| 1 | Best short story I’ve ever read:
Haguruma (Spinning Gears) the last story by Ryunosuke Akutagawa before his suicide in 1927.
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| 2 | Book that should be on the national curriculum:
There should be no national curriculum but, given that there is, GB84 by me.
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| 3 | Best film of the book I’ve seen:
Ugetsu Monogatari (1953) by Kenji Mizoguchi from two tales by Akinari Ueda.
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| 4 | Best music to write to:
JA Caesar’s soundtrack to Shuji Terayama’s 1974 masterpiece Denen ni Shisu (Death in the Countryside).
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| 5 | My favourite opening line of a novel:
‘I lie among the corpses’ – from Tokyo Year Zero by me.
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| 6 | My favourite novel that no one else seems to have heard of:
Dogura Magura (1935) by Yumeno Kyusaku.
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| 7 | The book I’d most like to reread, if I could find it again:
England for the English by Justin Quirk; simply the best manuscript I’ve ever read but, tragically, still not yet published – sober up, publishers!
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| 8 | My favourite bookshop:
The hundreds of second-hand bookshops in the Jimbocho area of Tokyo.
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| 9 | Author I’d like to nominate for the Nobel Prize for literature:
There should be no prizes, least of all this one. But, if it has to go to someone, it should go to either John le Carré or Ian Rankin.
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| 10 | Deceased author I’d most like to resurrect:
Edgar Allan Poe – to find out how he bleeding died and to warn him what Lou Reed was doing to his work.
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