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Tokyo Ueno Station
- A Novel
- Narrated by: Johnny Heller
- Length: 3 hrs and 58 mins
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Publisher's summary
Winner of the 2020 National Book Award in Translated Literature
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year
A surreal, devastating story of a homeless ghost who haunts one of Tokyo's busiest train stations.
Kazu is dead. Born in Fukushima in 1933, the same year as the Japanese emperor, his life is tied by a series of coincidences to the Imperial family and has been shaped at every turn by modern Japanese history. But his life story is also marked by bad luck, and now, in death, he is unable to rest, doomed to haunt the park near Ueno Station in Tokyo.
Kazu's life in the city began and ended in that park; he arrived there to work as a laborer in the preparations for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and ended his days living in the vast homeless village in the park, traumatized by the destruction of the 2011 tsunami and shattered by the announcement of the 2020 Olympics.
Through Kazu's eyes, we see daily life in Tokyo buzz around him and learn the intimate details of his personal story, how loss and society's inequalities and constrictions spiraled toward this ghostly fate, with moments of beauty and grace just out of reach. A powerful masterwork from one of Japan's most brilliant outsider writers, Tokyo Ueno Station is a book for our times and a look into a marginalized existence in a shiny global megapolis.
Critic reviews
"Tokyo Ueno Station is a dream: a chronicle of hope, loss, where we've been and where we're going. That Yu Miri could conjure so many realities simultaneously is nothing short of marvelous. The novel astounds, terrifies, and make the unseen concrete - entirely tangible and perennially effervescent, right there on the page." (Bryan Washington, author of Lot and Memorial)
"Poetic.... How Kazu comes to be homeless, and then to haunt the park, is what keeps us reading, trying to understand the tragedy of this ghostly everyman. Deftly translated by Morgan Giles.... It is an urgent reminder of the radical divide between rich and poor in postwar Japan." (The Guardian)
"A radical and deeply felt work of fiction, psychogeography and history all at once, tapping us straight into the lifeblood of a Tokyo we rarely see: Tokyo from the margins, rooted in the city's most vulnerable and least visible lives - and deaths." (Elaine Castillo, author of America Is Not the Heart)
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- Rose
- 12-04-20
Goods story, great translation, poor narration
The story is moving though a bit predictable. The translation is smooth and natural.
The narrator has trouble pronouncing Japanese words and names, making me cringe at times.
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5 people found this helpful
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- Chuck Safris
- 08-06-20
Raw
Strips off my stereotypes of Japan and reveals a believable, perhaps common story of hardship and survival.
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5 people found this helpful
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- Kani
- 06-18-23
Heartbreaking story; avoid this narration
First my thoughts on the book, then on the narration:
This novel caught my attention for its setting in Japan during the period from roughly the 1960s through 2010s, narrated from an alternative perspective— one that is usually invisible and ignored: a man who becomes homeless in his later years. It’s a portrait of the social and economic changes in both Tokyo and the countryside that builds in a sense of cultural texture of the era - pachinko parlors, street life, urban development, and individuals struggling along in the tides of local and national priorities and disasters. But it’s also a heartbreaking portrait of this man looking back on an entire lifetime, wondering what went wrong and looking at the world around him passing him by. At times the first person non-linear structure can seem meandering and repetitive, but that could be justified as an effort to replicate the voice of an older man who has been leading a marginal, peripatetic existence, and an experiment with conveying the ways that memory can be layered, inconsistent, doubted, revised. In this book, time itself can seem to expand, contract, and fold in on itself as it does in lived experience.
That said, even though this is a short book, the unremitting suffering, loss, and tragedies in the narrative make it a very hard read. It often feels like the book of Job, minus the famous frame of that parable. In seeking to convey the harsh contrasts, desperation, and painful ironies of life for the homeless, the author does not shy away from being relentless. But it strains credibility when the symbolism or contextual details come across as heavy handed or forced. One key example is the way the author, in an effort to convey the huge gap between this Everyman and the imperial family, sets up some highly unlikely coincidences that get repeated several times — the narrator and his son are born on same day as two successive emperors yet have starkly different fates. Similarly, the 1960s Tokyo Olympics are mentioned a few times, bearing heavy weight as symbols of the contemporary globalization, the aspirations of contemporary Japan, and the socioeconomic realities for laborers hired for all the construction involved.
If you do read this book, go for the print version, not this audio. I wished I had listened to a sample first. As others have noted, the clipped plaintive tone of the main narration is weirdly mechanical and distracting... I kept wondering if the narrator was trying to make the book sound more “Japanese,” more “gruff”? Yet it ultimately sounds like a “broken-English” accent, which just comes across as inappropriate. (Later in the book there are a few other brief voices of Japanese women that the narrator performed realistically, and quite well, without the weird mechanical accent, which makes the clipped tone of the rest of the narration all the more inexplicable and annoying.)
