Natsuhiko Kyougoku’s Loups-Garous is a thrilling blend of traditional Japanese storytelling forms with modern genre sensibilities. It is my pick for book of the year for 2020.

All human stories have two eternal subjects: sex and violence. These, combined with the two primordial genres of Ancient Greek theatre, grant us a basic vocabulary with which we can categorise some of the “raw material” which makes up basic storytelling — all human societies create stories about romance, tragedy, war, comedy, and crime.

Intimacy is on the sharp decline among other-sex attracted persons, but not same-sex attracted persons. The fundamental assumption held for generation upon generation that men and women have an unmovable need to have sex with one another is being rapidly exposed as too simplistic.

Genre is such a useless framework on its own. Given that it serves as an universal intermediary between societies and their various art forms, you would expect a lot more from it. This has gotten me thinking about alternatives to conventional genre classifications and the appropriate uses for these alternatives.

‘Decapitation: Kubikiri Cycle (The Blue Savant and the Nonsense User)’ was the debut novel of the Japanese mystery and young-adult fiction author Ishin Nishio. It is a novel that has something to say, and is successful in saying it, while still being a viscerally satisfying work of fiction.

Is it worth reading even the corrupt and pathological descent of a pervert and madman? Nabokov has proven for the ages that the answer is absolutely a forceful yes.