In his 1998 book, Japanese Literature as ‘fluctuation’ (‘Yuragi’ no nihon bungaku), Komori Yōichi deconstructs the concept of ‘modern Japanese literature’ by examining the Encyclopedia of Modern Japanese Literature (『日本近代文学大辞典』), an impressive work that, despite its six volumes, fails to provide an entry for the very thing it proposes to discuss: modern Japanese literature. This, Komori argues, is due to modern Japanese literature’s status as a ‘privileged sign’. Like the modern nation-state of Japan, it can only be defined indirectly, through a tautology of association and exclusion. That is, a work is modern only if it is not premodern. To not be premodern, a text must not only be written after the start of the Meiji period (1868–1912), it must also have been properly baptised at the font of European and American literature.

We know that Akutagawa Ryūnosuke is a modern writer not simply because he was active in the early twentieth century but because scholars have discerned in him traces of Anatole France. Had Akutagawa written gesaku, waka, monogatari, or in any other ‘premodern’ literary mode, he would be invisible to the editors of the encyclopedia, regardless of when he wrote. This logic of exclusion is applied to the other components of the phrase, ‘modern Japanese literature’. A work is Japanese if it is not non-Japanese, if it is written in Japanese by a Japanese person – though the concepts of Japanese l anguage and ‘Japaneseness’ are themselves hardly straightforward. A text is ‘literature’ only if it is not not literature, if it is not art, music, journalism, etc.

Last year in New York, I visited the Mysterious Bookshop, Manhattan’s only bookstore specialising in crime fiction. The otherwise knowledgeable bookseller had heard of three Australian crime novelists: Peter Temple, Garry Disher, and Jane Harper.

If I were to visit this year, however, I’m pretty sure the bookseller would be able to add more Australian novelists to his list – the multi-award-winning author Emma Viskic for one, along with Dervla McTiernan and Candice Fox. Fox has become an internationally bestselling author, a success amplified by her four parallel collaborations with James Patterson, one of which hit number one on the New York Times bestseller list. McTiernan’s 2018 début, The Ruin, was both a critical and commercial success in Australia and overseas, garnering praise from fellow writers, critics, and fans alike for the Ireland-set novel’s clear-eyed style and deep characterisation.

In 2018, Garry Disher was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Australian Crime Writer’s Association Ned Kelly Awards in recognition of a career spanning several decades. Twice awarded Germany’s most prestigious crime-writing award, the German Crime Prize, and twice winner of the Australian equivalent for best crime novel, the Ned Kelly Award, Disher is one of Australia’s great writers and the author of more than fifty books.

Hare’s Fur is about what follows grief. Russell Bass, a seventy-two-year-old potter, lives alone in Katoomba. Adele and Michael, his wife and child, have both died. Time still passes. He wakes early, drinks coffee, visits friends, throws clay.

One morning, seeking basalt for glazes at a nearby creek, Russell discovers three siblings living in a cave: two young children, Todd and Emma, and their teenage sister, Jade. Moved to act, he brings them food, offers them help. At first hesitant, they come to trust him, and a tentative relationship begins.

Hare’s Fur is a tale of convalescence, a restrained, moving story about how we discover new meaning in the wake of anguish. While Trevor Shearston’s prior fiction has largely explored the fictionalisation of historical figures – Jack Emanuel’s assassination in A Straight Young Back (2000), Italian explorer Luigi D’Albertis in Dead Birds (2007), the bushranger Ben Hall in Game (2013) – Hare’s Fur proves the writer’s talent beyond historical saga. Katoomba, nestled in the heart of the Blue Mountains, also provides a vivid backdrop. Privy to its ‘tea-trees, acacias, and hakeas’, its ‘grevillea laurifolia, dillwynia, and hibbertia’, Shearston is clearly at home; it’s no surprise that he lives there.

This serenity is occasionally disrupted by superfluous touches – Russell’s internal, italicised musings, for one, tend to get in the way. We are also rationed only fragments of the lives of Adele and Michael – in one beautiful passage, Russell watches Todd approach a wallaby, recalling Michael once doing the same – and we are left wanting more.

Overall, Hare’s Fur is about the inevitable reconfiguring of a life. It shows us that, like Kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with seams of gold, we too can mend ourselves, we too can reconnect our pieces.

As the United States tears itself to pieces over a proposed wall, which has in recent months transmogrified into a steel fence, here in Australia we have no right to be smug or to rubberneck. After all, Australia loves its fences. Since it was first occupied as a penal colony, this land has been bisected by a seemingly endless series of enclosures, barricades, frontiers, and fences, including some of the longest in the world: the rabbit-proof fence in Western Australia; and the dingo fence in the Eastern states. Fences, both physical and symbolic, have long been used by our leaders to banish undesirables or to constrain their movement within acceptable boundaries. Various Australian governments have forcibly removed Indigenous Australians to reserves and missions, interned so-called ‘enemy aliens’ within camps during wartime, and detained those fleeing danger or tyranny abroad within remote and offshore prisons.

Debra Adelaide’s masterful new story collection, Zebra, draws upon this history of fences to examine what it means, in Australia in 2019, to be a good neighbour. Zebra is full of fences, backyards, and divided spaces, and full of people making choices about the extent of their kindness and compassion for those on the other side. The first story, ‘Dismembering’, is narrated by a woman who dreams of a body that she and her ex-husband may or may not have buried next to her back fence. In the story ‘Welcome to Country’, the fence is much bigger: armed conflict has made the Northern Territory an ‘autonomous state now just called Country’, surrounded by a massive wire fence. Adelaide is explicit about some of the history this fence is drawn from: ‘There had been dingo fences and rabbit-proof fences before – now we had the ultimate fence.’  The story is narrated by a man who travels across the continent to perform an act of kindness in honour of someone that he has lost.