First off, if anyone here has goodreads feel free to add me!
http://goodreads.com/jumpluff my fav books are there also.
I had time to read while I was in hospital so I managed to power through the entirety of
The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro in one sitting. Ishiguro is one of my favourite authors but over the years the one book of his I've never read is
The Unconsoled because I'd mostly heard negative stuff about it and my backlog is huge, so I just never got around to it.
I definitely see why it was criticised at the time—it's a significant departure from Ishiguro's more elegant stuff and I imagine for people whose jobs or lives revolve around putting out takes on popular authors, the structural oddities and general tediousness of its (deliberately) incoherent plotline would've been a huge nuisance to read 600 pages of. I think it might be one of his best works though. I think it's his funniest, it absolutely nails the deadpan pathos-style humour that his works are filled with and the way it portrays its internal contradictions is surreally amusing to me, but I see why a lot of people would just find it infuriating. For me though it was really more subtly layered than anything else he's written and made me empathetically exhausted, I've never really read anything that quite evokes the frustration and inconclusiveness and repetition of obligation and overwhelming stress. The incoherence mostly comes from the book's depiction of the overlap of memories and dreams (so in a way I think this is the most advanced Ishiguro in that literally everything he writes deals with memory, and it had the usual stuff + a really interesting perspective on the malleability of both types of knowledge + how the unconscious informs both, but the literalness of that is what makes it hard to follow if you're not going with the flow). Personally what made it hard for me to read was that I genuinely got upset trying to keep track of all the people's problems and worrying about certain characters who were deliberately 'forgotten'; not many books manage to achieve that level of emotional harmony in the reader. So, it was hard and had the usual slow start that comes with that author, but by the second act I couldn't put the book down because it was breathless and I needed a resolution I knew was never coming.
I also liked pretty much all the parent-child dynamics in this book, those were super poignant and I think a really really important part of the book, especially when it comes to obligations. The 'ending' was super rewarding in that aspect.
I wouldn't really recommend
The Unconsoled on a general level even though I adored it because I think it's a super niche book (edit: go read
Never Let Me Go though, or if you're willing to put up with very slow rambly character pieces,
The Remains of the Day is perfect)
I also got about halfway through
The Sound of the Mountain by Yasunari Kawabata and at first I really hated it and thought it was the worst Kawabata book I've ever read (my favourite is
Beauty and Sadness) but upon sticking with it and its vignettes I think it might end up being my favourite, we'll see though 'cause I need to finish it. It has all the best things about a Kawabata book (sparse, delicate, emotionally evocative prose; intricate, melancholy family dynamics; existential sorrow; emphasis on the episode over a massive plot; peaceful nature descriptions) and the worst (gross men). It's a nice book, although it requires some effort on your part to contemplate it, since it's very show-not-tell in some places.
Anyway at least one Kawabata book is unmissable if you want to read Japanese lit imo and if you enjoy it you should read
The Sound of the Mountain. If you like slice of life anime you would probably also enjoy the feel of
The Sound of the Mountain except keep in mind there are no schoolchildren and it's not very zany, it's about decaying old people and their problematic relationships with their adult children. If you like shit like Hemingway you can definitely appreciate
The Sound of the Mountain but if you don't you can also appreciate it. I'd recommend
Beauty and Sadness or
Snow Country first though especially if your reading habits are 'award winners' (Kawabata got the Nobel Prize for Literature, which was a token award used to excuse the committee's general disregard for how good postwar Japanese literature, or anything outside of Europe, is, but idk who cares about it anymore it's been a joke for a long time)
Hopefully I can post more sometime about other books I like. I mostly read Japanese and Russian literature, particularly set in the 20th century because it's full of interesting time periods, but I enjoy magical realism and SFF (rarely read it anymore though) as well