From the author of The Hole and The Factory, a collection of strange and wonderful tales of humans, animals, and plants

Crabs scurrying over a landfill. Huge tadpoles writhing in a pond. A gecko stuck to the window. A sudden invasion of ants. Nature mysteriously creeps in and overruns the realm of humans in this stunning collection of stories.

Hiroko Oyamada masterfully conveys the sense that seemingly stable and ordinary people are cracking at the edges, that a surreal encounter with an animal can change the entire course of one’s life, that an obscure local ritual can have profound consequences. In these fifteen stories we find young couples navigating pregnancies, toddlers, and in-laws; men and women returning to their childhood homes to rediscover the enigmatic traditions they’d left behind; and children who plumb dreamlike riddles in the natural world.

About the Author:

Born in Hiroshima in 1983, Hiroko Oyamada won the Shincho Prize for New Writers for The Factory, which was drawn from her experiences working as a temp for an automaker’s subsidiary. Her novel The Hole won Akutagawa Prize.

David Boyd is Assistant Professor of Japanese at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He has translated stories by Genichiro Takahashi, Masatsugu Ono and Toh EnJoe, among others. His translation of Hideo Furukawa’s Slow Boat won the 2017/2018 Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission (JUSFC) Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature. With Sam Bett, he is cotranslating the novels of Mieko Kawakami.

Lucy North has translated Japanese fiction and non-fiction, including by Taeko Kono, Hiromi Kawakami, Fumiko Enchi, and Natsuko Imamura. Born in Tokyo and raised in Los Angeles, Yuki Tejima is the translator of works by Mizuki Tsujimura, Emi Yagi, Kumi Kimura, and Risa Wataya, among others.