You took off your glasses and set them on the table. My nails really were beautiful. They gleamed, and there wasn’t a single imperfection to be found. You went over to the sofa and flopped down. Still sitting in my chair and holding my fingers out, I watched you stretch out. It wasn’t unusual for you to lie on your back like that. But now, horizontal on the sofa, you looked like something the furniture store had thrown in as part of the package. You closed your eyes. But that’s not to say that you fell asleep.
Comprised of a novella (the titular tale, which won Japan’s Akutagawa Prize) and two short stories, this collection, while not quite horror, explores feminist themes of women’s lives and roles in modern Japanese society; a position seemingly pulsing with dread and danger. Kaori Fujino’s writing (in translation by Kendall Heitzmann) is crisp and allusive, and despite frequent whiffs of the supernatural, I absolutely believed the lives and characters she has created here. A short read that I found totally satisfying. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
You couldn’t see anything that you could make sense of. There was only light. In front of you, there was brightness. And a surprising clarity. Your past and future, equally clear, stretched out from your body into the distance. You weren’t able to focus on any single particular event. But all the time that had passed to this point in your life and all the time that remained to you had formed into a single plane of glass that now threatened to cut you in half at the waist. ~ Eyes and Nails
Such a creepy novella. Narrated in the second person POV by a woman who was three at the time of the story she’s telling — and who could not possibly have known the intimate thoughts and actions of the others that she’s relating — this is the tale of a young woman who moves in with her widowed boyfriend, mere months after his wife died in strange circumstances. This mistress who becomes a reluctant/neglectful mother-figure and housewife is pretty unlikeable, and the little girl she’s in charge of is clearly damaged, and there’s a claustrophobic tension that builds to a disturbing climax.
Now more than ever, Shoko despises anything and everything: Kawabata, and her daughter who doesn’t understand a thing, and her granddaughter who acts like a child well into her adulthood, and herself: an old woman who forgets her own name until the moment someone calls her by it. ~ What Shoko Forgets
Melancholy story of an old woman in a rehab hospital, visited every night by a mysterious stranger. It’s hard to say whether these visits happen in fact or only in Shoko’s muddled mind, but they are very real and disturbing to her.
I was overcome by a mixture of rage and inebriation. I felt that I had to protect Daiki. Children are horrible. Two days from now, Daiki would of course be alive and well, and he would show up at school perfectly fine, but that didn’t mean the other children would all gather around to congratulate him on escaping the jaws of death. They might even start bullying him. Daiki, the cursed child. ~ Minute Fears
A pocket park, a ghost, a curse: This story of a young Mom who wants to go out for the evening with her old college friends — but who is held back by her uncharacteristically clinging child — suggests that we might become ghosts of ourselves while still living our lives; and isn’t that a horrifying thought?
I don't want to give away any more than that, but if you enjoy reading Mona Awad or Han Kang — as I do —you'll probably enjoy this as well.
