Read the World: Mexico and Japan

I have joined another book club. (What? You don’t say?) Partly I have joined because it is at the bookstore where I work. Partly I love the premise—a type of book club that I have been considering starting myself, the type of book club where people read books of their choosing, given certain parameters. This book club is called “Read the World,” and the guidance given each month is simply a country; members pick any book from the country and come ready to share about their experience. The club has met one time so far, and the members read the gamut, from fiction to nonfiction, classics to currently popular genre fiction. I’ll come back to that in a minute.

For September’s meeting, we are supposed to read a book from Mexico. I am already reading the book I chose, something from my TBR: Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. This morning, as I was reading, I wondered if I’ve read any other books from Mexico? Surely. Like, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accent or something… (Spoiler: it’s not Mexican.) I was shocked to see just how few books from Mexico make it in America. This is some sort of problem, considering they are one of our two closest neighbors. And with so many immigrants from there… just weird, really.

So here is the list of books from Mexico that I would put out there for me (and you) to explore, to help close this wanton gap between literary ignorance and cultural intelligence. (Note: I included only one book from any given author, for the most part. There are rabbit trails that could be explored from there. Another note: I got several of these ideas (at least the more obscure ones) from Read This Twice, https://www.readthistwice.com/lists/best-mexican-books).

READ THE WORLD: MEXICO

As I mentioned, Mexican Gothic, Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Like Water for Chocolate, Octavio Paz
Selected Poems, Jose Emilio Pocheco
The Savage Detectives, Roberto Bolano
Pedro Páramo, Juan Rulfo
Hurricane Season, Fernanda Melchor
The Death of Artemio Cruz, Carlos Fuentes
The Murmur of Bees, Sofía Segovia
The Hummingbird’s Daughter, Luis Alberto Urrea
The Devil’s Highway, Luis Alberto Urrea (nonfiction)
Oaxaca, Bricia Lopez (cookbook)
Sunny Days Taco Nights, Enrique Olvera (cookbook)
Frida Kahlo, the Complete Paintings, Phaidon
Frida, a Biography of Frida Khalo, Hayden Herrera
The House on Mango Street (YA) or Caramelo, Sandra Cisneros (Mexican-American author)
Where They Burn Books They Also Burn People, Marcos Antonio Hernandez (takes place in Mexico)
Mexican Superstitions, Traditions, and Milagros, Michèle Fervarger
Pedro & Daniel, Federico Erebia (Mexican-American)
The Book of Wanderers, Reyes Ramirez (Mexican-American)

And some Latino anthologies that I hope would have Mexican authors in them:

The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature
Daughters of Latin America, ed. Sandra Guzman (poetry)
Latin@ Rising, ed. Matthew David Goodwin (speculative fiction)
New Poets of Native Nations, ed. Heid E. Erdrich (poetry)

And some more titles, from a previous world literature list I had made:

Time Among the Maya, Ronald Wright
On Mexican Time, Tony Cohan
True Tales from Another Mexico, Sam Quinones
Yo Basta! (nonfiction anthology)
The Power and the Glory, Graham Greene
The Labyrinth of Solitude, Octavio Paz (poetry)
The Burning Plain and Other Stories, Juan Rulfo (short stories)
The Old Gringo, Carlos Fuentes
Signs Preceding the End of the World, Yuri Herrera
Natural Histories, Guadalupe Nettel (short stories)
The Body Where I Was Born, Guadalupe Nettel
Faces in the Crowd, Valeria Luiselli

Now back to the book club that has already met. The country for the world was Japan, and quite frankly America is more “into” Japanese culture than lots of others, at this point in time, so making this list wasn’t difficult at all. Nor was finding a number of titles already on the bookshelf both at home and at the book store.

