Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2014 - The Shadow Jury announces the winner

In 2014, for the third year in a row, Chairman Stu gathered together a group of brave bloggers to tackle the task of shadowing the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.  It's not a task for the faint of heart - in addition to having to second-guess the strange decisions of the 'real' panel, the foolhardy volunteers undertook a voyage around the literary world, all in a matter of months...

On our journey around the globe, we started off by eavesdropping on some private conversations in Madrid, before narrowly avoiding trouble with the locals in Naples.  A quick flight northwards, and we were in Iceland, traipsing over the snowy mountains and driving around the iconic ring road - with a child in tow.  Then it was time to head south to Sweden and Norway, where we had a few drinks (and a lot of soul searching) with a man who tended to talk about himself a lot.

Next, it was off to Germany, where we almost had mussels for dinner, before spending some time with an unusual family on the other side of the wall.  After another brief bite to eat in Poland, we headed eastwards to reminisce with some old friends in Russia - unfortunately, the weather wasn't getting any better.

We finally left the snow and ice behind, only to be welcomed in Baghdad by guns and bombs.  Nevertheless, we stayed there long enough to learn a little about the customs involved in washing the dead, and by the time we got to Jerusalem, we were starting to have a bit of an identity crisis...

Still, we pressed on, taking a watery route through China to avoid the keen eye of the family planning officials, finally making it across the sea to Japan.  Having arrived in Tokyo just in time to witness a series of bizarre 'accidents', we rounded off the trip by going for a drink (or twelve) at a local bar with a strangely well-matched couple - and then it was time to come home :)

Of course, there was a method to all this madness, as our journey helped us to eliminate all the pretenders and identify this year's cream of the crop.  And the end result?  This year's winner of the Shadow Independent Foreign Fiction Prize is:

The Sorrow of Angels by Jón Kalman Stefánsson

(translated by Philip Roughton, published by MacLehose Press)

This was a very popular (and almost unanimous) winner, a novel which stood out amongst a great collection of books.  We all loved the beautiful, poetic prose, and the developing relationship between the two main characters - the taciturn giant, Jens, and the curious, talkative boy - was excellently written.  Well done to all involved with the book - writer, translator, publisher and everyone else :)

Some final thoughts to leave you with...

- Our six judges read a total of 83 books (an average of almost fourteen per person), and ten of the books were read and reviewed by all six of us.

- This was our third year of shadowing the prize and the third time in a row that we've chosen a different winner to the 'experts'.

- After the 2012 Shadow Winner (Sjón's From the Mouth of the Whale), that makes it two wins out of three for Iceland - Til hamingju!

- There is something new about this year's verdict - it's the first time we've chosen a winner which didn't even make the 'real' shortlist...

Stu, Tony, Jacqui, David, Bellezza and Tony would like to thank everyone out there for all their interest and support over the past few months - rest assured we're keen to do it all over again next year :) 

Revenge - Yoko Ogawa (translated by Stephen Snyder) - Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2014

To be honest I really don’t know how to start this review, or actually how to write this review. I toyed with the idea of a long homage to Karl Ove Knausgaard and writing a diatribe about the importance of writing a decent review, interspersed with coffee and cigarette breaks as I contemplate the style. I thought the raw emotional style would suit, then I decided that actually that would fit better with an emotive work.

I toyed with comparisons to Ogawa’s “The Diving Pool”, her dark, bleak musings on human frailties, death, decay, the human form and its fragile state. Then I realised this is a stand-alone work and I’m judging it on its contribution to this year’s Independent Foreign Fiction Prize list. I didn’t compare Karl Ove Knausgaard to volume one, I didn’t compare Jon Kalman Stefansson’s “The Sorrow of Angels” to “Heaven and Hell” and their recent works are part of a larger release (both being part two of longer bodies of work). So if I didn’t do that why on earth should I compare Ogawa’s work to an earlier release of hers, one which isn’t even related?

Does this introduction get me any further in the quest to review Ogawa’s latest work? Not at all, should I have another cup of coffee, contemplate it and start again?

I know the reason for my struggle, it lies in the fact that I wasn’t overly blown away by the eleven stories in this collection. That’s not to say I don’t think it is a good work, I just think they were formulaic. Clever? Yes. Memorable? Maybe. Enjoyable? Sort of. Worthy of inclusion on the shortlist for the Prize? In my opinion, no. You watch it take out the main gong now I’ve said that.

