This book is 2 short stories
This wasn’t the book for me. I found it to be extremely boring. I couldn’t warm to any of the characters and I didn’t like the writing style.

The stories made me uncomfortable and I think that was probably the aim of the author. But I was only uncomfortable without actually also feeling the need to think or act on that emotion and so after finishing it, I feel like this stories won’t stay with me.

The book consists of two short novellas—Touring The Land of the Dead, and Ninety-nine Kisses—which, despite their differences, somehow seem connected through the common theme of family.

In the first one, we meet a woman, Natsuko, who goes on vacation with her husband, Taichi, who has recently become a wheelchair user. The trip is more than just a holiday—they visit places Natsuko kept hearing about as a child, places that her family mythologized as symbols of the splendor her grandfather could afford. Throughout her life, Natsuko had to face her family's expectations and outright abuse, and it's the central focus of this simple, contained story. Through flashbacks, we find out all about her life and what brought her to this place. It's a painful and relatable dissection of a dysfunctional family, which reads fairly easy despite its topic.

Ninety-nine Kisses is about sisters growing up together and discovering their womanhood and sexuality. I don't know about this one, I think I've read enough stories about girls becoming women through growing boobage and interest in boys.

So while I definitely recommend the first one as an exploration of trauma and maturity, the second one was not my jam.

This was actually two novellas. Even though they were polar opposites, they were both just really strange and bizarre, and not in an enjoyable way for me unfortunately.

I would say the writing/translation was promising and the ideas were really unique, there was just something about the execution which really fell flat.

Thanks to Europa Editions and NetGalley for the Advance Review Copy in exchange for an honest review.

I'm not going to spend a whole lot of time on this review as it slants towards the negative and it's not productive for anyone to just slag something off.

The book is made up of two short novellas. I struggled to engage with the first, telling the story of Natsuko and her disabled husband but towards the end I was able to see chinks of genuine feeling and overall I found it quite touching. It was very depressing to read however.

The second novella I had to stop reading when I started to veer into incest. I'm pretty open minded but that's a hard pass for me. Maybe it went somewhere profound but I couldn't get past my own personal aversion to it to read any further.

I enjoy all things Japanese , so I was really looking forward to this and I wasn’t disappointed. The descriptions of the Japan, the food, people and areas were just perfect. The two novellas are very different, but both very interesting and a a very unique read.

Thanks to netgalley and the publisher for a free copy for an honest opinion

I thoroughly enjoyed both of these stories with a common theme of family relationships and looking back on relationships with those who have passed on. A fan of Japanese fiction, I was particularly taken with the descriptions of the locations visited or the areas that the characters lived in and then spent an afternoon looking up the dishes that the characters were eating in both the stories!
Thoroughly recommend.

These two novellas were very different but equally strange. The first one, 'Touring the Land of the Dead', started with a wife caring for a disabled husband and, as they prepare to spend two days in a hotel turned into a health centre, reminisces about her childhood and her dysfunctional family. I kept thinking this would go somewhere... but it didn't. I have read and enjoyed plenty of books where seemingly nothing ever happens, but this left me a different impression - like many false starts. I kept waiting for a revelation or a twist that never happened.

The second one, 'Ninety Nine Kisses', was so odd that I almost could not finish it. Similarly, not much actually happens - can't say too much without spoiling the book - for most of the novella; we instead follow the narrator's thoughts about her sisters - the three of them, and more specifically the one who gets a boyfriend, as she fantasises about them, listening to one of them as she masturbates in her room. One scene shows the family, headed by a single mother, at a restaurant where the daughters ask their mum what it was like having sex with their dad. The mum happily responds.

It was well-written (or well-translated) but odd and uncomfortable, and the discomfort did not seem to have any aim... it was painful to read and I can't say I enjoyed it. 2.5 rounded up.

Two novellas, whose substance and approach are poles apart.

The first, "Touring the Land of the Dead", is a melancholy reflection of a woman’s life and her restrained efforts to reconcile with it.

Learning how despicably Natsuko was treated by her ungrateful, needy family was a pretty depressing affair. They chipped away at her good nature piece by little piece and now, after escaping ‘that life’ as she constantly refers to it, her husband’s continuing welfare presents its own demands.

As her past and present ebb and flow, it feels as though she has dutifully shielded others from the elements, while a slow, painful erosion of her ‘self’ has taken place.

And then I was greeted by a mini-saga that is obsessed with over-sharing the unrelenting confused, intimate, and random thoughts of one of four unmarried sisters in particular.

