289 pages

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We, The Children Of Cats , livre ebook

PM Press - Tomoyuki Hoshino

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289 pages

English

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We, The Children of Cats showcases a new collection of provocative early works by Tomoyuki Hoshino, winner of the 2011 Kenzaburo Oe Award in Literature. Drawing on sources as diverse as Nabokov, Garcia-Marquez, Kenji Nakagami and traditional Japanese folklore, Hoshino creates a challenging, slyly subversive literary world all his own. By turns teasing and terrifying, laconic and incandescent, the stories in this anthology demonstrate Hoshino's view of literature as 'an art that wavers, like a heat shimmer'.

Informations

Publié par	PM Press
Date de parution	07 août 2012
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781604867589
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	4 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0300€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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PraiseforTomoyukiHoshinoandWte,CheldhinerCfosta

“I see [in Hoshino] an ability to trulythinkthrough ﬁction that recalls Kōbō Abe. is superlative ability makes even the most fantastical details and developments read as perfectly natural.” —Kenzaburō Ōe, Nobel Prize–winning author ofNip the Buds, Shoot the KidsandTeach Us to Outgrow Our Madness

“Like a heat shimmer on a summer’s day, Tomoyuki Hoshino’s stories tantalize and haunt. From ‘Paper Woman’ to ‘A Milonga for the Melted Moon,’ Hoshino writes of people stranded between poles of reality and dream—with each option as uncertain as the other. Wonderfully translated, selected, and presented, this collection of works will be required reading.” — Rebecca Copeland, Washington University, author ofLost Leaves: Women Writers of Meiji Japanand translator ofGrotesqueby Natsuo Kirino

“[Hoshino’s] stories are ﬁlled with images like sacred spaces: even as each seems perfectly self-contained, they secretly refuse their apparent closures, spinning forever across limitless expanses, dropping seeds along the way for further growth. As they travel always towards some distant other place, they live on through myriad forms that possess no tidy resolution, no real end.” — Mayumi Inaba, award-winning author of otel ZambiaandPortrait in Sand

“ese wonderful stories make you laugh and cry, but mostly they astonish, commingling daily reality with the envelope pushed to the max and the interstice of the hard edges of life with the profoundly gentle ones.” — elen Mitsios, editor ofNew Japanese Voices: He Best Contemporary Fiction from Japanand Digital Geishas and Talking Frogs: He Best 21st Century Short Stories from Japan

“What feels most striking and praiseworthy about Hoshino’s work is how he deals with ambiguity—not as a fusion of multiple meanings, nor as their simple coexistence, nor as symbolic of meaning’s absence; rather, he dely weaves these concepts together and then, in the space between them, makes his escape.” — Maki Kashimada, award-winning author of Love at 6000°andHe Kingdom of Zero

“e loosely linked stories collected inWe, the Children of Catshome in on everyday events of millennial Japan only to slowly pan out onto alternate realities—voyages, crimes of passion, cultural histories of treason, sudden quarrels, and equally sudden truces. Bergstrom and Fraser’s translations brilliantly capture the emotional tones and shape-shiing nature of Hoshino’s lan-guage. ese stories explore the longing to be some-where, sometime, or even someone else so strongly that reality itself is, before you know it, transﬁgured.” — Anne McKnight, Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies at UCLA, author ofNakagami, Japan: Buraku and the Writing of Ethnicity

We,tHeCHildrenofCats Stories and Novellas by Tomoyuki Hoshino

Edited and Translated by Brian Bergstrom

with an additional translation by Lucy Fraser

Some of the translations in this collection have appeared elsewhere in slightly diFerent form and are reprinted with kind permission: “Chino,” published online by the Japanese Literature Publishing and Promotion Center (J-Lit Center, 2005); “Air” inChroma: A Queer Literary and Arts Journal(Spring 2008); and “He No athers Club” inDigital Geishas and Talking Frogs: He Best 21st Century Short Stories from Japan(Boston: Cheng & Tsui, 2011).

He stories and novellas in this collection were originally published in Japanese in the following venues: “Paper Woman” as “Kamionna” inIssatsu no hon(Asahi Shinbunsha, March 2000), reprinted inWarera neko no ko(Kōdansha, November 2006); “He No athers Club” as “Tetenashigo kurabu” inBungei(Kawade Shobō, Spring 2006), reprinted inWarera neko no ko(Kōdansha, November 2006); “Chino” as “Chino” inKawade Yume Mook: Bungei Bessatsu—Asian Travelers(Kawade Shobō, July 2000), reprinted inWarera neko no ko(Kōdansha, November 2006); “We, the Children of Cats” as “Warera neko no ko” inShinchō(Shinchōsha, January 2001), reprinted inWarera neko no ko(Kōdansha, November 2006); “Air” as “Eaa” inGunzō(Kōdansha, November 2006), reprinted as “Ea” inWarera neko no ko(Kōdansha, November 2006); “Sand Planet” as “Suna no wakusei” inSubaru(Shūeisha: March 2002), reprinted inFantajisuta(Shūeisha, 2003); “Treason Diary” as “Uragiri nikki” inBungei(Kawade Shobō, Summer 1998), reprinted inNaburiai(Kawade Shobō, 1999); “AMilongafor the Melted Moon” as “Toketa tsuki no tame no mironga” inBungei(Kawade Shobō, Spring 1999), reprinted inNaburiai(Kawade Shobō, 1999).

