We, the Children of Cats (Found in Translation) - Softcover

Hoshino, Tomoyuki

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1604865911 ISBN 13: 9781604865912

Publisher: PM Press, 2012

Synopsis

By turns teasing and terrifying, laconic and luminous, the stories in this anthology are drawn from sources as diverse as Borges, Nabokov, Garcia-Marquez, and traditional Japanese folklore, and yet they ultimately reside in a slyly subversive literary world that is all their own. Blending an uncompromising ethical vision with exuberant, free-wheeling imagery and bracing formal experimentation, the five short stories and three novellas included in We, the Children of Cats show the full range and force of Hoshino’s imagination. The stories include a man and woman who find their genders and sexualities brought radically into question when their bodies sprout new parts; a man who travels from Japan to Latin America in search of revolutionary purpose only to find much more than he bargained for; a journalist who investigates a poisoning at an elementary school and gets lost in an underworld of buried crimes, secret societies, and haunted forests; and two young killers, exiled from Japan, who find a new beginning as resistance fighters in Peru. An afterword by translator and editor Brian Bergstrom and a new preface by Hoshino himself is also included.

About this title

About the Author

Tomoyuki Hoshino is the award-winning author of numerous books, including Fantasista, The Last Gasp, Lonely Hearts Killer, The Mermaids Sing, Open Your Eyes, and OreOre, which won the 2011 Kenzaburo Oe Award for Literature.

Review

“These wonderful stories make you laugh and cry, but mostly they astonish.”  —Helen Mitsios, editor, New Japanese Voices

“I see [in Hoshino] an ability to truly think through fiction that recalls Kobo Abe. This superlative ability makes even the most fantastical details and developments read as perfectly natural.”  —Kenzaburo Oe, Nobel Prize–winning author, Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids and Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness

“Wonderfully translated, selected, and presented, this collection of works will be required reading.”  —Rebecca Copeland, author, Lost Leaves: Women Writers of Meiji Japan

“The loosely linked stories collected in We, the Children of Cats home 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. These stories explore the longing to be somewhere, sometime, or even someone else so strongly that reality itself is, before you know it, transfigured.”  —Anne McKnight, author, Nakagami, Japan: Buraku and the Writing of Ethnicity

"Nearly every character in Hoshino's collection of short stories and novellas yearns to escape the boundaries of their gender, national identity, or, in many cases, their own flesh. Hoshino is an avowed lover of magical realism, and the transformative, dream-like aspects of that genre wield a heavy influence on this work." —Publishers Weekly (November 19, 2012)

"Every story and novella in this collection startles, confuses, yet finally energizes the attentive reader. The editor and translators are to be congratulated on presenting us with such an impressive sample of this brilliant contemporary writer." —Japan Times (January 2013)

"Power surges through each fantasia of failed transformation in this remarkable collection."  —Michael A. Morrison, World Literature Today

"We, the Children of Cats is an interesting collection, and certainly a good introduction to an interesting writer." —www.complete-review.com

Edition details

• Publisher: PM Press
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 1604865911
• ISBN 13: 9781604865912
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320