my favorite, but the amount of effort (and editorial courage) in publishing this deserves respect