We, the Children of Cats: Stories and Novellas by Tomoyuki oshino Copyright © Tomoyuki oshino, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2006, 2012. Aerword and translation copyright © Brian Bergstrom, 2012 Translation for “Chino” copyright © Lucy raser, 2005 His edition © 2012 PM Press

ISBN: 978–1–60486–591–2 Library of Congress Control Number: 2011939692

Cover: John Yates / www.stealworks.com Interior design by briandesign

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

PM Press PO Box 23912 Oakland, CA 94623 www.pmpress.org

Printed in the USA on recycled paper, by the Employee Owners of Homson-Shore in Dexter, Michigan. www.thomsonshore.com

Contents

REàCE To All of You Reading His in English

Stories

PaperWoman(2000)

He No athers Club (2006)

Chino (2000)

We,theChildrenofCats(2001)

Air (2006)

Novellas

Sand Planet (2002)

Treason Diary (1998)

AMilongafor the Melted Moon (1999)

àERORD He Politics of Impossible Transformation

àCOEDGEŝ

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185

235

266

To All of You Reading his in EnglisH

As you know, on March 11, 2011, an enormous earthquake struck eastern Japan. At the time, I was at home in Tokyo working on a novel. He shaking was unlike anything I’d experienced before. It went on and on, up and down and side to side, as if I were in a small boat tossed by angry waves; minutes passed, but still it didn’t stop. He book-cases and walls swayed like wind-buFeted trees. I’d never thought earthquakes were frightening, but in this moment, I felt true terror in my heart. His is how my life will end, I thought. I felt the strength leave my body, and, afraid I would collapse right there, I put my hand against the wall, using all my might just to get through it. As soon as the shaking subsided, I turned on the tel-evision. Tsunami warnings were sounding. He tsunami arrived unbelievably quickly. Here was no sense of reality to it at all. It crashed over the coastline and rushed across rice ﬁelds with amazing speed. Images of it swallowing ﬂeeing cars and ﬂeeing people were broadcast live from helicopters. Watching them, I felt my heart break a little, somewhere deep inside. Hat wound has yet to heal. And if someone like me, shaken up in Tokyo and watching the tsunami on televi-sion, was so aFected, how must it be for those the tsunami touched directly? When I think of them, my body trembles. Twenty years ago, I lived in Mexico, drawn there by a love of Latin American literature. Doing so taught me that what I saw before my eyes at any given moment was not the entirety of reality. Latin America is a place where,

vii

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for good or for ill, extraordinary events ordinarily occur. I was frequently faced with absurd occurrences I could do nothing about, but on the other hand, it forced me to be creative and resilient as I confronted whatever may come next. I found my powers of imagination growing more expansive as I lived there in that society. Now, faced with this enormous earthquake and tsunami, what I need, as my heart threatens to break apart completely, is the will and imagination to confront another reality I can do nothing about. As I read back through the pieces in this anthology on the occasion of their transla-tion into English, I felt this need all the more keenly. Hat’s why I write stories in the ﬁrst place, I thought. In every story, the characters attempt to confront an unyielding reality using the power of their imagina-tions. He characters in these stories all share a certain measure of minority. His minority is invisible to the eyes of the majority. Which makes it as though it never was. But reality is made up of more than just what meets the eye. In these situations, those in minor positions call upon their powers of imagination to create spaces of belonging. His imaginative power creates worlds that aîrm their being rather than deny it. With a strength that rivals that of reality itself. He earthquake and tsunami, as well as the resulting nuclear crisis, have transformed, in the blink of an eye, the position of the majority, who had been simply living their lives normally up till then, into that of the minority. And those who had already been living in minority positions have been driven to ones even more minor. Especially now, because the damage they’ve sustained has been so great, various people existing in positions of minority have dis-appeared entirely from the world’s view. Hose calling for “reconstruction” imagine only the reconstruction of the majority, leaving those in the minority behind once again. Truth be told, aer the quake, it hasn’t been uncom-mon for me to feel writing literature to be rather ineFective.

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Yet, at the same time, it is only by writing stories that I am able to inhabit a future at all. He stories included in this anthology are, without exception, ones for which I feel a deep aFection. My ﬁction may be a bit diFerent from the image that comes to mind when you think of modern Japanese literature. But these ﬁctional worlds are minor Japanese realities (even as several have Latin America as their setting). My wish is for the words in these stories to overcome our various diFerences and lodge themselves within the bodies of all of you.

Tomoyuki Hoshino June 2011

Translated by Brian Bergstrom