It was especially distracting to hear so many basic Japanese place names, people’s names, and phrases mispronounced or with emphasis on all the wrong syllables in this audio version. Even Buddha— a word most English speakers can pronounce fairly well—is rendered in this audio version as Boooo.Da., which sounds so fake and comical that it ruins several scenes, such as a funeral where the incantations are supposed to convey a deeply somber tone.
Audiobook producers : Please hire readers who can pronounce words correctly when a book contains a lot of phrases and names in languages other than English. Don’t assume your listeners only speak English and will never know the difference!
Audiobook narrators: If you do hope to take on a project that involves a languages other than those you speak, please consult a voice coach who has native-level fluency, and practice in advance those words and phrases with them till you get it right. It doesn’t have to be perfect, but at least get the right sounds and emphasis. And please carefully consider the tone and accenting of your narration, so that it doesn’t inappropriately come across as broken English.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Robertson G. Adams
- 05-18-23
excruciating
I am a nut for Japan and I normally eat up literature about Tokyo and it's quirks. however, this story and this narration left me bored, confused, and annoyed that I wasted money downloading a book.
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- J. Trimble
- 05-05-23
Poor narrator, meandering story but moments of greatness
As others have noted the narrator was, bluntly, awful. His whining plaintive delivery ruined some nicely written poignant prose. The story wandered, though, repeated certain plot points as if the author had forgotten the previous mentions, and I found the protagonist vacuous & not particularly likable. Honestly if this book had been longer I probably would’ve stopped listening.
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- Cristina I.
- 02-28-23
short story about life and hardships
Throws a different perspective on Japan too. It strips the mysterious and glamorous coat and shows real people with real-life problems.
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- Joy Kim
- 12-12-22
Awful narrator
It was hard to concentrate on the book as the narrator butchered Japanese names and words. What a shame since the book is quite good. Better to read in print. What a waste of my money and time…
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- G. Cincinnati
- 03-11-22
Good story but the reader ruined it for me.
If you’ve never visited or lived in Japan you wouldn’t notice. But the reader consistently mispronounced every single thing he could get his mouth around.
All of the city and region names were spoken in American English with a complete lack of effort applied to getting them even close to right. It was grating.
Other than that this story is wonderful and the translation was done well. You get a true sense of what life is like for the (absolutely not voluntarily) homeless in Tokyo. I’d recommend people read it and skip the verbal assault on location names.
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- S. Frederick
- 02-27-22
Moving novel by important writer
For Japanese speakers the mispronounced place names may be jarring, but good reading overall. Great short novel.
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- josue hernandez
- 11-05-21
Boring and cringe narration
I blame myself for expecting something else from this book. I expected this book to be a ghost-story but from the perspective of the ghost at a Japanese train station etc.. I was very wrong, but still gave it a chance because it’s not the book’s fault that I was full of assumptions.
Either way, the book was just super boring and couldn’t engage. I think it may have been due to the narrator whom is a white guy that sounds like a Latino trying to speak Japanese. Apparently he is very sought after for his voice; but due to the cultural aspect of this book it was just cringe. I almost guarantee my experience would have been a bit better if we had a different narrator.
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- Unabridged
-
Overall
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Performance
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Story
Tsukiko, 38, works in an office and lives alone. One night, she happens to meet one of her former high school teachers, "Sensei", in a local bar. Tsukiko had only ever called him "Sensei" ("Teacher"). He is 30 years her senior, retired, and presumably a widower. Their relationship develops from a perfunctory acknowledgment of each other as they eat and drink alone at the bar, to a hesitant intimacy, which tilts awkwardly and poignantly into love.
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Cozy Love Story and Leisure Time in Japan
- By mz on 01-02-19
By: Hiromi Kawakami, and others
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The Woman in the Purple Skirt
- A Novel
- By: Natsuko Imamura, Lucy North - translator
- Narrated by: Jennifer Ikeda
- Length: 3 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
-
Story
Almost every afternoon, the Woman in the Purple Skirt sits on the same park bench, where she eats a cream bun while the local children make a game of trying to get her attention. Unbeknownst to her, she is being watched—by the Woman in the Yellow Cardigan, who is always perched just out of sight, monitoring which buses she takes, what she eats, whom she speaks to.
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Wild
- By Anna Christine on 07-27-22
By: Natsuko Imamura, and others
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The Hole
- By: Hiroko Oyamada
- Narrated by: Brianna Ishibashi
- Length: 2 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
-
Story
Asa’s husband is transferring jobs, and his new office is located near his family’s home in the countryside. During an exceptionally hot summer, the young married couple move in, and Asa does her best to quickly adjust to their new rural lives, to their remoteness, to the constant presence of her in-laws, and the incessant buzz of cicadas. While her husband is consumed with his job, Asa is left to explore her surroundings on her own: She makes trips to the supermarket, halfheartedly looks for work, and tries to find interesting ways of killing time.
