Johan Gabrielsen

I'm sure they exist in Japan, but I'm not so sure how much has been translated.

You know, I also like Murakami, of course, and there's other Japanese writers I really like.

But right away you felt this is something completely different.

And it felt very fresh and like a wonderful angle on Japanese society from a woman's voice as well.

Because I'm not sure there has been so that many Japanese women writers translated into English or Swedish for that matter.

She is a woman who was brought up in very poor circumstances in a sea town near, or is it in Osaka or just outside Osaka?

And her father, it doesn't really do anything.

He lies lying on a mattress and is drunk and is just terrible.

And it's really her mother and the sister that tries to survive and cope.

And it's a very kind of bleak, unsentimental,

version of Japanese society.

And it's a lot about the mother struggling, as I said, trying to keep it together, but also what the length she goes to, to keep the family together.

And it just, it feels very much like she experienced that.

And I understand that some of it is actually built on her own experiences because there's this wonderful kind of quick glimpses that you just feel that is just too true.

I can't really see how you can come up with something like that.

It just felt so real.

For instance, the only time the family's together is this very banal moment

thing when they're walking down the stairs.

She just had this memory, I can't remember if she's five or seven, but suddenly she feels we're a family and they're just walking out down the stairs of this very bleak apartment building.

And it was kind of, it was so sad when I read that.