不冷的紅茶

by Yōko Ogawa, 小川洋子, 粟奕倩 (Translator)

一位中學時代同學的死訊，令她開始思考死亡這個問題。
而在葬禮上與中學同學K君的重逢，更帶她走入K君與他戀人的世界，三人共度了許多不可思 議的時光……

這裡明明是她的家，她卻沒有歸屬感；從小與一群孤兒一起長大，她自己卻 不是孤兒。家中充斥著一大堆不相干的人，還要像一家人似地生活在一起，使她那惡劣的情緒，無法抑制地大量湧現。

兩篇芥川賞入圍作品「不冷的紅茶」及「潛水池」，帶你進入小川洋子纖細的想像世界，隨著沉靜卻充滿張力的情節，死亡及不完整家庭這兩個深沉的議題 悄然浮現……

184 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 1990

About the author

Yōko Ogawa (小川 洋子) was born in Okayama, Okayama Prefecture, graduated from Waseda University, and lives in Ashiya. Since 1988, she has published more than twenty works of fiction and nonfiction. Her novel The Professor and his Beloved Equation has been made into a movie. In 2006 she co-authored „An Introduction to the World's Most Elegant Mathematics“ with Masahiko Fujiwara, a mathematician, as a dialogue on the extraordinary beauty of numbers.

A film in French, "L'Annulaire“ (The Ringfinger), directed by Diane Bertrand, starring Olga Kurylenko and Marc Barbé, was released in France in June 2005 and subsequently made the rounds of the international film festivals; the film, some of which is filmed in the Hamburg docks, is based in part on Ogawa's "Kusuriyubi no hyōhon“ (薬指の標本), translated into French as "L'Annulaire“ (by Rose-Marie Makino-Fayolle who has translated numerous works by Ogawa, as well as works by Akira Yoshimura and by Ranpo Edogawa, into French).

Kenzaburō Ōe has said, 'Yōko Ogawa is able to give expression to the most subtle workings of human psychology in prose that is gentle yet penetrating.' The subtlety in part lies in the fact that Ogawa's characters often seem not to know why they are doing what they are doing. She works by accumulation of detail, a technique that is perhaps more successful in her shorter works; the slow pace of development in the longer works requires something of a deus ex machina to end them. The reader is presented with an acute description of what the protagonists, mostly but not always female, observe and feel and their somewhat alienated self-observations, some of which is a reflection of Japanese society and especially women's roles within in it. The tone of her works varies, across the works and sometimes within the longer works, from the surreal, through the grotesque and the--sometimes grotesquely--humorous, to the psychologically ambiguous and even disturbing.