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Murakami-esque in much except its brevity
- By TiffanyD on 01-29-21
By: Hiroko Oyamada
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All the Lovers in the Night
- By: Mieko Kawakami
- Narrated by: Mirai
- Length: 7 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
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Performance
-
Story
Fuyuko Irie is a freelance copyeditor in her mid-thirties. Working and living alone in a city where it is not easy to form new relationships, she has little regular contact with anyone other than her editor, Hijiri, a woman of the same age but with a very different disposition. When Fuyoku stops one day on a Tokyo street and notices her reflection in a storefront window, what she sees is a drab, awkward, and spiritless woman who has lacked the strength to change her life and decides to do something about it.
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Enjoyable listen
- By Rose on 05-16-22
By: Mieko Kawakami
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Breasts and Eggs
- By: Mieko Kawakami
- Narrated by: Emily Woo Zeller, Jeena Yi
- Length: 15 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
-
Story
Breasts & Eggs paints a portrait of contemporary womanhood in Japan and recounts the intimate journeys of three women as they confront oppressive mores and their own uncertainties on the road to finding peace and futures they can truly call their own. It tells the story of three women: the 30-year-old Natsu, her older sister, Makiko, and Makiko’s daughter, Midoriko. Makiko has traveled to Tokyo in search of an affordable breast enhancement procedure. She is accompanied by Midoriko, who has recently grown silent.
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Masterful Writing and Performance
- By Noelle on 03-01-21
By: Mieko Kawakami
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The End of August
- A Novel
- By: Yu Miri, Morgan Giles - translator
- Narrated by: Sue Jean Kim
- Length: 28 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
-
Story
In 1930s Japanese-occupied Korea, Lee Woo-cheol was a running prodigy and a contender for the upcoming Tokyo Olympics. But he would have had to run under the Japanese flag. Nearly a century later, his granddaughter is living in Japan and training to run a marathon herself. She summons Korean shamans to hold an intense, transcendent ritual to connect with Lee Woo-cheol.
By: Yu Miri, and others
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Strange Weather in Tokyo
- A Novel
- By: Hiromi Kawakami, Allison Markin Powell - translator
- Narrated by: Allison Hiroto
- Length: 5 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Tsukiko, 38, works in an office and lives alone. One night, she happens to meet one of her former high school teachers, "Sensei", in a local bar. Tsukiko had only ever called him "Sensei" ("Teacher"). He is 30 years her senior, retired, and presumably a widower. Their relationship develops from a perfunctory acknowledgment of each other as they eat and drink alone at the bar, to a hesitant intimacy, which tilts awkwardly and poignantly into love.
-
-
Cozy Love Story and Leisure Time in Japan
- By mz on 01-02-19
By: Hiromi Kawakami, and others
-
The Woman in the Purple Skirt
- A Novel
- By: Natsuko Imamura, Lucy North - translator
- Narrated by: Jennifer Ikeda
- Length: 3 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Almost every afternoon, the Woman in the Purple Skirt sits on the same park bench, where she eats a cream bun while the local children make a game of trying to get her attention. Unbeknownst to her, she is being watched—by the Woman in the Yellow Cardigan, who is always perched just out of sight, monitoring which buses she takes, what she eats, whom she speaks to.
-
-
Wild
- By Anna Christine on 07-27-22
By: Natsuko Imamura, and others
-
The Hole
- By: Hiroko Oyamada
- Narrated by: Brianna Ishibashi
- Length: 2 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Asa’s husband is transferring jobs, and his new office is located near his family’s home in the countryside. During an exceptionally hot summer, the young married couple move in, and Asa does her best to quickly adjust to their new rural lives, to their remoteness, to the constant presence of her in-laws, and the incessant buzz of cicadas. While her husband is consumed with his job, Asa is left to explore her surroundings on her own: She makes trips to the supermarket, halfheartedly looks for work, and tries to find interesting ways of killing time.
-
-
Murakami-esque in much except its brevity
- By TiffanyD on 01-29-21
By: Hiroko Oyamada
-
All the Lovers in the Night
- By: Mieko Kawakami
- Narrated by: Mirai
- Length: 7 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Fuyuko Irie is a freelance copyeditor in her mid-thirties. Working and living alone in a city where it is not easy to form new relationships, she has little regular contact with anyone other than her editor, Hijiri, a woman of the same age but with a very different disposition. When Fuyoku stops one day on a Tokyo street and notices her reflection in a storefront window, what she sees is a drab, awkward, and spiritless woman who has lacked the strength to change her life and decides to do something about it.
