Yoko Ogawa – författare

Bokcirkelfrågor ingår.

Yoko Ogawa är en av Japans kändaste och mest ansedda författare. Romanen var nominerad till Kulturhuset Stadsteaterns internationella litteraturpris 2022.

En ung kvinna börjar arbeta som hemhjälp åt en matematikprofessor, som efter en bilolycka bara kan minnas saker 80 minuter åt gången. Trots att han sedan olyckan lever kvar i år 1975 och inte ens kan återge vad han åt till frukost kan han fortfarande berätta ingående om avancerade ekvationer och olösliga matematiska problem. När kvinnan börjar ta med sin tioårige son till arbetet inleds en varm och egenartad vänskap mellan de tre, med matematiken som gemensamt språk.

En gåtfull vänskap är en förtrollande vacker berättelse om vad det innebär att leva i nuet, och om de märkliga ekvationer som en familj kan utgöra.

YOKO OGAWA, född 1962, är ett av den moderna japanska litteraturens största namn. Sedan debuten 1988 har hon givit ut ett tjugotal böcker och En gåtfull vänskap har sålt i flera miljoner exemplar exemplar i hemlandet, där den också filmatiserats. På svenska finns även hennes roman De förlorade minnenas ö att läsa.

"Högst originell, oändligt charmfull. Och enormt gripande." Paul Auster

"Skriven på ett så ogrumlat och opretentiöst språk att det är som att blicka ner i en källa med kristallklart vatten." New York Times

On an unnamed island off an unnamed coast, objects are disappearing: first hats, then ribbons, birds, roses—until things become much more serious. Most of the island’s inhabitants are oblivious to these changes, while those few imbued with the power to recall the lost objects live in fear of the draconian Memory Police, who are committed to ensuring that what has disappeared remains forgotten. When a young woman who is struggling to maintain her career as a novelist discovers that her editor is in danger from the Memory Police, she concocts a plan to hide him beneath her floorboards. As fear and loss close in around them, they cling to her writing as the last way of preserving the past. A surreal, provocative fable about the power of memory and the trauma of loss, The Memory Police is a stunning new work from one of the most exciting contemporary authors writing in any language.

In the spring of 1972, twelve-year-old Tomoko leaves her mother behind in Tokyo and boards a train alone for Ashiya, a coastal town in Japan, to stay with her aunt’s family. Tomoko’s aunt is an enigma and an outlier in her working-class family, and her magnificent home—and handsome foreign husband, the president of a soft drink company—are symbols of that status. The seventeen rooms are filled with German-made furnishings; there are sprawling gardens and even an old zoo where the family’s pygmy hippopotamus resides. The family is just as beguiling as their mansion—Tomoko’s dignified and devoted aunt, her German great-aunt, and her dashing, charming uncle, who confidently sits as the family’s patriarch. At the center of the family is Tomoko’s cousin Mina, a precocious, asthmatic girl of thirteen who draws Tomoko into an intoxicating world full of secret crushes and elaborate storytelling. In this elegant jewel box of a book, Yoko Ogawa invites us to witness a powerful and formative interlude in Tomoko’s life. Behind the family’s sophistication are complications that Tomoko struggles to understand—her uncle’s mysterious absences, her great-aunt’s experience of the Second World War, her aunt’s misery. Rich with the magic and mystery of youthful experience, Mina’s Matchbox is an evocative snapshot of a moment frozen in time—and a striking depiction of a family on the edge of collapse.

A tale of twisted love from Yoko Ogawa—author of The Diving Pool and The Housekeeper and the Professor.In a crumbling seaside hotel on the coast of Japan, quiet seventeen-year-old Mari works the front desk as her mother tends to the off-season customers. When one night they are forced to expel a middle-aged man and a prostitute from their room, Mari finds herself drawn to the man''s voice, in what will become the first gesture of a single long seduction. In spite of her provincial surroundings, and her cool but controlling mother, Mari is a sophisticated observer of human desire, and she sees in this man something she has long been looking for.The man is a proud if threadbare translator living on an island off the coast. A widower, there are whispers around town that he may have murdered his wife. Mari begins to visit him on his island, and he soon initiates her into a dark realm of both pain and pleasure, a place in which she finds herself more at ease even than the translator. As Mari''s mother begins to close in on the affair, Mari''s sense of what is suitable and what is desirable are recklessly engaged.Hotel Iris is a stirring novel about the sometimes violent ways in which we express intimacy and about the untranslatable essence of love.