Ogawa gives us eleven interconnected tales. Gothic in style and content. Each story contains references to decay (generally fruit), whether it be the strawberries on a cake, kiwi fruit, ageing bodies, decrepit abandoned buildings. Each story contains references to the weather – in some it is stifling hot, others it snows – so we know these interconnected stories happen over all seasons, but the mystical quality alludes to them happening concurrently. Each story is a first person narration, and almost a-sexual, a couple of times I found myself startled that the narrator was in fact male (or vice versa) sometime into the story. And of course each story contains some sort of macabre death, carrots that grow like the form of human hands and we discover there’s a body in the garden which has had the hands hacked off, people who are living with their heart outside of their ribcage are done away with in a hospital, lovers feuds, children – why list them all? There’s eleven.

This is where I thought this was a lesser work, it is as though Ogawa had a set of cards, each with a theme (death, decay, weather etc.) wrote up eleven different approaches, shuffled them and wrote the stories, sure to include each theme and at least one reference to another story. Even the mundane becomes subjects for her musings:

Now, you may be wondering why I get so excited. You may be thinking that a bag is just a thing in which you put other things. And you’re right, of course. But that’s what makes them so extraordinary. A bag has no intentions or desires of its own, it embraces every object that we ask it to hold. You trust the bag, and it, in return, trusts you. To me, a bag is patience; a bag is profound discretion.

Please don’t take my views as being critical of this work, it is a fine collection of Edgar Allan Poe (esque) style works, with the macabre always bubbling in the background of each story. A museum of torture implements? But we have the human frailties are uncertainties all bubbling along too:

As I walked, I recalled, one by one, all the times I had ever been rejected. This process had become something of a ritual with me since my husband’s affair had started. I would unearth memories, beginning in childhood, of places and occasions when someone had hurt me. In that way, I believed, I would see that my pain was due not only to my husband but to the cruelty of countless others besides. I found it somewhat comforting to think that his coldness was in no way special or unique.

If you haven’t read anything by Ogawa before this would be a nice introduction to her mysterious world of evil. Personally I thought the longer form of three stories taking up 55 pages each in “The Diving Pool” allowed deeper exploration of the human frailties, the slow mood of decay and death. The shorter works seeming pressed to put all those themes onto the page.

This wasn’t in my top six books from the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize long list for the above reasons. Not saying this is a bad work, or one that is flawed, I just thought she has written better material.

The Mussel Feast - Birgit Vanderbeke (translated by Jamie Bulloch) - Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2014

Pardon my ignorance here, but how can a “modern German classic” one that “won the most prestigious German-language literature award, the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize”, that was first published in 1990 and “has not been out of print since”, one that has “been translated into all major European languages”, take 23 years before somebody picks it up, translates it into English and releases it in Britain? What is going on here?  Surely such honoured works don’t just slip into oblivion for English readers? It does make you think, “How many untranslated masterpieces are sitting out there?” I could go into the merits of the Best Translated Book Award that doesn’t restrict their winner to being “alive” but may be another time. I should simply thank the independent publisher Peirene Press for bringing this work to life in English. www.peirenepress.com

The 2014 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize features a number of short works and “The Mussel Feast” is yet another. Weighing in at 105 pages and 13 paragraphs (yes that is not a typo the book has thirteen paragraphs) it is a work that you feel you could knock over simply in one sitting.

Our story starts with our young (teenage?) narrator, via a monologue, explaining the process of cleaning mussels, because they’re having a feast, a celebration for their father as he’s about to return from a business trip. “We would always have mussels to celebrate a special occasion” but her and her mother don’t “care for them much”. On the surface a simple feast preparation for a normal family (there is a brother) about to celebrate the father’s potential promotion and his home-coming. Just like a mussel, strong, solid, shiny on the outside, resilient.

But soon our monologue reveals the true darkness of the family, the mussels begin to open. We are slowly led into the bleak world of a “normal family” that has moved from the East and settled in West Berlin. Even the pot that contains the mussel feast has a tale. As our night unfolds, and the ritual hour of the home-coming passes and hours tick away we slowly peel back the layers of this “proper family”:

We no longer liked being a proper family, as he called it. In truth we didn’t see ourselves as a proper family. Everything in our lives revolved around us having to behave as if we were a proper family, as my father pictured a family to be because he hadn’t had one himself and so didn’t know what a proper family was, although he’d developed the most detailed notions of what one was like; and while he sat in his office we played at being this, even though we’d far rather have let our hair down than be a proper family.

