Bestselling author Keiichiro Hirano offers a timeless ode to love’s fragility and its resilience in this delicate, award-winning novel.
Classical guitarist Satoshi Makino has toured the world and is at the height of his career when he first lays eyes on journalist Yoko Komine. Their bond forms instantly.
Upon their first meeting, after Makino’s concert in Tokyo, they begin a conversation that will go on for years, with long spells of silence broken by powerful moments of connection. She’s drawn by Makino’s tender music and his sensitivity, and he is intrigued by Yoko’s refinement and intellect. But neither knows enough about love to see it blooming nor has the confidence to make the first move. Will their connection endure, weaving them back together like instruments in a symphony, or will fate lead them apart?
Blending the harmonies of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Nocturnes and the sensuality of Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love, At the End of the Matinee is an enchanting and thought-provoking love story.
Keiichiro Hirano is an award-winning and bestselling novelist whose debut novel, The Eclipse, won the prestigious Akutagawa Prize in 1998, when he was a twenty-three-year-old university student. A cultural envoy to Paris appointed by Japan’s Ministry of Cultural Affairs, Hirano has lectured throughout Europe. Widely read in France, China, Korea, Taiwan, Italy, and Egypt, Hirano’s novels include the Watanabe Junichi Literary Prize–winning novel At the End of the Matinee―a runaway bestseller in Japan―and the critically acclaimed and Yomiuri Prize for Literature–winning A Man. His short fiction has appeared in the Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature. For more information, visit http://en.k-hirano.com and follow Hirano on Twitter at @hiranok_en.
Juliet Winters Carpenter is a veteran translator and professor emerita of Doshisha Women’s College of Liberal Arts in Kyoto. Her first translated novel, Secret Rendezvous by Kobo Abe, received the 1980 Japan-US Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature. In 2014, A True Novel by Minae Mizumura received the same award as well as the American Translators Association Lewis Galantière Award. The audio edition of her translation of Shion Miura’s bestselling novel The Great Passage won an Earphones Award. Carpenter’s other recent translations include An I-Novel by Minae Mizumura and Pax Tokugawana: The Cultural Flowering of Japan, 1603-1853 by Toru Haga. She lives on Whidbey Island in Washington.