Put it this way, if there was a literary scale of oddness "Ninety-Nine Kisses" would easily unbalance them. While I do like to read outside my comfort zone I’d rather not feel uncomfortable while reading, which unfortunately is something this particular novella achieved with ease.

Two short novellas that, at first, seem quite different, but on closer reading reveal a common theme of a woman who feels that her identity is formed by those around her, that she has no real sense of self, and who slowly comes to realise the truth of her situation.

In the title story, Natsuko takes her ailing husband Taichi to a seaside hotel that, many years ago, her grandfather had taken her family. The hotel is tired and the paint peeling, but over the course of their stay Natsuko is forced to confront her memories of her mother and her husband, and the trip becomes one where she slowly starts to heal herself, finally able to forge even just a small sense of self-identity.

In 'Ninety-Nine Kisses' we have a tale of fours sisters, narrated by Nanako, the youngest. Quite different in tone to the previous novella, this is a highly-sexualised group of women, including their mother, whose carefully balanced existence is shaken by the arrival of S., a young man whom all of the sisters take a fancy and who ends up having a relationship with one of them. Nanako has always seen herself purely as someone who only exists to reflect or support the others, not necessarily as an individual: 'I don't have my own story. My story is that of my sisters.'

I really enjoyed these, the writing is beautifully slow and descriptive, and it is no surprise that the title story won the Akutagawa Prize a few years ago. It is a story with deliberate echoes of past Japanese greats, a slow meditation on love and the possibility of finding oneself. The second story is quite a contrast, openly sexual and playing with some darker themes. I got echoes of Shirley Jackson, with the strange relationships between the sisters, and it is a nice balance to the title story's theme of a woman finding herself late in life; this time, Nanako's innocent childhood is coming to an end as she is about to enter the world of adulthood.


These may not be for everyone, but I would highly recommend them to fans of Japanese literature who will appreciate the imagery and references to other works, and to those who appreciate a quiet, meditative story rather than a purely plot-driven thrillerama. A definite 4 stars.

(With thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for an ARC of this title.)

Novella 1: Touring the Land of the Dead
As the narrator reminisces about the past, you get a glimpse into her innermost thoughts. You read about what it is like to be married to someone suffering from a disease. Her husband feels fulfilled and she sees no reason to deny him that. In the end, her silent acceptance of her marriage helps her deal with that life, her past.

The author hits the mark when describing the not quite happy moments of camaraderie paired with moments of loneliness while being in each other’s company. Just when the married couple seems to make a real connection, they drift apart again. It is like an unconscious teasing game except neither of them disregards the other. They share a quiet appreciation for the presence of the other. To Natsuko and Taichi, their non-perfect counterpart is a very important person.

Maki Kashimada carefully balances a tone of resignation and gratefulness. Natsuko’s emotions and thoughts are portrayed beautifully.

Novella 2: Ninety-nine kisses
This novella is about the acceptance or rejection of the way you love. It is also a story about sisterly love and exploring your sexuality. The four sisters are vastly different and you get to know them well in this short novella. The story starts with a sisterly rivalry when one of the sisters starts dating. The narrator herself is less charmed by the man in question, but instead, she is infatuated with her sisters in a sexual way and struggles with her obscene thoughts. Her rising awareness of her desires is explored in a very natural way, mixing present and past, without providing an insight into the future.

Because of the incestuous thoughts and insinuations, this story will not be for everyone.

Final thoughts
I liked both novellas. Slowly Maki Kashimada lays bare the feelings of the narrators. The characters are multidimensional persons that you get to know intimately. I especially loved the moments that the narrators realize something that helps them understand and accept their feelings better. Even though there is no way (or desire) to escape reality, I’d like to think that they will improve their happiness by learning from the people close to them.

Touring the Land of the Dead was so dull that I was almost leaving the book altogether. But I wanted to love it and kept my hopes up. In the end, I didn’t hate it, but I must say I forget it already. Although it was a novella, it felt like a 1000 pages long novel. Reading about an unfunctional family and a woman, with a disabled husband, reminiscing about her past was depressing. In the end, it didn’t make me think about much; I was just annoyed.

Ninety-Nine Kisses was bizarre. The narrator has three big sisters, and she has sexual fantasies about them. Their daily life changes when a handsome man moves to their neighbourhood. All the big sisters want to be with that man, and this changes the atmosphere at home. That was not a joy to read, but I kept reading it, hoping there would be something I could get out of it but no, nothing. So this was also annoying.

disclaimer: in the below review I am expressing my own entirely subjective opinion. I do not wish to invalidate anyone's feelings or thoughts about this book. If you loved it or liked it, huzzah!
If you are thinking of reading this I recommend you check out some more positive reviews.