As the monologue continues we are drawn further into the horrors of this family unit, the omnipotent father has still not arrived but their uncomfortableness of him being all knowing, all seeing restricts their openness. As the hours tick by the special Spatlese starts to take effect and the revelations speed up, the honesty also opens up and the horrors become more revealing. Time seems to speed up too. The fully open mussels are now there for all to see, in all their resplendent colour, but because of the time, they’re ruined.

This is a moving and bleak tale of emotional and domestic violence, of manipulation and creation, a story where I had to double take and think…“have I ever said anything like that”? Dad’s come home from a long hard day, he just needs a bit of a rest…..

My father talked to my mother about his week at the office, whereas my mother didn’t talk to my father about her week at school, because the office was important and worth more than school.

The impressions that parents behaviour, actions and words makes on young children is all to the fore here, simple acts like discussing the next holiday are shown to be power struggles and with a domineering father in charge there is only going to be one outcome.

I don’t want to reveal too much of the family interactions and the opening up as the hours tick by and there is no father at the feast, I want to leave that startling unravelling to you as a potential reader. But I dare you to not be moved by the innocence, the acceptance of abnormal behaviour, and the reluctance to address it.

A book written just before the fall of the Berlin Wall, it shows the relentless ambition of the Eastern bloc settlers, their shame of their past, their need to create a “proper family”, what it means to keep up appearances at all costs, the relentless pursuit of promotion and the emotional and physical neglect that comes as baggage. A very moving book indeed.

Another amazing work that’s appeared on the 2014 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize long list (and now on both the Shadow Jury and the official shortlist) this is a book that every parent should read, even if it makes you simply think about the impact your day to day interactions with each other has on the children.

The Iraqi Christ - Hassan Blasim (translated by Jonathan Wright) - Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2014

Could you possibly imagine Gabriel Garcia Marquez being in Iraq? The magic realism spun into stories containing assassination attempts, decrepit hospitals, insurgents kidnapped and other Iraqi atrocities.

Hassan Blasim’s “The Iraqi Christ” contains 14 short stories set in Iraq or Finland or in some cases I don’t know where (it’s not important).  The title story itself (The Iraqi Christ) is about a soldier who can predict the future and as a result is given the nickname “Christ”, of course he is one of the most popular members of the regiment, leading people away from sabotage or air raids. However what choice does he make when having to choose between his own life and that of a loved one?

Like “The Corpse Washer” from the same prize list, we are transported to the heart of Iraq, a country under siege:

My voice was reminiscent of the city’s own symphony of mediocrity, the soulless, broken music produced by the machine of life: those sounds they have spattered us with shamelessly since childhood; their symphony that starts squeaking early in the morning, in shopping centres, banks, universities, hospitals, parliament buildings, bars and restaurants. The sounds of human ignominy. They’re incapable of loving each other so how can they understand out love for them? I felt that my mind was packed with sounds – the voices on buses and trains, the noises in planes and ships, the sound of domestic disputes, insults, abuse, the whistle of bullets, shouting, screaming, weeping, the chants of environmental protesters. Applause at the Peace Prize award ceremony at a time when new wars are breaking out in new hotspots, the sound of cars crashing, car bombs exploding, the cars of thieves, an ambulance, a bank truck loaded with bundles of banknotes, a fire engine. The sounds of mosques and churches, of Friday sermons and homilies, of group sex and glass breaking, sounds coming in the right ear and sounds going out the left ear. If we were deaf creatures – us and those humans – perhaps the world would be less painful. There are only two kinds of sound that are good for bringing about peace: the songs of the forest and music.

But unlike “The Corpse Washer” this is filled with fantasy, we have a story about a person who falls into a hole only to meet a djinni  (an Arabic supernatural creature) and the corpse of a Russian soldier from the Russian/Finland wars. We have a rabbit which lays an egg, a barfly returning home to find a wolf in his 4^th floor apartment, a group who can make knives disappear (and only one who can make them reappear). This is magic realism with a touch of agro.

Two years ago I was assigned to read books in order to find out what the knives meant, and I soon came to the idea that the knives were just a metaphor for all the terror, the killing and the brutality in the country. It’s a realistic phenomenon that is unfamiliar, and extraordinary game that has no value, because it is hemmed in by definite laws.

