日本語で読むということ

collection of very short pieces, maybe interesting if you like the author

This book is a collection of the author's non fiction writing that was originally published in various magazines or newspapers in the 1990s and 2000s. It’s been arranged thematically (writing about books she’s read, autobiographical/memoir type stuff, writing about her own books, and about work in general) but there’s no particular throughline or argument, so it’s a good book to pick up, read an essay or two and then not touch for another week. The pieces vary in length from as short as a single page up to about ten pages at the long end.

I liked the first two thirds of the book, and in particular the parts where she's writing about books she likes. The "writing about her own books" section I found less interesting and also a little repetitive, because for each of her books there are two or three pieces originally written for different venues, and they tend to hit the same points. Some of the pieces in the book are very slight (there's a list of her top ten foreign novels), and some I didn't have the context to really care about (one of the pieces is a eulogy for the author 辻邦生 who I'd never heard of -- though it turns out that I had actually read one of his books, the award winning https://learnnatively.com/book/f56622b99a/ !). I give it three stars overall for "interesting if you like this kind of thing and know the author, but I wouldn't actively recommend it".

When I bought this I was hoping for non fiction writing that was making an argument, like her book 増補 日本語が亡びるとき: 英語の世紀の中で, but it is not that kind of essay. There is a second volume of the author’s non-fiction 日本語で書くということ which judging from the Amazon reviews seems to have her more heavyweight writing (Mizumura even says in the あとがき for this book that as an author she'd rather you read that other volume!). I’ll probably pick that up at some point.