Advent Calendar: December 10th

Imagine if you will a cross between Gormenghast, A Dance to the Music of Time and The Forsyte Saga. Only set in Japan.

What you have probably come up with, whether you realise it or not, is something pretty close to The House of Nire by Morio Kita.

This is a quite an obscure Japanese novel from the mid-1980s. Well, not so obscure that it hasn't been translated into English but sidelined enough that a bunch of Japanese people I know from the world of books have never read it.

Well I have, and it is wonderful.

Epics are, well, epic. This usually just means they are bloody long. And Nire is bloody long but it is also incredibly rewarding. Set in and around an insane asylum - no that's too strong, perhaps sanatorium would be better - run by the Nire family it starts out at the beginning of the First World War and takes us through to the end of the Second.

First up, this is an opportunity to read about these wars from a Japanese viewpoint. Yes, they are covered in some of the Japanese fiction we can read over here but rarely both wars in the same book and never in such an insightful and, it must be said, comic manner.

For The House of Nire is, above all else, very funny. It is gripping and moving and heartbreaking and lots of other things ending in ing but it is, at heart, a comedy. And I am struggling to think of a comedic novel from any culture that can sustain the amusement and attention as much as this can.

I don't think it is currently in print but there seem to be quite a few copies listed on Amazon Marketplace so I am confident you should be able to pick one up. It would be worth going the extra mile to do so if you ask me.