This collection of short stories is not an easy read, with metaphor throughout and if you don’t have a full appreciation of the horror and brutality that is Iraq some of the nuances could be lost (I’m sure there is a level that I completely lost). But this is an amazing collection, taking the shocking and the Kafkaesque style and throwing it in the face of a horrific war. If magic realism is your style then I can’t recommend this collection highly enough, another amazing Arabic work set in Iraq – I’m privileged to have come across two magnificent works in one year from what is becoming a very solid list of translated fiction.

A Meal in Winter - Hubert Mingarelli (translated by Sam Taylor) - Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2014

The author blurb in my edition of “A Meal In Winter” states “Hubert Mingarelli is the author of numerous novels, short story collections and fiction for young adults.”, and the flow of this simple story has a “young adult” feel - although of course the subject matter of WW2 atrocities is probably not young adult fare.

A very simple tale of three men (our narrator, Bauer and Emmerich) who avoid the rostered killings in a "German Nazi concentration camp in German-occupied Poland” and take to the road to find “one of them”. This story is closer to a short story than a novella even, my edition running to 138 pages with decent line spacing and short chapters, I’d hazard a guess at approximately 100 pages of reading.

We were all used to it, we knew what to expect, and yet the cold always came as a shock. It seemed as if it entered through your eyes and spread through your whole body like icy water pouring through two holes. The others were already there, lined up and shivering. While we found our places among them, they hissed at is that we were arse-holes for making the whole company wait like that. We said nothing. We got in line. And, when everyone had stopped shuffling their feet to get warm, Graaf, our lieutenant, told us that there would be more arrivals that day, but late probably, so the work was scheduled for the following day, and that this time our company would be taking care of it. I had the same thought as everyone else: was that all? Couldn’t he have told us that inside?

Two other features permeate this book throughout. The bitter cold and hunger – hence the title of the book. The solid ice, the deep snow, the fact that they can’t even smoke without numerous protective layers, throughout the story there are references to the bitterness. The hunger is stalled by smoking, shrinking back to one’s own thoughts and finally preparations for a simple broth – although lighting a fire to cook the meal is a challenge in itself.

The hunger made me dizzy, and the cold hurt my bones, but I was now thinking that today would end up being even better than my tram dream. I went back to the house with my spirits raised by these thoughts, and when I entered they rose even higher, because the temperature was now above zero.

Our three soldiers find a captive and take him to a hovel to spend the night before returning to camp with their captive. They are joined by a local Pole and they then start questioning the “moral implications of their murderous mission and confront their own consciences”.

I found the simple language of this story refreshing, the distance and moral implications of their roles in exterminating Jews chilling, the justification for their actions and the way they deal with such of course disturbing. A very short and sharp look into the Holocaust using a simple setting and a single meal as the stage for more personal reflection. The silence is described, the inner machinations of our narrator’s mind (as well as his assumptions of his companions) and the “how can I live with myself” moments are clear and concise.

A short review this time for a very short book. Probably not a contender for the main prize due to the brevity (a similar criticism I had of Colm Toibin’s “The Testament of Mary” on the Man Booker Prize list), that doesn’t mean it can’t be “the best work of fiction” I just think a little more meat in the soup may have helped.

My Struggle Book Two, A Man In Love - Karl Ove Knausgaard (Translated by Don Bartlett) - Independent Foreign Fiction Prize Long List 2014 - Best Translated Book Award 2014

Back in December 2013 I reviewed Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “My Struggle – Book One, A Death In The Family” and spoke highly of his attention to the most trivial of details, the minutiae which makes up our daily existence. How often does a novel go into such triviality? Of course taking three pages to describe the ordering of a takeaway cup of coffee could be considered frustrating, but when you’re struggling with the reasons for existence it could well be the minor details which shape the person we are. A “novel” which constantly reads like an open sore of a biography, how on earth is it so gripping?

Book two of Karl Ove’s six book series, moves from his struggle with his father’s death from alcoholism to his move from Norway to Sweden and his falling in love and having children. My edition is 573 pages and basically starts and ends with our writer taking his children to a broken down fair ground, but it is the flashbacks to how his children came into being and his reactions to becoming a family man that is the real story here. Or the story of Karl Ove’s struggle to just be a good person is probably more to the point.

