I have so many books that I have finally decided to sell them, or at least try to sell them. I am so attatched to all my books, it’s so hard to part with them. I love the way they look on my shelves, the way they smell (old and new books have their own distinct smells) and I just like to look at them. Problem is, unless the book really grabbed me, I won’t be reading them again. And so they end up sitting there on my shelves, collecting dust while I collect more! My shelves are oberflowing with books.
Before I sell them or give them away I decided to do little book reviews on the ones I remember reading the most, that way it might not be so hard to let them go. You may notice that a lot of them are about or related to Japan. That is because for a long time I was really into everything Japanese! It really only started to go away after I went there in May 2011 with a good friend of mine. It seems like thats just what I needed, because after that It felt like I was able to allow myself to find new interests including Yoga, Essential Oils, Doctor Who, Gardening, Downton Abbey, British Culture, Reading more Classic literature, and becoming interested in my own Maritime Canadian Heritage.
All that being said, I really can’t write reviews, maybe I will get better the more I do them, but I want to write a little bit about each novel before I let them go. 🙂
The first novel I will be reviewing is Snakes and Earrings by Hitomi Kanehara.
I remember really liking this book, and being excited that I was able to read a translated from Japanese book. At the time that I read this I had not read many books my Japanese authors, so it was pretty exciting for me, who was pretty obsessed with the country at the time. While fictional, it was still able to depict a part of Japanese underground culture that I did not know a lot about.
The narrator is 19 year old Lui Nakazawa, a girl from a normal family, described as a “Barbie Girl”. She meets Ama at a club, following him home the same night and moving in with him immediately. She is drawn to his forked tongue and tattoo’s, and decides that she herself would like to have her tongue forked too. She arranges with Ama’s friend, Shiba, to design a dragon tattoo for her, and ends up having an affair, which causes a whole lot of shit to happen.
It is a really short book, and an easy read. Some people say that they did not like it because the writing was simple, or it could have been lost in translation, but this also was Hitomi Kanehara’s first novel.
There is a feature film that stars  Yuriko Yoshitaka as Lui, Kengo Kora as Ama and Arata as Shiba. Shun Oguri and Tasuya Fujiwara also has a role in this movie too! So if you don’t feel like reading the book you can always watch the movie!
Girl With An Owl Hat 