Starred review from October 1, 2017
A supersurreal triad of stories from Japanese novelist Kawakami (The Nakano Thrift Shop, 2017, etc.).Kawakami, winner of the Akutagawa Prize, delivers three evocative tales that, as if from the notebooks of Kafka, concern strange transformations that happen to perfectly ordinary people going about their lives. In the title story, the narrator feels an itch--and then is suddenly galloping down the streets and amazing the onlookers. "That's a sight you don't see every day," says one, and when the poor changeling tries to respond "Get the fuck outta here," it becomes apparent that, yes, our narrator, gender uncertain and in any event provisional, has turned into a horse. It's the first of many transformations in a dream that turns to horror, with talking dolls, shriekingly accusatory macaques, and ranting kiwis. In a closing moment, while the landscape is being scraped clean to make a town, the narrator has become a tree, and more: "Then I grew old, very old, and rotted away." The narrator's lot is no better or worse than those of the characters in the succeeding stories. "Missing" is an enigmatic fable in which people and huge porcelain vases alike go disappearing in the night, while those left on this plane say bizarre things: "My love for you," says a matter-of-fact bridegroom (by proxy, as it happens), "is wider even than the floor area of the largest apartment in this apartment complex." The narrator of the closing story, meanwhile, might want a similarly large space in which to hide in a world where everyone and everything, it seems, is a snake in disguise--including, in the end, that very narrator, a young woman who lies in the darkness "experiencing in equal parts a sense of dread and a sense of calm expectation, the tears falling, as the night continued to deepen."Kawakami marks the literary map of Japan with a warning that beyond here lie dragons--or snakes and ghosts, at any rate. Astonishing, strange, and wonderful.

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December 1, 2017
Originally published in Japan in 1996, this is the first English translation of Akutagawa Prize winner Kawakami's collection of three short stories. Though each story stands on its own, Kawakami's stylea mix of magic realism, folklore, and subtle humorbinds them together. The eponymous opening story follows a woman as she travels through the night in a series of dreamlike episodes; though the Alice in Wonderland feel of her adventures is beautifully written, the pace is too frenzied to sustain interest, and the collection begins on a somewhat weak note. The remaining two stories, though still fantastical, are much more narrative-driven and compelling. Missing explores what happens when two families join together: one with a history of mysterious disappearances, and one whose members have a habit of shrinking to the size of an ant. Snake tells the story of a woman who unwittingly gets a new roommate: a snake-human hybrid in the body of a middle-aged woman. Fans of Haruki Murakami and Banana Yoshimoto will enjoy immersing themselves in Kawakami's magical worlds.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)