The Word Book

Front Cover
Dalkey Archive Press, 2009 - Fiction - 148 pages

Like the surfaces of a jagged crystal, each story in this collection shows an entirely different facet when viewed from a different angle. Playing games with the basic units of both life and fiction--the solid certainties of the self, the world around us, and the words we use to describe these things to one another--Mieko Kanai creates a reality where nothing is certain, and where a little boy going out to run errands for his mother might find that he's an adult, and his mother long dead, at the end of a single train ride. Using precise language to describe dreamlike plots owing as much to Kafka and Barthelme as to Kenzaburo Oe and the long tradition of the Japanese folktale of the macabre, "The Word Book" is an unforgettable voyage to absurd, hilarious, and terrifying locales, and is the English-language debut for one of the greatest and most interesting Japanese writers working today.

About the author (2009)

Poet, fiction-writer, and film critic Mieko Kanai was born in 1947. Citing influences ranging from Borges to Jean-Luc Godard, her work is at the vanguard of contemporary Japanese prose, and her poems, stories, and essays appear regularly in major newspapers, magazines, and literary journals.Paul McCarthy, Professor of Comparative Culture at Surugadai University in Japan, has translated work by Jun'ichiro Tanizaki, Takeshi Umehara, Zenno Ishigami, and Atsushi Nakajima. Mark Allen, London South Bank UniversityPaul McCarthy, Glasgow Caledonian University

Bibliographic information