2023-05-11 16:23:49
Authors from Asia don’t always have it easy on the German book market. But for some time there have been more. They offer exciting thrillers with a noir atmosphere from Tokyo or Seoul.
East Asia is not just delicate porcelain, tea ceremonies, a culture shaped by Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism on the one hand and Manga, K-Pop and in-beauty products on the other. For several years now, thriller authors from Japan and South Korea have carved out a niche in the book market – often years after the original publication. Because unlike for Western languages, literary translators for these countries are relatively few and far between.
There is a lot to discover – a powerful, sometimes brutal language, a dark and violent humor that seems like a literary answer to Tarantino’s films, and at the same time exciting protagonists who are subject to their very own value system.
Filmed with Brad Pitt
The Japanese author Kotaro Isaka, whose book “Suzuki’s Revenge” was recently published in German, shouldn’t be unknown in the West since the predecessor “Bullet Train” – which should also be due to the screen version of the book with Brad Pitt in one of the leading roles. The literary original of the literally fast-paced thriller about five killers, a high-speed train and a suitcase full of money is, however, much more complex.
“Suzuki’s revenge” is also about assassins, the original of which was released in 2004. Quite violent in places, with quirky characters and a dark sense of humor, the novel from the underworld of Tokyo is not for the faint-hearted with great visual imagination.
For all its striking violence, the book is about a mathematics teacher who wants to avenge the death of his wife, but it is not without questions of meaning and depth. Suzuki decides to march through the institutions, or rather the criminal empire, to get closer to the object of his revenge.
And the moral compass?
No matter how many corpses plaster the pages of the book, murder is not an end in itself. One hitman is literally haunted by the victims of his crimes, another sees himself puppet-like entangled in a life over which he is trying to gain control. And Suzuki must also ask himself whether he has lost his moral compass in his desire for revenge.
In general, killers and their value system seem to be a popular topic for thrillers from the Far East that have hit the German book market in recent years. Hornclaw, the petite elderly Korean lady and protagonist in Byeong-mo Gu’s “Woman with a Knife”, has been a hitman for 40 years. With increasing age and dwindling physical strength, she gradually becomes precarious, especially since a young, aspiring and enjoyably brutal “colleague” is making her life difficult. Age discrimination, the reader will note, also exists in the hitman industry. And as a professional killer, it’s not that easy to say goodbye to retirement.
Dark and bloody
And then there’s Korean author Un-Su Kim, whom some critics are already dubbing as the Korean Henning Mankell. With his crime thriller “Die Plotter”, published in German in 2018, he wrote a novel that is as dark and gloomy, but at the same time literary, as the best representatives of the Scandinavia Noir genre.
It’s dark, very dark and very bloody in “Die Plotter”, which once again focuses on the main character Raeseng, an assassin. The boy, who was found in a garbage can and grew up in a library, committed his first murder at the tender age of 17 and, at 32, is amazed he survived at all.
A yakuza-like code of loyalty mixes with Buddhist rites and nihilistic philosophy. Un-Su Kim takes his readers on a journey of discovery through the dark side of Seoul. And Un-Su Kim’s 2020 novel “Hot Blood” is dark, often deadly and supported by an ethical code of the underworld.
“In recent years, there has been an increase in fiction from Asia,” confirms Lisa Bluhm from Hoffmann und Campe Verlag, which also publishes Kotaro Isaka’s books. “The reason for this is the extremely exciting stories that Asian authors have to tell – and not only in the field of crime fiction.” (dpa)
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