'The words "strange" and "mysterious" are not enough to describe the joy this gives me as a reader' - Sayaka Murata
The startling first collection of dark, surreal, and unsettling stories from the international prize-winning author of The Woman in the Purple Skirt.
Asa tries to give her classmate a biscuit. Nami evades her classmates' playground game of acorn-throwing. Happy decides she's not interested in doing anything other than lying down on her sofa. Each of these three stories begins in a reasonable place-but by the end you'll find yourself in another world altogether.
About the Author
Natsuko Imamura was born in Hiroshima, Japan, in 1980. Her fiction has won various prestigious Japanese literary prizes, including the Noma Literary New Face Prize, the Mishima Yukio Prize, and the Akutagawa Prize. She lives in Osaka with her husband and daughter.
Lucy North is a British translator of Japanese fiction and non-fiction. Her translations include The Woman in the Purple Skirt, published in 2021, Toddler Hunting and Other Stories, as yet the sole book of fiction in English by Taeko Kono, and Record of a Night Too Brief, a collection of stories by Hiromi Kawakami. Her fiction translations have appeared in Granta, Words Without Borders, and The Southern Review and in several anthologies, including The Oxford Book of Japanese Short Stories and The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature. She lives in Hastings, East Sussex.
Snappy Japanese surrealism . . . Like a lot of Japanese fiction in translation (I'm thinking Sayaka Murata, Hiromi Kawakami, Yoko Ogawa), Imamura's prose eschews ornamentation: she sets up her odd situations and lets them unfold in a doggedly simple fashion, with little in the way of obvious metaphor or even description. As strange as the stories are in terms of plot and characterisation, they read like fables, though fables that take, in all three cases, decidedly dark turns - more Brothers Grimm than old Aesop. The simplicity and clarity of the prose, then, belies the emotional and social complexity that the stories suggest as they push relentlessly through to ends that do not reflect at all reflect the buoyancy of the opening pages . . . These stories are quick reads, but like good poetry, they'll snag in your mind long after they're done. ― Bookmunch
