Category: Literature
After Nasu: The consumption of myth as data
Our search for the Nasu copycats means it is time to expand the conversation beyond just him. We came looking for a genre, but what does that even mean?
The rise of Kinoko Nasu: A cultural autopsy
Fate/stay night and Kinoko Nasu feel like a whole genre on their own. But why aren’t there more Nasu copycats?
Catch-up: Nine book reviews
Nine book reviews to catch up on what I’ve been reading and enjoying while taking a bit of a break from blogging.
Tsukumojuuku and Symbolic Realities
Tsukumojuuku by Outarou Maijou succeeds in crafting something that seems authentically confessional out of deconstruction and metatext.
An Anthologised Review of Locked Outside of Mystery
A guest post? A review of an entire short story anthology? Now, this is something entirely different from usual…
Fiction and the world: Our Sekai Breakdown
To be direct about it, Our Broken World (Sekai vol. 1) is my favourite novel ever written. Here is a review.
Despair: Russian anti-mystery
Nabokov’s Despair takes the form of a mystery novel, inverts it, and stuffs its insides with the aesthetics and logic of artistic, modernist fiction. In this sense, it might well be the first true “anti-mystery”.
Who cares who killed X? You should.
Using shinhonkaku mysteries as a case study to expand on why genres matter for contemporary literature.
Genre, as Device
The dynamics and meaning of genre; Viktor Shklovsky, Kiyoshi Kasai, Genre X, and Hollywood.
What Yuki Nagato and Light Yagami read
A portrait of popular Japanese literature trends leading into the early 2000s and the ascent of otakudom.