His relationship and discussions with his friend Geir give us detail as to how Karl Ove verbalises his struggles. His friend’s jealousy of Karl Ove’s writing ability, for example:

“Technical? Technical” Easy for you to say, that is. You can spend twenty pages describing a trip to the bathroom and hold your readers spellbound. How many people do you think can do that? How many writers would not have done that if only they could? Why do you think people spend their time touching up their modernist poems, with three words on each page? It’s because they have no other option. After all these years surely you must understand that, for Christ’s sake. If they could have, they would have. You can, and you don’t appreciate it. It means nothing to you, and you would rather be clever and write in an essayistic style. But everyone can write essays! It’s the easiest thing in the world.”

How does an ordinary man, who thinks he has limited writing ability, who believes he is a poor father, son, brother and partner, fall in love and then come to terms with the imposition this places on his writing career?

Then I met Linda and the sun rose.

I can’t find a better way to express it. The sun rose in my life. At first, as dawn breaking on the horizon, almost as if to say, this is where you have to look. Then came the first rays of sunshine, everything became clearer, lighter, more alive, and I became happier and happier, and then it hung in the sky of my life and shone and shone and shone.

Such a struggle,, as we turn each page we are drawn into Karl Ove’s need for acceptance, need to define himself, need to write a truly memorable book.

That was where I had to go, to the essence, to the inner core of human existence. If it took forty years, so be it, it took forty years. But I should never lose sight of it, never forget it, that was where I was going.

There, there, there.

Amazingly as a reader you are reading about his struggle to write a novel (which in fact you have already read – if you’ve read Book One of course) and you are actually further down the path of his struggles as you’re now reading book two, but of course this is written as part of his development. All those peripheral details, the details that make up this man’s life and his love.

If only I could bridge this distance, I wrote. I would give everything in the world for that. But I can’t. I love you, and perhaps you think you love me, but you don’t. I believe you like me, I’m fairly sure of that, but I’m not enough for you, and you know that deepest down. Perhaps you need someone now, and then along I came, and you thought, well he might do. But I don’t want to be someone who might do, that’s not good enough for me, it has to be all or nothing, you have to be ablaze, the way I am ablaze. To want the way I want. Do you understand? Oh, I know you do. I have seen how strong you can be, I have seen how weak you can be and I have seen you open up to the world. I love you, but that isn’t enough. Being friends is meaningless. I can’t even talk to you! What kind of friendship would that be? I hope you don’t take this amiss. I’m just trying to say it as it is. I love you. That is how it is. And somewhere I always will, regardless of what happens to us.

These outpourings of the soul, to his partner, friends, and family are all on the pages to see, raw and exposed. To think these people would be reading this (once published) is at times cringe worthy, in some circumstances you’d not blame people for never talking to Karl Ove again.

As per Book One the way Karl Ove addresses the generally non public thoughts of a middle aged man is startling. To say a large chunk of this book expressed my own fears and doubts would be an understatement. Having said that I can understand that female readers may find this trite, self-absorbed and lacking in compassion. This is not a series for people not wanting to confront their daily fears.

Over recent years I had increasingly lost faith in literature. I read and thought this is something someone had made up. Perhaps it was because we were totally inundated with fiction and stories. It had got out of hand. Wherever you turned you saw fiction. All these millions of paperbacks, hardbacks, DVD’s and TV series, they were all about made-up people in a made-up, though realistic, world. And news in the press, TV news and radio news had exactly the same format, documentaries had the same format, they were also stories, and it made no difference whether what they told had actually happened or not. It was a crisis, I felt it in every fibre of my body, something saturating was spreading through my consciousness like lard, not the least because the nucleus of all this fiction, whether true or not, was verisimilitude and the distance it held to reality was constant. In other words, it saw the same. This sameness, which was our world, was being mass-produced. The uniqueness, which they all talked about, was thereby invalidated, it didn’t exist, it was a lie. Living like this, with the certainty that everything could equally well have been different, drove you to despair. I couldn’t write like this, it wouldn’t work, every single sentence was met with the thought: but you’re just making this up. It has no value. Fictional writing has no value, documentary narrative has no value. The only genres I saw value in, which still conferred meaning, were diaries and essays, the types of literature that did not deal with narrative, that were not about anything, but just consisted of a voice, the voice of your own personality, a life, a face, a gaze you could meet. What is a work of art if not the gaze of another person? Not directed above us, nor beneath us, but at the same height as our own gaze. Art cannot be experienced collectively, nothing can, art is something you are alone with. You meet its gaze alone.

