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The latest addition to our Reviews section is a by Christopher Iacono on Milena Michiko Flašar’s I Called Him Necktie, translated by Sheila Dickie and published by New Vessel Press.

Here’s the beginning of Chris’s review:

While looking back at an episode in his life, twenty-year-old Taguchi Hiro remembers what his friend Kumamoto Akira said about poetry.

Its perfection arises precisely from its imperfection . . . . I have an image in my head. I see it clearly before me. Its colors are glaring and harsh in their brightness. But as soon as I rush to capture it, it explodes, and what I write down are separate bits that don���Ĵ�ý�t form a whole. Do you see it now? It���Ĵ�ý�s as if I tried to glue together a broken vase, piece by piece. But the shards are so fragmentary that I don���Ĵ�ý�t know which goes with which or how I fit them together, there���Ĵ�ý�s always one fragment left over. But this fragment! It makes the poem. It alone gives meaning . . . . My requiem should be a vase with water shooting through the glue in its cracks.

Soon after this speech, Kumamoto wrote this ���Ĵ�ý�requiem���Ĵ�ý����Ĵ�ý�which he also called ���Ĵ�ý�his poem���Ĵ�ý����Ĵ�ý�and now Hiro is writing his. Also, like his friend, Hiro is fixated on a broken object; in this case, it���Ĵ�ý�s his bedroom wall, which has a hairline fissure that he���Ĵ�ý�s been staring at for the last two years, so he can figure out how to fit himself inside it. Hiro has spent a lot of time staring at this crack, because following a traumatic incident when he was eighteen, he became a hikikomori, a young person who shuts him- or herself in a room and has no interaction with anyone else. Even though his parents still left food at his door, they pretty much gave up on him. However, at the beginning of this wonderful novel from Japanese-Austrian writer Milena Michiko Flašar, Hiro finally re-emerges into the outside world.

For the rest of the review, go here.