Briefly Noted Book Reviews

"Swallows, by Natsuo Kirino, translated from the Japanese by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda (Knopf). This acerbic novel explores the ramifications of a controversial topic in Japan: surrogacy. (Although the practice is legal there, it is widely regarded with skepticism.) Riki, the protagonist, is a twenty-nine-year-old woman from the countryside who is struggling financially in Tokyo. Desperate for stability, she decides to become a surrogate for a rich, artistic couple. But she quickly starts to resent the wife's desire to control Riki's body, and she is wary of the husband's attempts to show feminist solidarity. As Riki navigates conception and pregnancy under the couple's gaze, she comes to feel that even their good intentions and a substantial paycheck can't alleviate a sense of exploitation. As she tells the couple, "I just don't want to be treated like a machine.""

"Information Age, by Cora Lewis (Joyland Editions). Observations, snippets of dialogue, and wry anecdotes make up this laconic novel, which focusses on the life of a young woman in New York. The woman works as a reporter for a news website, where she covers such subjects as "the celebrity candidate" and "the 'unusual animal' beat," and is trailed by doubts about the journalistic enterprise. As she wonders whether she is a "hack" or is simply subject to "a profound alienation from the production and dissemination of information," the novel becomes a subtle meditation on the difference between what can and cannot be communicated, ultimately suggesting that intimate moments are the most difficult to capture and convey."

Swallows follows Riki, a twenty-nine-year-old rural woman in Tokyo who becomes a surrogate for a wealthy artistic couple to escape financial precarity. Riki confronts the wife's controlling impulses and the husband's performative feminist gestures, enduring conception and pregnancy under constant scrutiny while receiving pay that fails to offset a growing sense of exploitation and loss of bodily autonomy. Information Age centers on a young New York reporter whose beats—"the celebrity candidate" and "the 'unusual animal' beat'"—accentuate doubts about journalism. Sparse observations and wry anecdotes track her alienation from information production and the difficulty of conveying intimate moments.

Read at The New Yorker