What more can I say?

the briefcase - Hiromi Kawakami (aka Strange Weather in Tokyo) - Man Asian Literary Prize 2013 - Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2014

Here’s a challenge for you, write a novel about loneliness without becoming boring. Write one about emptiness without being melancholy, how about deep love without sentimentality? “the briefcase” is a moving sparse and deeply emotional tale of loneliness, emptiness and love but in a style that that is removed and scant enough to elicit a sadness that lingers long after the final page has been read.

This is the story of Tsukiko, in her late 30’s, a loner and a food aficionado who crosses paths with her former high school teacher, 30 years her senior, at a local eatery, she simply refers to him as Sensei (“Teacher”).  Their common love of food, saki and beer but their extreme yin/yang opposites is highlighted simply but effectively on page one:

Taking my seat at the counter, I ordered “tuna with fermented soybeans, fried lotus root, and salted shallots”, while the old man next to me requested “Salted shallots, lotus root fries, and tuna with fermented soybeans” almost simultaneously.

A novel that explores the Japanese food culture, with a hint of barfly behaviour as well as moving seamlessly through the seasons we become engaged with the first person narrative of our female lead through her thoughts, despair, awkwardness and speech (which is not always acknowledged with inverted commas, sometimes it just slips onto the page).

Her chance meeting with Sensei leads to further companionship through their shared love of the seasonal foods, mushroom hunting, and of course alcohol. Not all the seasonal changes are made as obvious as mentioning the weather, at times it is through the consuming of certain seasonal fish or vegetables or through the observations of the birds in empty or full blossoming trees. However the passing of time is understated enough for the reader to know it is significant without becoming laboured. The real story here is love but unacknowledged love whilst still suffering loneliness and emptiness:

It seemed strange to be surrounded by so many living things. When I was in Tokyo, I couldn’t help but feel I was always alone, or occasionally in the company of Sensei. It seemed like the only living things in Tokyo were big like us. But of course, if I really paid attention, there were plenty of other living things surrounding me in the city as well. It was never just the two of us, Sensei and me. Even when we were at the bar, I tended to only take notice of Sensei. But Satoru was always there, along with the crowd of familiar faces. And I never acknowledged that any of them were alive in any way. I never gave any thought to the fact that they were leading the same complicated life as I was.

I am not in anyway an expert on Japanese culture or writing and don’t understand enough of haiku to comment accurately, but I’m sure there are numerous meters and patterns throughout this novel that draw on traditional Japanese themes. Some sections are quite sparse and empty with just enough hint of relevance to the story to obviously delve into the lonely theme.

Old bastard, I said to myself, and then I repeated it out loud. “Old bastard” The old bastard must be taking a brisk walk around the island. I should just forget about him and go soak in the little outdoor hot spring at the guesthouse. Since I’m here on this island anyway. I’m going to enjoy myself on the trip whether Sensei is with me or not. I’ve managed on my own until now anyhow. I drink by myself, I get drunk by myself, and I have a good time by myself don’t I?

This is a difficult novel to review as I don’t want to give away the outcome of the deepening relationship between Tsukiko and Sensei. A short book (my edition is 176 pages) the awkwardness of a younger female having a relationship with an older man is not explicitly addressed whilst their deepening concern and love for each other becomes more apparent throughout, as does Tsukiko’s justification for her irrational actions (why remain lonely and empty when you have love on your doorstep?).  

I had given up worrying about Sensei’s intentions. I wouldn’t get attached. I wouldn’t distance us. He would be gentlemanly. I would be ladylike. A mild acquaintance. That’s what I had decided. Slightly, for the long term, and without expectations. No matter how I tried to get closer to him, Sensei would not let me near. As if there were an invisible wall between us. It might have seemed pliant and obscure, but when compressed it could withstand anything, nothing could get through. A wall made of air.

The title of the novel refers to Sensei’s constant companion “the briefcase” its relevance only becoming clear in the last sentence of the novel (and I’m not going to give that away). A moving but sad novel that covers an awkward subject matter, not just an affair between two people of different generations but the depth of Tsukiko’s emptiness and loneliness. Not my favourite novel of the shortlist to date (at this stage it goes to “The Garden of Evening Mists” just a smidgin in front of “Narcopolis”) but one I would highly recommend, a great shortlist this year.