死者の学園祭

[arisha]

死者の学園祭 (Shisha no Gakuensai)
by 赤川次郎 (Akagawa Jirou)
Amazon link301 pages, furigana on all kanji except numbers, a picture roughly every other chapter

Comments

[pm215]

I'm not sure if it's a cultural thing or just an Akagawa thing; certainly I've encountered some similarly problematic-seeming things in other books of his that I've read. Given that the author is 66 it is perhaps also a reflection of the culture of a previous generation.

[amaelamin]

I think this has a lot to do with it - and he's also been writing for almost 40 years, so a lot of his books were actually written during the previous generation, when this kind of thing was the norm. I think Japan still tends to lag a decade or two behind the West on a lot of social issues, but more recent fiction's generally a bit better on the gender roles. Student-teacher relationships aren't necessarily uncommon in modern fiction, but they are much more likely to be treated as problematic.

I think Akagawa is a good choice for people trying to break into standard Japanese fiction fairly painlessly, but he definitely is not deep or particularly original. I've found personally that I tend to enjoy his humorous stories more than the ones that play everything straight - just seems to mitigate the cringe factor a bit.

[arisha]

Thank you for the info! I didn't even think to research the author. I do agree though that his writing style is good for beginning readers, it's pretty straightforward. Would you recommend his humourous stories?

[arisha]

The age of the author is a good point that I didn't even think of! I did notice this book was first published in the '80s, but some of the attitudes in the book felt older than that to me. Makes a bit more sense now. :)