It’s in literature that true life can be found. It’s under the mask of fiction that you can tell the truth. — Gao Xingjian
Michiko Kakutani, a Japanese- American, was born on January 9, 1955, in New Haven, US. She was The New York Times chief book reviewer and Pulitzer Prize winner in 1998, and known as the most powerful book critic.
Kakutani was one of the most respected critiques in literary world, not only for her intelligent criticism but also to her straightforward comments about a certain author. She was never afraid to show her disappointments to a book when it does satisfy her standards in a literary piece. Despite of her being straightforward describing a piece of book to be “risible”, she was also capable to interpret a certain piece to its greatest extent where it was enough for her to say it was a “wondrous narrative.” Michiko does not critic a book according to how it was sold or fond by the masses but how it was applied with different literary conventions to come up with a wondrous piece.
Michiko Kakutani was feared by the authors because of her attitude towards criticizing a certain literary piece. She was well-informed on how the author must have the knowledge to play with his/her reader’s imagination when they read his/her literary piece. It is important for Michiko for the book to be written with intelligence and dedication for the authors to be able to come up with an interesting plot. Michiko, as a critic, practiced her gifted talents in criticizing a written work in accordance with the rule of literature.
The Second Plane by Martin Amis in 2008 is one the books that was busted by Kakutani. She said, “Indeed “The Second Plane” is such a weak, risible and often objectionable volume that the reader finishes it convinced that Mr. Amis should stick to writing fiction and literary criticism, as he’s thoroughly discredited himself with these essays as any sort of political or social commentator.” On the other hand, The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers was one of Kakutani’s favorite. “The author of this beautifully observed first novel joined the army when he was 17 and served as a machine-gunner in Iraq in 2004 and 2005. In chronicling the friendship of two young soldiers struggling to stay alive on the battlefield, there he has written a deeply affecting book that conveys the horrors of combat with harrowing poetry. At once a freshly imagined bildungsroman and a metaphysical parable about the loss of innocence and the uses of memory, it is a novel that will stand with Tim O’Brien’s enduring Vietnam book, “The Things They Carried,” as a classic of contemporary war fiction.”
However, Kakutani is now stepping down a she announced it herself last July 27, 2017. “No one has played a larger role in guiding readers through the country’s literary life over the past four decades than Michi,” Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet wrote in a memo. As Michiko departs on Times, she will never be forgotten because of her brilliant personality, and an icon in the world of Literature.
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