-
-
Enjoyable listen
- By Rose on 05-16-22
By: Mieko Kawakami
-
Breasts and Eggs
- By: Mieko Kawakami
- Narrated by: Emily Woo Zeller, Jeena Yi
- Length: 15 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Breasts & Eggs paints a portrait of contemporary womanhood in Japan and recounts the intimate journeys of three women as they confront oppressive mores and their own uncertainties on the road to finding peace and futures they can truly call their own. It tells the story of three women: the 30-year-old Natsu, her older sister, Makiko, and Makiko’s daughter, Midoriko. Makiko has traveled to Tokyo in search of an affordable breast enhancement procedure. She is accompanied by Midoriko, who has recently grown silent.
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Masterful Writing and Performance
- By Noelle on 03-01-21
By: Mieko Kawakami
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Heaven
- A Novel
- By: Mieko Kawakami
- Narrated by: Scott Keiji Takeda
- Length: 6 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Hailed as a bold foray into new literary territory, Kawakami’s novel is told in the voice of a 14-year-old student subjected to relentless torment for having a lazy eye. Instead of resisting, the boy chooses to suffer in complete resignation. The only person who understands what he is going through is a female classmate who suffers similar treatment at the hands of her tormenters.
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Great listen
- By Anthony on 07-30-21
By: Mieko Kawakami
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There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job
- By: Kikuko Tsumura, Polly Barton - translator
- Narrated by: Cindy Kay
- Length: 9 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
A young woman walks into an employment agency and requests a job that has the following traits: It’s close to her home, and it requires no reading, no writing, and, ideally, very little thinking. Her first gig - watching the hidden-camera feed of an author suspected of storing contraband goods - turns out to be inconvenient. Her next gives way to the supernatural: announcing advertisements for shops that mysteriously disappear. As she moves from job to job, it becomes increasingly apparent that she's not searching for the easiest job at all but something altogether more meaningful.
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I LOVED it
- By Rose on 09-29-21
By: Kikuko Tsumura, and others
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Sweet Bean Paste
- By: Durian Sukegawa, Alison Watts - translator
- Narrated by: Cindy Kay
- Length: 5 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Sentaro has failed. He has a criminal record, drinks too much, and his dream of becoming a writer is just a distant memory. With only the blossoming of the cherry trees to mark the passing of time, he spends his days in a tiny confectionery shop selling dorayaki, a type of pancake filled with sweet bean paste. Into his life comes Tokue, an elderly woman with disfigured hands and a troubled past. Tokue makes the best sweet bean paste Sentaro has ever tasted. She begins to teach him her craft, but as their friendship flourishes, social pressures become impossible to escape.
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Beautiful
- By Mekhala Mathure on 10-14-23
By: Durian Sukegawa, and others
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The Emissary
- By: Yoko Tawada, Margaret Mitsutani - translator
- Narrated by: Julian Cihi
- Length: 4 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Japan, after suffering from a massive irreparable disaster, cuts itself off from the world. Children are so weak they can barely stand or walk: the only people with any get-go are the elderly. Mumei lives with his grandfather Yoshiro, who worries about him constantly. They carry on a day-to-day routine in what could be viewed as a post-Fukushima time, with all the children born ancient - frail and gray-haired, yet incredibly compassionate and wise. Mumei may be enfeebled and feverish, but he is a beacon of hope, full of wit and free of self-pity and pessimism.
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Tedious. Waste of time.
- By Kenneth McGovern on 02-17-19
By: Yoko Tawada, and others
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Territory of Light
- A Novel
- By: Yuko Tsushima
- Narrated by: Rina Takasaki
- Length: 5 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
It is spring. A young woman, left by her husband, starts a new life in a Tokyo apartment. Territory of Light follows her over the course of a year as she struggles to bring up her two-year-old daughter alone. Her new home is filled with light streaming through the windows, so bright she has to squint, but she finds herself plummeting deeper into darkness, becoming unstable, untethered. As the months come and go and the seasons turn, she must confront what she has lost and what she will become.
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A poetic metaphor
- By Amazon Customer on 10-21-19
By: Yuko Tsushima
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The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea
- By: Yukio Mishima
- Narrated by: Brian Nishii
- Length: 4 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
A band of savage 13-year-old boys reject the adult world as illusory, hypocritical, and sentimental, and train themselves in a brutal callousness they call 'objectivity'. When the mother of one of them begins an affair with a ship's officer, he and his friends idealise the man at first; but it is not long before they conclude that he is in fact soft and romantic. They regard this disallusionment as an act of betrayal on his part - and the retribution is deliberate and horrifying.
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Unsettling writing, flawed reading
- By Erez on 11-22-12
By: Yukio Mishima
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Trust Exercise
- A Novel
- By: Susan Choi
- Narrated by: Adina Verson, Jennifer Lim, Suehyla El-Attar
- Length: 9 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance