Suzanne Leal
๐ค SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
At the other end of the spectrum is A Boy in Winter by Rachel Seaford, an English-Australian author whose grandparents were nominally members of the Nazi Party.
And her book, A Boy in Winter, is set over three days in the Ukraine.
And there is a lot of research in it, but none of it is telegraphed in the book.
It's very light.
It's completely fictional.
And it belies the amount of research.
Then you have Bram Presser in the middle, who tells you his research.
and then who uses fiction to bring to life his grandparents' story, and then who returns to describing his fiction.
So I really do think we've got the spectrum of these books that combine or don't combine fiction and non-fiction.
So, Suzanne Leal, who was Akutagawa?
So Akutagawa is known as the father of the Japanese short story.
And he was a man who lived for only 35 years.
He lived from 1892 to 1927.
He committed suicide mid-1927.
He's best known for his novella called Kappa, which is the story of patient 23, who's in a psychiatric hospital, and his escape into the world of the Kappa, who are creatures from Japanese folklore, but who David Peace and who Akutagawa...
use in their own work.
They're small creatures and they have their own world and they have their own morality.
I know all this because I was interested, I'm always interested in book titles, where the titles come from.
And I was thinking patient X, so who is patient X and why is there such an interest in asylums and psychiatric facilities?
material, which takes you to Akutagawa's history and the reverence in which he's held in Japan.