Shiraishi Masaaki, the author of the 2015
Sugihara Chiune: Jōhō ni kaketa gaikōkan, has worked for more than three decades in the Diplomatic Archives of Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. His book has now been translated by Gaynor Sekimori, a research associate at the SOAS University of London Centre for the Study of Japanese Religions, and published in English as
Sugihara Chiune: The Duty and Humanity of an Intelligence Officer. The work, an objective analysis drawing on the telegrams and reports filed by Sugihara (1900–86) during his time in Kaunas, Lithuania, and Prague, then Czechoslovakia, paints a fuller picture of the diplomat whose “visas for life,” issued in 1940–41, offered a lifeline to thousands of Jewish refugees in Eastern Europe.
Sugihara Chiune: The Duty and Humanity of an Intelligence Officer, published in March this year as the English translation of a 2015 Japanese work, illuminates the life of the war-era Japanese diplomat who issued thousands of life-saving transit visas to Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi horrors in Europe.
Dec 19, 2020
As 2021 approaches, six Japan Times book reviewers look back on their top reads released in English this year.
Breasts and Eggs, Fiction, Mieko Kawakami (trans. Sam Bett and David Boyd), Picador, 432 pages
If you missed “Breasts and Eggs,” Mieko Kawakami’s expansive and lively omnibus, put it at the top of your 2021 reading list.
The book is made up of two connected novellas that were combined and translated into English this year, and together the story explores the human condition by examining what it means to be born. No one delves into humanity quite like Kawakami, who adroitly balances social issues with humor and juxtaposes philosophical questions with streetwise answers. Kawakami’s sprawling, soaring, sometimes stumbling prose always rights itself into a sly meditation on human flaws and fallacies, taking on single motherhood, social isolation, gender norms and sexual abuse.