TRANSLATED FICTION
Picnic in the Storm by Yukiko Motoya
Picnic in the Storm, also published as The Lonesome Bodybuilder, is a collection of 11 extremely weird tales. Yukiko Motoya imbues mundane settings with a sense of the surreal so that even a story about a saleswoman at a clothing shop who is trying to assist a customer who won’t come out of their changing […]
MoreConsent: A Memoir by Vanessa Springora
Written in spare yet unflinching prose Consent, as the title would suggest, is a memoir that examines its author’s relationship’ to a renowned French author, Gabriel Matzneff. At the time Springora was 14 and Matzneff was 50. Springora looks back to that time in her life, evoking the feelings and emotions her teenage self was […]
MoreTerritory of Light by Yūko Tsushima
Territory of Light is a sparsely written novel divided into twelve chapters, each one capturing a specific moment or period of its unnamed narrator’s life. Our narrator, the mother to a three-year-old, has recently moved into a new apartment as her husband, the father of her daughter, left her for another woman. Territory of Light […]
MoreHeaven by Mieko Kawakami
A few weeks ago I read Mieko Kawakami’s acclaimed Breasts and Eggs and suffice to say that I was not a fan. While Heaven was clearly written by the same author of Breasts and Eggs (both novels implement similar imagery and even use the same metaphor comparing the legs of a young girl to poles) […]
MoreMoshi Moshi by Banana Yoshimoto
There is something idiosyncratic about Yoshimoto’s novels. Every time I read something of hers I feel almost comforted by how familiar it all is. Her narrators sound very much like the same person: they are young women prone to navel-gazing yet attuned to their environment (especially nature or their hometown). Moshi Moshi follows Yoshie after […]
More