{"product_id":"japanese-novellasisbn-9781782272717","title":"Japanese Novellas","description":"\u003cb\u003eAkutagawa Prize-winning stories about unsettling loss and romance from one of Japan’s most celebrated contemporary writers—for fans of Haruki Murakami and Banana Yoshimoto\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn a dreamlike adventure, one woman travels through an apparently unending night with a porcelain girlfriend, mist-monsters and villainous monkeys; a sister mourns her invisible brother whom only she can still see, while the rest of her family welcome his would-be wife into their home; and an accident with a snake leads a shop girl to discover the snake-families everyone else seems to be concealing.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Sensual, yearning, and filled with the tricks of memory and grief, \u003ci\u003eRecord of a Night Too Brief\u003c\/i\u003e is an atmospheric trio of unforgettable tales.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Talking animals, transformations into trees and horses, and a melancholic mood of loss and love make it easy to see why Kawakami is one of the more exciting voices in contemporary Japanese literature.\" \u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003e—Thrillist\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\"A supersurreal triad of stories . . . Kawakami marks the literary map of Japan with a warning that beyond here lie dragons—or snakes and ghosts, at any rate. Astonishing, strange, and wonderful. \"\u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eKirkus Reviews \u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003e(starred review)\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Fans of Haruki Murakami and Banana Yoshimoto will enjoy immersing themselves in Kawakami’s magical worlds.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003e—Booklist\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\". . . the author successfully juxtaposes elements of contemporary Japan—in Kawakami’s case, postmodern Japan, with its high-rise apartment buildings, highway service areas, radio stock market reports, and advertising jingles blaring from parade-float loudspeakers — with myths and folklore that gesture toward a lost, pre-modern imaginary.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003e—Los Angeles Review of Books\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Talking animals, transformations into trees and horses, and a melancholic mood of loss and love make it easy to see why Kawakami is one of the more exciting voices in contemporary Japanese literature.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003e—Thrillist\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"A truly fantastical story . . . rewards with rich imagery that will challenge anyone’s powers of imagination.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eJapan Society\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003e Journal (UK)\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"At once funny and humane . . . the author's estranging fiction is bewitching. If Japan were in need of a Lewis Carroll, look no further.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003e—\u003c\/b\u003eSouth China Morning Post\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\"Baffling, unsettling and haunting, these stories have a dreamlike atmosphere.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003e—The Lady\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003e (UK Magazine)\u003c\/b\u003eHiromi Kawakami was born in Tokyo in 1958. She has written numerous novels and collections of short stories, including \u003ci\u003eStrange Weather in Tokyo\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eThe Nakano Thrift Shop\u003c\/i\u003e. She has been awarded the Akutagawa Prize and the Tanizaki Prize, and was shortlisted for the 2013 Man Asian Literary Prize and the 2014 \u003ci\u003eIndependent\u003c\/i\u003e Foreign Fiction Prize. Her work has been published in more than twenty languages.1 Horse\u003cbr\u003e What was that itch on my back? I wondered. And then\u003cbr\u003e I realized that it was the night—the night was nibbling\u003cbr\u003e into me.\u003cbr\u003e It wasn’t that late, still only twilight, but the darkness\u003cbr\u003e seemed to have collected just above my shoulders. A black\u003cbr\u003e clump of it had fastened onto me, eating away at my back.