I Called Him Necktie - by Milena Michiko Flasar (Paperback)

About the Book

This is the Japanese Catcher in the Rye for the 21st Century.

Book Synopsis

This is the Japanese Catcher in the Rye for the 21st Century.

Review Quotes

"The best of the best from this year's bountiful harvest of uncommonly strong offerings ... Deeply original." -O, The Oprah Magazine

"A spare, stunning, elegiac gem of a book. Milena Michiko Flasar writes with a poet's clarity of language and vision, probing deeply below the surfaces of familiar Japanese stereotypes ... to tell a compassionate and insightful story of dysfunction, despair and friendship."
-Ruth Ozeki, author of A Tale for the Time Being

"The quiet reflection of this jewel of a novel is revelatory, redemptive and hypnotic until the last word."
-Kirkus Reviews

"Flasar's exquisite, finely wrought novel is both a prose poem and a parable about how we deflect, defer and disconnect from life, and what is needed before we can bravely embrace it again."
- Monique Truong, author of The Book of Salt and Bitter in the Mouth

"A tender, melancholy book of great linguistic beauty and clarity. A flawless novel."
-Süddeutsche Zeitung

"With high artistry . . . this seductive beauty is also strangely religious: the book treats life with an almost Buddhist serenity."
-Der Spiegel

About the Author

Milena Michiko Flasar was born in 1980, the daughter of a Japanese mother and an Austrian father. She lives in Vienna and has written three novels, including I Called Him Necktie, which won the 2012 Austrian Alpha Literature Prize.

Sheila Dickie studied German and Drama at Bristol University and has taught German. She has translated a novel by Claude Michelet from French, and lives in Henley-on-Thames, England.