Toddler hunting
Subtitle: and other stories
By: Taeko Kono ; translated by Lucy North with an introduction by Lucy Lower
Contributors: North, Lucy, translator
Edition: Revised paperback edition.
Series: New Directions Paperbook -- 1424
Published: 2018
Language: eng
Number of pages: 274
ISBN-13: 9780811228275
Description: *Toddler-Hunting and Other Stories* introduces a startlingly original voice. Winner of Japan’s top literary prizes for fiction (among them the Akutagawa, the Tanizaki, the Noma, and the Yomiuri), Taeko Kono writes with a strange beauty, pinpricked with sadomasochistic and disquieting scenes.

In the title story, the protagonist loathes young girls, but compulsively buys expensive clothes for little boys so that she can watch them dress and undress. The impersonal gaze Taeko Kono turns on this behavior transfixes the reader with a fatal question: What are we hunting for? And why?

Multiplying perspectives and refracting light from the strangely facing mirrors of fantasy and reality, pain and pleasure, these ten stories present Kono at her very best.
Table of contents: title: Night journey --; title: Full tide --; title: Toddler-hunting --; title: Snow --; title: Theater --; title: Crabs --; title: Ants swarm --; title: Final moments --; title: Conjurer --; title: Bone meat.