Ginko Ogino was just sixteen when her mother and older sister arranged her marriage, as was custom in nineteenth-century Japan. When she returned home violently ill three years later, overcome with fever and infection due to gonorrhea, her family was shamed. Her story begins here, though, for during her embarrassing treatment in the male-dominated hospital,

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Silence by Shusaku Endo is an unusual book compared to the other Japanese novels I’ve read. It’s an historical fiction novel, taking place in 1600s Japan, and it is about faith. It is about trusting in God, or not, when things get hard. Yet, to some extent, Silence seems similar to the other Japanese novels

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Nobel laureate (1968) Yasunari Kawabata is obviously talented at describing scenes, and there was, in The Old Capital, something refreshing about a slow-paced story of a young woman coming into a realization of herself. In her free time, Chieko would see the cherry blossoms and visit the cedar forests. It was a celebration of the

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