Her younger brother, Ren, travels to Akakawa with the intention of quickly settling her affairs and returning home to Tokyo. Rainbirds opens shortly after the brutal stabbing death of 33-year-old Keiko Ishida, an English-language teacher living in a small Japanese town named Akakawa. But beyond the practical matter of availability, I also found myself deeply intrigued by the strange characters, surrealist nods, and recurring themes of emotional and geographic isolation rendered in these Japanese authors’ works - the same qualities that drew me to Clarissa Goenawan’s atmospheric debut novel, Rainbirds. “Where are all the Koreans?”Īt the time, English translations of Kōbō Abe, Yasunari Kawabata, Haruki Murakami, and Banana Yoshimoto were simply easier to find in the United States than English translations of Korean authors, for whom there was less demand. As was the case with many Koreans of his generation, living under colonial rule left him with some lingering resentments toward the Japanese, so much so that when I went to college and majored in Asian Studies, he questioned why I only seemed to bring home books by Japanese authors. MY FATHER GREW UP in Pusan, South Korea, during the Japanese occupation.
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