The 3 best books by Yoko Ogawa

There is life in current Japanese literature beyond Murakami. Because the case of Yoko ogawa It was also a worldwide phenomenon in its narrative of the most unsuspected encounter of numbers and their messages beyond simple operations to achieve humanistic significance, as a human approach that in the end are numbers.

As a result of that desire to balance between letters and numbers as a whole, his book "The Teacher's Favorite Formula" appeared, where we were all able to learn that the mind, and especially memory, may not abandon us so much to our fate if we cling to the perenniality of numbers and their formulations.

But Ogawa was not satisfied with awakening the curiosity of half the world since his metaliterary discovery and he devoted himself to a prolific work. Mainly a great collection of novels in which he pours that charm of the most oriental narrative. Stories that appear at the birth of each new day, as anticipated and aware of the necessary pause with which to face the rhythm that is already given by life itself.

Top 3 Recommended Novels by Yoko Ogawa

The teacher's preferred formula

The international explosion of a creativity made in Ogawa, capable of rethinking distances between language and mathematics. One of those disruptive novels far beyond the merely literary. All this with a very close setting that manages to further enhance the humanistic aspect that encloses everything in its perfect circle.

The story of a single mother who goes to work as an assistant in the house of an old and sullen math teacher who lost her memory in a car accident (or rather, the autonomy of her memory, which only lasts 80 minutes).

Passionate about numbers, the teacher will become fond of the assistant and her 10-year-old son, whom he baptizes "Root" ("Square Root" in English) and with whom he shares a passion for baseball, until it is forged between them a true story of love, friendship and transmission of knowledge, not only mathematical ...

The teacher's favorite formula

The memory Police

The particular dystopia of this Japanese author who picks up the glove of the usual sociological approach typical of so many other Japanese narrators. A story with an aftertaste also to the Margaret Atwood more interested in the stripping of social obscenities.

A mysterious phenomenon occurs on a small island. One day the birds disappear, the next anything could disappear: the fish, the trees ... Worse still, the memory of them will also disappear, as well as the emotions and sensations that were associated with them. No one will know or remember what they were then. There is even a police force dedicated to persecuting those who retain the ability to remember what no longer exists.

On that island lives a young writer who, after the death of her mother, tries to write a novel while trying to protect her publisher, who is in danger because he is one of the few who remember. She will be helped by an old man whose strength is beginning to fail. Meanwhile, slowly, our protagonist is shaping her novel: it is the story of a typist whose boss ends up holding her against her will in a loft. A work on the power of memory and on loss.

The memory police

Hotel Iris

The curious magnetism for fatality, the desire for perdition, the fear capable of inspiring souls anesthetized by a reality that becomes too flat, of unbearable inertia. A fascinating novel about the assumption of defeat as destiny, as an inescapable temptation turned into an essential drive, a physical attraction of pleasure and pain.

Mari, a seventeen-year-old girl who helps her mother run a modest family hotel near the beach, at night hears the screams of a woman who comes out half-naked from one of the rooms, imprecating a mysterious advanced man age. This, imperturbable, orders him to shut up with a few sharp words.

The authority with which he pronounces them has the effect of a spell on the young woman, who feels immediately and irresistibly attracted to him. A few days later, she meets him by chance and feels the need to follow him. The man is a Russian translator with a dark past. His wife died under strange circumstances. He lives in a lonely village on an almost deserted island.

From that encounter, a murky relationship is born between them, and the man's house becomes a disturbing place of intimate transgression. Yoko Ogawa, one of the most widely read novelists in Japan, this time delves into the dark territory of sexual psychology, which, like the characters in the book, disturbs and either attracts or repulses the reader.

5/5 - (28 votes)

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