The first major English translation of one of contemporary Japan''s bestselling and most celebrated authorsFrom Akutagawa Award-winning author Yoko Ogawa comes a haunting trio of novellas about love, fertility, obsession, and how even the most innocent gestures may contain a hairline crack of cruel intent.A lonely teenage girl falls in love with her foster brother as she watches him leap from a high diving board into a pool--a peculiar infatuation that sends unexpected ripples through her life.A young woman records the daily moods of her pregnant sister in a diary, taking meticulous note of a pregnancy that may or may not be a hallucination--but whose hallucination is it, hers or her sister''s?A woman nostalgically visits her old college dormitory on the outskirts of Tokyo, a boarding house run by a mysterious triple amputee with one leg.Hauntingly spare, beautiful, and twisted, The Diving Pool is a disquieting and at times darkly humorous collection of novellas about normal people who suddenly discover their own dark possibilities.

Yoko Ogawa''s The Housekeeper and the Professor is an enchanting story about what it means to live in the present, and about the curious equations that can create a family. He is a brilliant math Professor with a peculiar problem—ever since a traumatic head injury, he has lived with only eighty minutes of short-term memory. She is an astute young Housekeeper—with a ten-year-old son—who is hired to care for the Professor. And every morning, as the Professor and the Housekeeper are introduced to each other anew, a strange and beautiful relationship blossoms between them. Though he cannot hold memories for long (his brain is like a tape that begins to erase itself every eighty minutes), the Professor''s mind is still alive with elegant equations from the past. And the numbers, in all of their articulate order, reveal a sheltering and poetic world to both the Housekeeper and her young son. The Professor is capable of discovering connections between the simplest of quantities—like the Housekeeper''s shoe size—and the universe at large, drawing their lives ever closer and more profoundly together, even as his memory slips away.

Brought to you by Penguin.On sleepless nights, I open the matchbox and reread the story of the girl who gathered shooting stars.After the death of her father, twelve-year-old Tomoko is sent to live for a year with her uncle in the coastal town of Ashiya. It is a year which will change her life.The 1970s are bringing changes to Japan and her uncle''s magnificent colonial mansion opens up a new and unfamiliar world for Tomoko; its sprawling gardens are even home to a pygmy hippo the family keeps as a pet. Tomoko finds her relatives equally exotic and beguiling and her growing friendship with her cousin Mina draws her into an intoxicating world full of secret crushes and elaborate storytelling.Rich with the magic and mystery of youth, Mina’s Matchbox is an evocative snapshot of a moment frozen in time, and a striking depiction of a family on the edge of collapse.Praise for Mina''s Matchbox''I read Mina’s Matchbox like a besotted child, enraptured, never wanting it to end.'' RUTH OZEKI, author of The Book of Form and Emptiness''Dreamy and whimsical, Mina’s Matchbox traffics in the themes at which Ogawa always excels: memory, identity, and nostalgia'' Esquire, Best Books of the Summer''A conspicuously gifted writer. . . To read Ogawa is to enter a dreamlike state. . . She possesses an effortless, glassy, eerie brilliance'' Guardian©2024 Yoko Ogawa (P)2024 Penguin Audio

Brought to you by Penguin.Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2020, an enthralling Orwellian novel about the terrors of state surveillance from one of Japan''s greatest writers.__________Hat, ribbon, bird rose.To the people on the island, a disappeared thing no longer has any meaning. It can be burned in the garden, thrown in the river or handed over to the Memory Police. Soon enough, the island forgets it ever existed.When a young novelist discovers that her editor is in danger of being taken away by the Memory Police, she desperately wants to save him. For some reason, he doesn''t forget, and it''s becoming increasingly difficult for him to hide his memories. Who knows what will vanish next?__________Finalist for the National Book Award 2019Longlisted for the Translated Book Award 2020New York Times 100 Notable Books of the Year''This timeless fable of control and loss feels more timely than ever'' Guardian, Books of the Year''Echoes the themes of George Orwell''s 1984, but it has a voice and power all its own'' Time''A novel that makes us see differently... A masterpiece'' Madeleine Thien©2019 Yoko Ogawa (P)2023 Penguin Audio