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Toddler-Hunting & Other Stories
by
Kōno Taeko,
Lucy North , Kono Taeko
FROM BOOKLIST: An intriguing new voice is introduced in this selection of Kono Taeko's stories written in the 1960s. Most focus on middle-class women in their thirties, married, but with no children. Although firmly rooted in the realist tradition, the stories have a surreal, dreamlike quality. Several of them deal with obsession; in the title story, for example, Akiko is ...more
Paperback, 266 pages
Published
September 28th 1998
by New Directions Publishing Corporation
(first published 1996)
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read two of these last night, excellent. Limpid, seemingly conventional but with a real subversive bite... (next day) and then I read the third - title - story, fuck me it's strong, repellant (her fantasy bit). Jesus Christ. Still reading on though, this is good stuff, but with caution now and wondering what else will come up.
update: I've stopped reading these for a bit. Not because they're bad, quite the opposite. I just need to go and lie down in a corner (with another book: it's like ch...more
update: I've stopped reading these for a bit. Not because they're bad, quite the opposite. I just need to go and lie down in a corner (with another book: it's like ch...more
One of the best short story collections I've read in recent years. It's a shame that Taeko Kono isn't better known and though she appears to have authored several books, this seems to be the only one translated into English.
The stories were written in the 60's but do not feel in any way dated. Each story creates a world as rich as any novel...The lives of women are explored, their relationships, the violence of their longing, the way pain and pleasure mix. Setting: a seaside town, ...more
The stories were written in the 60's but do not feel in any way dated. Each story creates a world as rich as any novel...The lives of women are explored, their relationships, the violence of their longing, the way pain and pleasure mix. Setting: a seaside town, ...more
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The stories in Toddler-Hunting and Other Stories were originally written in the 1960s and concerned women and their unstable or uncertain marital relationships. Kōno Taeko's genre of writing was classified as transgressive fiction owing to her use of elements of sadomasochism and aberrant behavior. The stories were often open-ended, which are really the best kind of stories; and they were propelled by ordinary details made to seem odd and entirely new, as if the outcome of the story was dictated...more
i'm not sure whether japanese authors have an innate proclivity for deviance, or if i just happen to have read the weird ones, but she's got a great way of shocking you with the undercurrent of violence, prurience, and cruelty that runs through all these stories.
incidentally, does anyone remember which japanese author wrote a story about a woman who bobbited her husband then kept the evidence in a box and took it out periodically to put it in her mouth when she missed him? i can't f...more
incidentally, does anyone remember which japanese author wrote a story about a woman who bobbited her husband then kept the evidence in a box and took it out periodically to put it in her mouth when she missed him? i can't f...more
This book was the subject matter for the best paper I ever wrote in college, or perhaps EVER, on the appeal of sadomasochism to Japanese women...so I admit I'm a bit sentimental toward this book. It's amazingly fascinating in that it defies your expectations, and makes you question what motivates the protagonist in her true and obvious hatred of little girls--or, if you don't want to think that far, you can be emotionally provoked by how she manifests her feelings in a very vivid sadomasochistic...more
the comparison to O'Connor on the back is apt. her writing also reminds me of Lydia Davis in places. "Toddler Hunting" and "Bone Meat" are both effectively creepy/moving. All the references to rough sex come to seem cliche after a while.
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Shelves:
japanese,
short-stories,
favourites,
existentialism,
mystery,
sex,
violence,
tragedy,
contemporary-classics,
academic,
cult,
culture,
notable-debut
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