\u003cbr\u003e I wriggled, trying to shake it off, but the night clung\u003cbr\u003e fast. When I tried to rip it off with my hands, it floated\u003cbr\u003e away, as vapour, and I couldn’t grasp it. I grabbed at a\u003cbr\u003e patch, where it was most intensely black, but immediately\u003cbr\u003e it dispersed, and another black patch swirled up somewhere\u003cbr\u003e else.\u003cbr\u003e The itchiness became unbearable. I scratched frantically.\u003cbr\u003e The more I scratched, the more the darkness ate into\u003cbr\u003e my back, and the more the darkness ate into my back, the\u003cbr\u003e more I itched.\u003cbr\u003e Unable to stand still, I broke into a run.\u003cbr\u003e Immediately, I was running as fast as a horse. I thought,\u003cbr\u003e as I ran: you get faster when the night starts eating into\u003cbr\u003e you. Roads, pedestrians, signs, all fly by, retreating into the\u003cbr\u003e distance, like scenes through a train window.\u003cbr\u003e After a minute or two I grew sick of running, so I stopped.\u003cbr\u003e My body was giving off steam like a horse. I was breathing\u003cbr\u003e loudly through my nose. Some of the darkness merged with\u003cbr\u003e the steam, producing swirling, hazy eddies.\u003cbr\u003e People, standing at a distance, stared.\u003cbr\u003e The darkness mixed with the breaths I was taking in,\u003cbr\u003e reappearing when I breathed out, floating in long trails.\u003cbr\u003e When I inhaled, the dark trails near my nostrils were sucked\u003cbr\u003e back in. When I exhaled again, they were longer than before.\u003cbr\u003e The darkness grew, stretching out like endless ribbons,\u003cbr\u003e issuing forth from my nostrils.\u003cbr\u003e “That’s a sight you don’t see every day,” an onlooker\u003cbr\u003e exclaimed, and then clapped, purposefully, as if summoning\u003cbr\u003e koi to the surface of a pond. The other onlookers clapped\u003cbr\u003e too, in just the same way.\u003cbr\u003e I grew irritated. “Get the fuck outta here!” I tried to shout.\u003cbr\u003e But no words emerged from my mouth. I couldn’t get the\u003cbr\u003e first consonant out. Straining, blowing through my nostrils,\u003cbr\u003e bearing down, I tried for that first sound: “G— G— G—” But\u003cbr\u003e all I could manage was to snort and blow out air.\u003cbr\u003e The onlookers were delighted, and clapped some more.\u003cbr\u003e This infuriated me. I leapt into the air, trying to yell at\u003cbr\u003e them, but all that came out was a whinny—like I was a horse.\u003cbr\u003e I kept leaping. Landing on a roof, I whinnied again—and\u003cbr\u003e then again. The onlookers below were all clapping. I wasn’t\u003cbr\u003e going to be outdone by them, and I kept whinnying. By now\u003cbr\u003e I had acquired a horse’s body, and was covered with a thick\u003cbr\u003e black coat of hair.\u003cbr\u003e “Night’s coming. The Night Horse has arrived,” an\u003cbr\u003e onlooker said—the first in the crowd to have clapped. At\u003cbr\u003e that moment the steam started to rise in clouds off my body.\u003cbr\u003e More darkness: spreading, covering everything.\u003cbr\u003e Elated now, I whinnied over and over again. With every\u003cbr\u003e whinny, the darkness became blacker and more intense.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e2 Chaos\u003cbr\u003e While I was walking, the number of people increased. We\u003cbr\u003e were all going in the same direction. I walked, swept along\u003cbr\u003e in the flow.\u003cbr\u003e It was after dusk, an hour closer to night. I could see the\u003cbr\u003e outlines of people walking just ahead of me, but couldn’t\u003cbr\u003e tell the colour of their clothes. A lamplighter approached,\u003cbr\u003e holding a long pole, pushing his way against the stream of\u003cbr\u003e people. Raising the pole up to a lamp, he let it rest there a\u003cbr\u003e few seconds, and the lamp started to glow. Looking around,\u003cbr\u003e I realized that there were several lamplighters: everywhere\u003cbr\u003e about me, one street lamp after another started to give out\u003cbr\u003e a steady light.\u003cbr\u003e Now there were even more people walking, and it was\u003cbr\u003e difficult keeping up the pace.\u003cbr\u003e “Are you going too?”\u003cbr\u003e I glanced over my shoulder, and saw a slender girl with\u003cbr\u003e short hair walking behind me.