num_pages: 227
description: Ikezawa has been described as one of the best short story writers in the world today. When he won his country's highest literary award ten years ago, readers hailed the arrival of a new voice in Japanese clear, unerring, and resonant. As the title itself suggests, all four of the stories in this collection are in some way about people moving away from ordinary life, seeing things from a distance, as though looking at their world through the window of a spaceship moving into orbit. In the last and most daring piece of all, an international team is sent to explore a ruined site in northern Afghanistan. A helicopter crash reduces their number to two, a Japanese and a Frenchman, who decide to press on. Watched by a high, circling eagle, they find what appears to be a ruined citadel, among whose stones they hear a form of music so strange it seems to call to them from another world. And the longer they stay the deeper they are drawn into it, until they're forced to to return, or to go beyond... Here, and we hope in other collections to come, readers will encounter a rare writer whose work attains the highest level of imagination, yet remains always anchored in a reassuring normality. Welcome to "a brave new lyrical world."
language: English
title: Still Lives
titlecomplete: Still Lives
genres: Fiction, Japan, Short Stories, Japanese Literature
ratings_count: 92
awards: awardedAt: 536486400000
name: Akutagawa Prize 芥川龍之介賞
publisher: Kodansha Amer Inc