My goal for December was to complete my 2020 reading challenge. In order to do this, I needed to read the last book of the Kaga series by Keigo Higashino and a literary award winner. I did both, and I read two more books as well: one is a novel, one is nonfiction. 『蛍川』 by Teru Miyamoto (宮本輝) The edition I have contains two novellas from the Rivers series: 泥の河 and 蛍川. When I read 泥の河 earlier this year, I found it difficult to read it in Japanese, so I bought the translation by Roger K. Thomas and Ralph McCarthy (Rivers, Kurodahan Press, 2014). I am glad that I did because I don’t think that I could have fully appreciated this novella without the translation. I would have understood the story without problems, but with literary fiction, just understanding what happens is not enough. If you cannot appreciate the author’s literary style or understand metaphorical descriptions, you miss a great part of the book. To give you a concrete example, this description is much too difficult to …