Hitomi Kanehara

Snakes and Earrings

Rin is twenty-two, with a troubled adolescence behind her. She is flying back from her honeymoon, madly in love with her husband, Shin, and the future looks rosy. Then Shin disappears to the bathroom while he thinks Rin is sleeping and she starts to imagine that he has gone to seduce the flight attendant. As her thoughts spiral out of control the phrase 'madly in love' takes on a more sinister meaning. Prizewinning author Hitomi Kanehara's sensational new novel, Autofiction, follows Rin's life backwards through time from this moment so that we see her when she is eighteen, sixteen and finally fifteen, and a picture of the dark heart and violent past of this disturbed young woman gradually develops.

Autofiction

Hiromi Kawakami

Banana Yoshimoto

Shuichi Yoshida

Hideo Furukawa

Kaori Ekuni

Mitsuyo Kakuta

Toshiyuki Horie

Nao-Cola Yamazaki

Osamu Hashimoto

A shape-shifter arrives at Tokyo harbour in human form, set to embark on an unstoppable rampage through the city’s train network… A young woman is accompanied home one night by a reclusive student, and finds herself lured into a flat full of eerie Egyptian artefacts… A man suspects his young wife’s obsession with picnicking every weekend in the city’s parks hides a darker motive… At first, Tokyo appears in these stories as it does to many outsiders: a city of bewildering scale, awe-inspiring modernity, peculiar rules, unknowable secrets and, to some extent, danger. Characters observe their fellow citizens from afar, hesitant to stray from their daily routines to engage with them. But Tokyo being the city it is, random encounters inevitably take place – a naïve book collector, mistaken for a French speaker, is drawn into a world he never knew existed; a woman seeking psychiatric help finds herself in a taxi with an older man wanting to share his own peculiar revelations; a depressed divorcee accepts an unexpected lunch invitation to try Thai food for the very first time… The result in each story is a small but crucial change in perspective, a sampling of the unexpected yet simple pleasure of other people’s company. As one character puts it, ‘The world is full of delicious things, you know.’

A City in Short Fiction

The Book of Tokyo

Serpenti e piercing

Roman

Tokyo love

Zmijski jezik

Une langue fendue en deux comme celle d'un serpent... Quand Ama a ouvert la bouche, Lui s'est sentie parcourue d'un frisson comme elle n'en avait jamais éprouvé. En tombant amoureuse de ce jeune punk la jeune fille va découvrir un monde obscur entre violence et désir. Mais l'automutilation est un voyage sans retour. Piercings, tatouages, sexe et pulsions morbides, Lui va peu à peu perdre tous ses repères au contact de la faune trouble des bas-fonds de Tokyo... Icône de la culture pop japonaise, Hitomi Kanehara dressE le portrait d'une jeunesse à la dérive, en quête d'une étincelle de vie. Quels qu'en soient les moyens, quel qu'en soit le prix..

Serpents et piercings

Uma japonesa adolescente, erótica, pop, extravagante, mas com cara de anjo. Assim são autora e personagem de um mundo subterrâneo da tecnológica e desumana Tóquio, cada vez mais ocidentalizada. Tatuagens, piercings e um assassinato. Um mundo de alcoolismo, auto-destruição, sadomasoquismo e desilusão, em busca de um sentido na vida.

Cobras e piercings

Snakes and Earrings (Originally published in Japan as Hebi ni Piasu)

Obsession

Hitomi Kanehara

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