Hiromi Kawakami

Tsukiko, thirty-eight, works in an office and lives alone. One night she encounters her now retired former high school teacher "Sensei" in a local bar. Despite the 30 year age difference, their relationship develops and grows into love.

"On a summer afternoon, Tsukiko and her former high school teacher have prepared and eaten somen noodles together. 'Tell me a story from long ago,' Sensei says. 'I wasn't alive long ago,' Tsukiko says, 'but should I tell you a story from when I was little?' 'Please do,' Sensei replies, and so Tsukiko tells him that, when she was a child, she awakened one day to find something with a pale red face and something with a dark red face in her room, arguing...

Stories from a Japanese master of transformative fiction, where reality, myth, and human foibles meet shifting dimensions of gender, biology, and destiny. From the bestselling author of Strange Weather in Tokyo comes this otherworldly collection of eight stories, each a masterpiece of transformation, infused with humor, sex, and the universal search for love and beauty-in a world where the laws of time and space, and even species boundaries, don't...

"One morning, a woman treads on a snake. She comes home that evening and realises the snake has moved into her house and is saying she is her mother. So begins the story of a woman trying to live with a snake, with herself, or perhaps with something else all together. This volume includes the three stories Tread on a Snake, Missing, and Record of a Night Too Brief which together won the Akutagawa Prize in 1996. Filled with fantastically multicoloured...