Touring the Land of the Dead comprises two short stories. The first one follows Natsuko who is travelling with her husband, who after an unspecified neurological disease requires walking aids (he sometimes walks with a cane or uses a wheelchair). The way the narrative treats Taichi's disability is somewhat...questionable? Then again, I also recognise that many countries treat those with visible disabilities as 'undesirable' or 'pitiable' (I myself come from a country that isn't exactly disability-friendly). Anyhow, Natsuko is going to this spa with Taichi, hoping for...rest? I don't know. It wasn't very clear. All the while we get pages and pages of flashbacks which give us unnecessary glimpses into Natsuko's relationship with her horrid mother and dick of a brother. Natsuko is a kind of Cinderella who is ill-treated by her awful and greedy family. They treat her poorly, throw abuse at her, use her as a monetary source, and even behave abhorrently towards Taichi, who is shown to be kind and respectful towards them. I would have much preferred for these flashbacks to be focused on Natsuko and Taichi, as opposed her unpleasant relatives. The prose was uninspiring and occasionally clunky. At times dialogues had quotation marks, at times they were in italics (and no, it wasn't as if one indicated a conversation occurred in the past and the other in the 'now'). I'm afraid I found this to be boring, unconvincing, and utterly forgettable.
The second story, 'Ninety-Nine Kisses', was a mess. I have no idea what it was trying to achieve but...bleargh. The narrative seemed to equate incest-y thoughts with quirkiness...which did little other than alienate me.
Overall, I had a hard time immersing myself into these stories. Usually while I read I am 'pulled' into a story, but here...nothing happened. I read some words. That's that.

ARC provided by NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Touring the Land of the Dead (and Ninety-Nine Kisses) by Maki Kashimada and translated by Haydn Trowell is an upcoming release from Europa Press (March 2021). Starting this year with a book of novellas was reminiscent of last year and reading Kitchen. On the surface the two novellas included in this book do not have much in common but they have more to say than at first glance.
Touring the Land of the Dead is about a husband and wife, Taichi and Natsuko, who go on holiday together to a spa that Natsuko spent time at as a child. Her mother and brother are quite despicable and are especially awful and ableist toward her husband, who is disabled and uses walking aides, and to her throughout her life. The holiday to the past brings up many painful memories and thoughts for her, but in reliving them she heals.

In Ninety-Nine Kisses the youngest of four sisters recounts the arrival of S, a new young man who moves to their neighbourhood, and how it changes their dynamic and reveals things about each of them in turn.

The writing was lovely and different from many of the Japanese books I have read. I enjoyed both narrative voices, one for its intense introspection and the other for its explorations of sexuality. I look forward to more books by Maki Kashimada being translated.

Thank you Netgalley and Europa Editions for the egalley. All opinions are entirely my own.

Touring the Land of the Dead has been translated by Haydn Trowell from the Japanese original by Maki Kashimada.

The book actually consists of two short novellas, the title piece and Ninety-Nine Kisses (of similar length with the total book running to only 144 pages).

Both stories are emotionally charged, with an obsessive first person narrator, and both also effectively, evoke the setting and particularly the food, colour of modern day Tokyo, aided by Trowell’s translation that leaves several words untranslated (although Romanized), albeit often with a gloss added for context (e.g. this on the ubiquitous street food snack) :

“One afternoon, Meiko came home in a really good mood, carrying a freshly cooked taiyaki. She set the fish-shaped cake down on the table oh-so-carefully.”

Touring the Land of the Dead won the 2012上 Akutagawa Prize for rising authors in the original - other winners of the prize since include Masatsugu Ono and Sayaka Murata (for the novel that in English became Convenience Store Woman).

The story is narrated by Natsuko, in her early 30s. She has been married for 8 years to Taichi, but shortly after their marriage he suffered the first in a series of seizures, that have left him wheel-chaired bound:

“Three years of repeated hospitalizations had passed since then, and five again since they had learned the name of the disease. Yet to Natsuko, as exacting as those eight years had been, they were still better than what had come before. She didn’t want to call to mind the time before she had met her husband, and referred to her past only as that life. That life— truly, the only words with which she could describe those unspeakable experiences. Not poverty, not loneliness, not sickness, but that life.”

The brain-injured Taichi is remarkably content with their, now relatively impoverished life, “almost pitifully blind to the malice of others, and yet as innocently dependent on his wife as ever”.

Which contrast strongly to her mother and brother, the family now having fallen on hard times, with the former hankering greedily after the richer days of her youth and the latter an alcoholic spendthrift, both suffering from unrealistic ambitions and “a cacophony of incoherent delusions.”

