I've finished this morning my re read of the entire Death Note series by Ohba/Obata. It was still as awesome as the first time around.

I'm now a third into Line, by Murakami Ryû. The concept of the novel works really well so far: It's set over the course of one night, and each character enters the story in one chapter, becomes the POV character for the next one, and exit the story in the third. This being a Murakami novel (and not to be confused with the more famous Murakami Haruki), it's all very dark, often very rough (bordering on porn, of the weirder/edgier kinds) and occasionally ultraviolent, kind of depressing but it's still a fascinating, extremely pessimistic and often troubling and vertigo inducing portrait of the darker faces of turn of the (20th) century Japan, right after the economical crash.

Next I'll start on one of the following:

Dogra Magra (Dogura-Magura) - by Yumeno Kyûsaku, a cult classic which author is often described as the Japanese Kafka or Poe (for this huge - 1000 pages - novel in particular, it's apparently more Kafka than Poe). It's a surrealist crime novel of a sort, in which the policemen are the villains, and the murderer is the victim. It starts with the murderer waking up in a psychiatric hospital with amnesia and finding a book about a murderer waking up in an asylum with amnesia. I don't know much more except it's apparently it's a one of a kind book and a must-read.

Erogotoshitachi (The Pornographers, but I don't think this author's works have ever been translated in English) by Nosaka Akiyuki. Mishima described this novel as "a brillant and mercilessly insolent book, as rejoicing as the sun at noon over a midden heap". It's a novel from the 60s, also a kind of cult book in Japan, and it's about the owner of a sex show, a girl who works with him and a young seducer who's actually interested only in masturbation. The trio consider themselves missionaries of sex for art and the welfare of humanity (whatever that means...) It sounds fun.

Empire of Light (aka "Your Republic is Calling You" by Kim Young Ha. That one is a recent (2006) south-korean novel, in which a man, an ex-spy now married to a south korean wife and a father and a foreign movie distributors,who's been a kind of deep sleeper agent in the South for twenty years, is suddenly recalled to North Korea urgently after years of complete silence, and has 24 hours to figure out what he will do. A kind of pseudo-spy novel, which going by the back cover is more about the two Koreas and their people in the last decades through the reminescences of the main character.

As for non-fiction, it will probably be an essay called (loosely translated) The Aesthetics of daily life in Japan, from Heian to Heisei (so roughly from 800 to today).