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Japanese Stories
by Inagaki Taruho
With tales of alienation told with deadpan humor and terrifying force, Unusual Fragments introduces the powerful but undertranslated peers of Osamu Dazai and Kōbō Abe.
A young storm-chaser welcomes a jaded woman into the eye of a storm. The last man of a peculiar family, implausibly tiny in stature, attends a Mozart opera with his dedicated wife. A medical student coolly observes an adolescent boy as he contorts his body into violent positions. With tension and wit, the writers of Unusual Fragments, among them Nobuko Takagi, Yoshida Tomoko, and Inagaki Taruho, trace their taboo, feminist, bizarre themes to complicate what we think of as 20th century Japanese literature. What's hiding just beneath the fiction of our perfectly ordered, happy lives? Something unusual. Something far more interesting.
"[S]tellar...All five entries are wonderful and provocative. For fans of contemporary Japanese fiction, it's a must-read." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Strange in evocative and enticingly varied ways, these previously untranslated treasures are each a little pocket universe of the eerie and uncanny, places in which to get deliciously lost." —Alexandra Kleeman, author of Something New Under the Sun
This information about Unusual Fragments was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Taruho Inagaki (1900–1977) was a prolific Japanese modernist writer known for his highly idiosyncratic voice and vision, which by the 1970s had gathered a cult-like following in Japan. While a young student at an international school in Kobe, he became fascinated with other cultures, aeronautics, astronomy, and attractive young men—interests that recur throughout his oeuvre. His best-known works include One Thousand One-Second Stories (1923), Miroku (1946), and The Aesthetics of Boy- Love (1968).
Taeko Kono (1926–2015) is one of the most significant Japanese writers in the twentieth century, whose work, often shocking and electrifying, interrogated prevailing myths and paradigms surrounding gender and sexuality in postwar Japan. She has been described as "one of the most radically talented writers of her generation" and as a "writer's writer" whose "often épater work was hailed for its spark and originality by writers such as Kenzaburo Ōe and Shūsaku Endō.
Nobuko Takagi is well known for works of a sensuous nature, in particular her book Translucent Tree, a story of love between an older couple. She traveled all over Asia and wrote a collection of stories inspired by her experiences as part of her "Soaked in Asia Project" at Kyushu University. "The Hole in the Sky" was one of those stories. Her story "Tomosui" (Two Lines Issue 24) received the Kawabata Yasunari Award in 2010.
Takako Takahashi (1932–2013) only began writing at the age of thirty-nine, following the death of her husband, the author Kazumi Takahashi. She converted to Catholicism in 1975, spending time in a Japanese convent and later living modestly in Paris. Her work is deeply engaged with existentialism, sexuality, and sin and is often dreamlike and disturbing, blurring the line between perception and hallucination. She won numerous major literary awards, including the Female Writers' Award, the Yomiuri Prize, and the Mainichi Arts Award.
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