READ THE WORLD: JAPAN

I have read these:

Japanese Soul Cooking, Tadashi Ono (cookbook)
Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro (Japanese emigrant to Great Britain)
Lost Souls Meet Under a Full Moon, Mizuki Tsujimura
Strange Pictures, Uketsu
The Buried Giant, Kazuo Ishiguro (Japanese emigrant to Great Britain)

These titles were on my short list for what to read last month and are actually on my TBR shelf at home, but I only ended up with time to read one:

How to Hold Someone in Your Heart, Mizuki Tsujimura (#2 in the series I already started)
Before the Coffee Gets Cold, Toshikazu Kawaguchi (This is the one I read)
Butter, Asako Yuzuki
What You Are Looking for Is in the Library, Michiko Aoyama
Kokun, Nahoko Uehashi
Kiki’s Delivery Service, Eiko Kadono

And a few more I’ve had on my radar:

The Memory Police, Yoko Ogawa
If Cats Disappeared from the World, Genki Kawamura
Pachinko, Min Jin Lee
The Cat Who Saved Books, Sosuke Natsukawa
Convenience Store Woman, Sayaka Murata
The Honjin Murders, Seishi Yokomizo
Battle Royale, Koushun Takami
A Tale for the Time Being, Ruth Ozeki
The Passengers on the Hankyu Line, Hiro Arikawa
Lonely Castle in the Mirror, Mizuki Tsujimura

I also took some notes during club, and these are the books they read that I would like to read:

The Legend of Kamui, Shirato Sanpei (graphic novel)
Underground, Haruki Murikami (nonfiction)
Inspector Iminishi Investigates, Seicho Matsumoto
Hiroshima, 8:15, Kiyoshi Hanimoto (nonfiction)
Land of Milk and Honey, C. Pam Zhang
Love at Least, Yukiko Matoya
Men Without Women, Haruki Murikami

And here’s a whole bunch more titles:

Thousand Cranes, Yasunari Kawabata
Silence, Shusaku Endo
The Traveling Cat Chronicles, Hiro Arikawa
Breasts and Eggs, Mieko Kawakami
Diary of a Void, Emi Yagi
The Devotion of Suspect X, Keigo Higashino
The Woman in the Dunes, Kobo Abe
The Pillow Book, Sei Shonagon
Some Prefer Nettles, Junichiro Tanizaki
Snow Country, Yasunari Kawabata
Norwegian Wood, Haruki Murakami (several list put this at #1)
The Makioka Sisters, Junichiro Tanizaki
The Sea of Fertility, Yukio Mishima
No Longer Human, Osamu Dazai
Heaven, Mieko Kawakami
There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job, Kikuko Tsumura (memoir)
The Phone Box at the Edge of the World, Laura Imai Messina
The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Stories, Matsuo Basho (poetry)
The Reason I Jump, Naoki Higashida
Goodnight Punpun, Inio Asano
The Factory, Hiroko Oyamada
Memorial, Bryan Washington
I Am a Cat, Soseki Natsume
The Housekeeper and the Professor, Yoko Ogawa
Kitchen, Banana Yoshimoto
Taiko, Eiji Yoshikawa
Out, Natsuo Kirino
Bullet Train, Kotara Isaka
The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories (short stories, anthology)
Territory of Light, Yuko Tsushima
The Woman in the Purple Skirt, Natsuko Imamura
Tokyo Express, Seicho Matsumoto
Earthlings, Sayaka Murata

Finally, books that were on a list that I had made years ago (some of which I saw repeated a lot when I went looking for new titles):

Rashomon, Ryunosuke Akutagawa
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami
1Q84, Haruki Murakami
Spring Snow, Yukio Mishima
The Tale of Genji, Marusaki Shikubu
Almost Transparent Blue, Ryu Marakami
Death in Midsummer and Other Stories, Yukio Mishima (short stories)
The Diving Pool, Yōko Ogawa
Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami
Kokoro, Soseki Natusume
Seven Japanese Tales, Junichiro Tanizaki
The Waiting Years, Fumiko Enchi
Memoirs of a Geisha, Arthur Golden (now considered controversial and problematic)

And how can we talk Japanese books without dipping our toes in manga? I have yet to begin, but I am drawn to One Piece. Most of these are series (and some veeeeery long series), but a few are stand-alones.