January in Japan 2015 - Group Reads Announcement!

January in Japan 2015 is less than a month away now, so the announcement of the group read books is well overdue.  Still, I got there in the end, and these are the two books I'm suggesting this time around :)

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A couple of years ago, our group read choice was Hiromi Kawakami's The Briefcase (later released in the UK as Strange Weather in Tokyo), and I've gone back to Kawakami for one of my choices for 2015.  This time it's her novel Manazuru - even if the weather's cold, it should make for a nice trip to the Japanese coast :)

The second choice is a classic of modern Japanese literature.  Yasunari Kawabata needs no introduction (but if he does, try this one!), and we'll be reading his novel The Sound of the Mountain, a wonderful story of a man coming to terms with the frailty that arrives with age.

The idea is that we'll read the books and post reviews around the same time - I'll be creating a page on this blog as a home for links to those reviews.  The schedule is:

January 15th - Manazuru

January 29th - The Sound of the Mountain

I hope that many of you will decide to join in - the more people who read the books and take part in the discussions, the better it will be.  See you in January :)