The story itself centres around Natsuko taking Taichi on a trip to a spa, once a luxury hotel much beloved of Natsuko’s grandfather and where she herself visited when she was 8, now rather run-down:

“Local Health Retreat. Special Accommodation Discount. 5,000 Yen Per Night. Weekdays Only Through February.


Reading it, she found herself being carried away, torn by a contradiction of callous pleasure and unbearable pain. It was the luxury resort hotel where she had gone with her parents and brother as a child.”

The contrast of the hotel to its former self mirroring the fall in Natsuko’s family and the trigger for her memories and bitter reflections that constitute the story.

Ninety-Nine Kisses is inspired by Junichiro Tanizaki's epic novel, 細雪, The Makioka Sisters in Edward G. Seidensticker’s translation (although the original title is closer to light snow, a poetic image of falling cherry blossoms), ,based on a four sisters from wealthy Osakan family in the years before the entry of Japan in WW2. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Makioka_Sisters)

”The ancients waited for cherry blossoms, grieved when they were gone, and lamented their passing in countless poems. How very ordinary the poems had seemed to Sachiko when she read them as a girl, but now she knew, as well as one could know, that grieving over fallen cherry blossoms was more than a fad or convention.”

Ninety-Nine Kisses updates the setting to modern-day Tokyo.

Nanako, a college student, is the youngest of four sisters (the oldest 32) with whom she has a very close, almost incesteous, relationship:

“Meiko, Moeko, Yo¯ko, I thought, chanting their names like some kind of love spell. Words have power, even by themselves. That’s why I don’t say them very much. Words like love, or death. Whenever I recite the names of my three sisters, I find myself drifting off into a deep fog. Even at college the other day, during a lecture about Marcel Pagnol, I wasn’t really paying attention to whatever my French professor, Monsieur Kimura, was saying. I just sat in my seat, repeating the names of my beloved sisters to myself over and over, writing them down again and again in my notebook.
...
“Sounds like a sister complex to me,” my classmate Tamura said when we went to Hanake to get a bite to eat.”

The close relationship of the sisters and their mother - they have vowed to each other not to marry - is disrupted when an outsider comes on the scene and each of the sisters falls in love with him, leading to much jealousy between them, all except Nanako whose jealousy is rather that the man might steal away one of her beloved sisters:

“When I got home, my sisters were all gossiping about this guy called S whom we had seen at the Azalea Festival at Nezu Shrine. He had only just moved into the neighborhood, but my sisters had already fallen for him. I had happened to see him myself not too long ago too, over at the Mad Hat. Everyone else was drinking Jinro, but then there he was, the odd one out with that Bloody Caesar of his. The Mad Hat. A run-down drinking house in the middle of this Shitamachi, this laid-back low town nestled in the old-fashioned, earthy half of Tokyo far from the bustle and commotion of the Yamanote. And this smug, pretentious-looking outsider sipping at his cocktail. He clearly didn’t belong here.”

This story has a very strong sense of place, and Japanese literary echoes:

“The place had something to do with the Bluestocking Society, the feminist literary group that used to be active around here a century ago. He was staring intently at the sign that described their connection to the local area. And then, completely out of nowhere, he went and kissed it.

My mind started wandering. Why had he kissed it? Did he feel some kind of reverence toward Hiratsuka Raicho ¯? I could picture it so vividly. S, kissing my sisters against their will. My bookish sisters, who had so eagerly devoured the works of Uno Chiyo and Okamoto Kanoko back when they were kids.”

Overall: I am generally a fan of shorter books, although here I did feel, at c70 pages each, I would have liked to stay longer in the world of the stories, to become more attuned to the narrator’s strong passions. But a striking voice and an author I hope to see more of in English. Her The Kingdom of Zero, reworking Doestevsky to tell the tale of a saintly Idiot in Japan, sounds particularly intriguing. 3.5 stars rounded to 4.

Thanks to the publisher via Netgalley for the ARC.

trigger warning
<spoiler> mention of suicde, mention of sexual harassment, gaslighting, alcoholism </spoiler>

This book includes two stories. The first is about a trip a wife and her disabled husband make, with her reminiscing about her past; the second is about another protagonist coming to terms with the fact that one of her three sisters started dating.

Story one was depressing because of the family dynamic, story two was weird as the protagonist kept <spoiler> having sexual fantasies about her siblings </spoiler>.
This was not my cup of tea and I am not sure if I would have kept on reading if it had been longer.

I probably won't pick up further works by this author.
The arc was provided by the publisher.