Mieko Kanai

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Like the surfaces of a jagged crystal, each story in this collection shows an entirely different facet when viewed from a different angle. Playing games with the basic units of both life and fiction—the solid certainties of the self, the world around us, and the words we use to describe these things to one another—Mieko Kanai creates a reality where nothing is certain, and where a little boy going out to run errands for his mother might find that he's an adult, and his mother long dead, at the end of a single train ride. Using precise language to describe dreamlike plots owing as much to Kafka and Barthelme as to Kenzaburō Ōe and the long tradition of the Japanese folktale of the macabre, The Word Book is an unforgettable voyage to absurd, hilarious, and terrifying locales, and is the English-language debut for one of the greatest and most interesting Japanese writers working today.

ISBN-10 1564785661

ISBN-13 9781564785664

Publication Date Oct 2009

Nb of pages 180

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. . . he remembered the black leather case that had been stolen on the train. And the chocolate he had saved for later, carefully rewrapping it in its silver foil; and the blood, clear as a glass bead, that had seeped out in the center of the bruise just under his nipple; and Maureen O’Hara, smiling provocatively in her evening gown of satin (or velvet) the same green as her eyes; and the feral-smelling musk. His remembering that he had a mother who drank a liter of milk was so sudden and unnatural that he burst out laughing. The abruptness with which one remembers that one has forgotten even the fact of having forgotten. At this rate, he’d probably forgotten that he’d forgotten many other things. So I think. In this weightless space of memory. At a coffee stand in front of the station facing the triangular park where small cypress trees were planted . . .

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