How long does it take to read Hardboiled and Hard Luck?
Hardboiled and Hard Luck by Banana Yoshimoto takes about 2 hours 56 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 2 hours 56 minutes
An evening's read
First published 2001. 160 pages, about 44,000 words.
6 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 4 hours 53 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 2 hours 56 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 1 hour 50 minutes |
The page count is the median across 7 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
A pair of thematically linked novellas from the acclaimed author of Lizard, Amrita, and Goodbye Tsugumi. In cherished novels such as Kitchen and Goodbye Tsugumi, Banana Yoshimoto’s warm, witty, and heartfelt depictions of the lives of young Japanese have earned her international acclaim and bestseller status. Her insightful, spare vision returns in two novellas possessed by the ghosts of love found and lost. In Hardboiled, the unnamed narrator is hiking in the mountains on an anniversary she has forgotten about, the anniversary of her ex-lover’s death. As she nears her hotel—stopping on the way at a hillside shrine and a strange soba shop—a sense of haunting falls over her. Perhaps these eerie events will help her make peace with her loss. Hard Luck is about another young woman, whose sister is dying and lies in a coma. Kuni’s fiancé left her after the accident, but his brother Sakai continues to visit, and the two of them gradually grow closer as they make peace with the impending loss of their loved one. Yoshimoto’s voice is clear, assured, and deeply moving, displaying again why she is one of Japan’s, and the world’s, most beloved writers.
Subjects: Fiction, short stories (single author)
