1 The Anxiety Solution - Chloe Brotheridge
A self-help guide for anxiety sufferers, squarely aimed at 20-something, female, urban instagram-users - it assumes that readers will be able to take up yoga classes, have time for daily meditation, and focuses of anxiety are things like work presentations and snowboarding holidays, so probably not particularly helpful if you are woman suffering from anxiety who is a single parent on benefits.
I bought this as DD (16) has been suffering from anxiety, and although she is slightly younger than the clear target audience, there were enough bits of useful advice and exercises that I have passed it on to her. It is all written in a very chummy, casual, women's-magazine style which I find a little irritating, but no doubt suits the target reader.
2 Me - Tomoyuki Hoshino
Award-winning Japanese novel, which starts with a young man walking off with someone else's mobile phone in a MacDonalds, which he then uses to blag money from the owner's mother. So far, quite straightforward. It then takes a sudden shift to much weirder, darker territory, when the mother of the other man turns up in his apartment and seems to believe that he is her son. When he returns to his own family home, he is turned away by another 'me', accepted by his family as him.
For a while, he and the other 'me', and a third 'me' they find, enjoy the company and solidarity of being with people entirely in tune with themselves, because they are the same person. But as time goes on, the 'me'-people proliferate, until Tokyo is overrun by hordes of 'me's', who grow disgusted at and aggressive with each other, until it descends into a totally dystopian situation.
The novel plays with issues of identity and conformity - how much of our personality and identity is really innate, and how much is based on our position in society/the family and how other people see us? What happens when people totally lose their own sense of identity? To some extent these are obviously universal themes, but I think they are particularly crucial in Japan, where the pressures of social conformity are still very strong, and personal identity is often defined by your place in a hierarchical structure at work or within a family or school or university. People are more often than not addressed by their job title or relationship-marker rather than their personal names, for example.
Reading this made me think of the scenes in the business districts of every Japanese city in early April every year, when all the new company recruits, fresh from universities, start work. You can be waiting to cross a road and then realise that you are surrounded by clones: groups of young men and women in absolutely identical black suits (skirts or trousers depending on sex), identical hairstyles (no hair dye, no curls, not too long, not too short, tied back for women), shiny black handbags/briefcases etc e.g. see the picture in this news article - these are not company uniforms (even though some companies do still have uniforms for office workers), but the socially accepted/dictated appropriate attire for a 'new member of society', which is how they are known. How can you preserve your own identity in that context?
'Me' was an interesting but slightly disturbing read, and I would be curious to know what anyone not familiar with Japan would make of it.