Description

The Akutagawa Prize-winning stories from one of the most highly regarded and provocative contemporary Japanese writers

‘The nightingale sang again. The plates on the table gleamed, and the food, in all its ceaseless variety, breathed, glossy and bright. The night had only just begun.’

In these three haunting and lyrical stories, three young women experience unsettling loss and romance.

In a dreamlike adventure, one woman travels through an apparently unending night with a porcelain girlfriend, mist-monsters and villainous monkeys; a sister mourns her invisible brother whom only she can still see, while the rest of her family welcome his would-be wife into their home; and an accident with a snake leads a shop girl to discover the snake-families everyone else seems to be concealing.

Sensual, yearning, and filled with the tricks of memory and grief, Record of a Night Too Brief is an atmospheric trio of unforgettable tales.

Hiromi Kawakami was born in Tokyo in 1958. Since the publication of God in 1994, she has written numerous novels and collections of short stories, including Strange Weather in Tokyo and The Nakano Thrift Shop. Her most recent novel, Running Water, was published in Japan in 2014 and won the Yomiuri Prize for Literature. Hiromi Kawakami has previously been awarded the Akutagawa Prize and the Tanizaki Prize, and was shortlisted for the 2013 Man Asian Literary Prize and the 2014 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. Her work has been published in more than twenty languages.

Publisher Review

‘Evocative… Astonishing, strange, and wonderful’ – Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

‘Baffling, unsettling and haunting, these stories have a dreamlike atmosphere’ – The Lady

‘A truly fantastical story which requires thorough reading, yet rewards with rich imagery that will challenge anyone’s powers of imagination’ – The Japan Society

‘At once funny and humane, the author’s estranging fiction is bewitching. If Japan were in need of a Lewis Carroll, look no further’ – South China Morning Post

‘Slippery and unfamiliar places where logic is internal and surreal… gives the reader the strange sense of being led through a collection of dreams’ – Asymptote