\u003cbr\u003e “I was thinking about it…,” I answered, without quite\u003cbr\u003e committing myself.\u003cbr\u003e Hearing this, the girl, who didn’t stop walking, removed\u003cbr\u003e an envelope from her satchel, and opened it, all the while\u003cbr\u003e keeping pace with the stream of people.\u003cbr\u003e In the envelope were some green tickets.\u003cbr\u003e “I have an extra. You take it,” she said, as she quickly\u003cbr\u003e slipped the green ticket into my pocket. I was going to\u003cbr\u003e thank her—but she waved me off and pointed at the\u003cbr\u003e people behind us. Some kind of hitch had stopped the\u003cbr\u003e flow of people, and there was a pile-up. Knots of people\u003cbr\u003e were starting to form, and as more people kept coming\u003cbr\u003e from behind them, soon some of the knots were getting\u003cbr\u003e pushed up into the air, on top of the knots of people below\u003cbr\u003e them.\u003cbr\u003e Quickly I turned to face forward again, and started\u003cbr\u003e to walk. A long gap had opened up between us and the\u003cbr\u003e people in front of us. Thinking I ought to catch up with\u003cbr\u003e them, I broke into a run. But again the girl stopped me.\u003cbr\u003e “Don’t run, or we’ll have chaos. It’s too early. Too early.”\u003cbr\u003e I didn’t understand what she was referring to, but in\u003cbr\u003e any case I resumed walking.\u003cbr\u003e We seemed to be approaching a termination point. The\u003cbr\u003e stream of people was spreading out. Just ahead, something\u003cbr\u003e very tall was rising up to the sky.\u003cbr\u003e Several dozen ticket collectors stood in a row, and once\u003cbr\u003e we passed through, showing our tickets, the tall object\u003cbr\u003e came into better view.\u003cbr\u003e It was a singer, who stood as tall as a three-storey building.\u003cbr\u003e From where I was, I had a clear view of the beauty spot\u003cbr\u003e under her jaw, and the rise and fall of her breasts.\u003cbr\u003e “The beauty spot is artificial,” the girl informed me,\u003cbr\u003e gazing up at the singer, enraptured.\u003cbr\u003e The singer was producing notes at different pitches, as\u003cbr\u003e if she were warming up. When she sang high notes, flocks\u003cbr\u003e of birds took flight from the branches of the gingko trees.\u003cbr\u003e When she sang low notes, the earth heaved, and small\u003cbr\u003e furry creatures emerged from underground and crawled\u003cbr\u003e about.\u003cbr\u003e When the square was packed with people, suddenly,\u003cbr\u003e with no warning, the singer commenced singing. It was\u003cbr\u003e as if an immense musical instrument was filling the\u003cbr\u003e firmament with sound, or as if the melody of her song\u003cbr\u003e was swimming through the skies… In the next moment\u003cbr\u003e her voice had overwhelmed all else, and rather than\u003cbr\u003e listening, we seemed to be encompassed within it. No\u003cbr\u003e longer able to know the words, we were conscious only\u003cbr\u003e that her lilting voice was, slowly and powerfully, all\u003cbr\u003e around us.\u003cbr\u003e The crowd of people, filled with her music, started to\u003cbr\u003e break up and form lines, which began to flow from the\u003cbr\u003e square in every direction, like innumerable streams flowing\u003cbr\u003e from a lake.\u003cbr\u003e “The chaos has started,” the girl said to me, joining a\u003cbr\u003e stream of people going by her. I watched as she was borne\u003cbr\u003e away.\u003cbr\u003e I joined the same stream of people, and pretty soon\u003cbr\u003e caught up with her.\u003cbr\u003e “Where are we going?” I enquired. The girl nodded several\u003cbr\u003e times, her eyes closed, looking unworried.\u003cbr\u003e “Where?” I asked again.\u003cbr\u003e “The night,” she replied.\u003cbr\u003e With that, her head tilted downwards, and she fell into\u003cbr\u003e a deep sleep. She was carried along as she slept.\u003cbr\u003e Now a part of the chaos, alongside the girl, I entered\u003cbr\u003e the night.","brand":"Pushkin Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46305096892645,"sku":"NP9781782272717","price":13.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781782272717.jpg?v=1730759375","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/japanese-novellasisbn-9781782272717","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}