Record of a Night Too Brief
Hiromi Kawakami, Lucy North (translation)This volume includes the three stories "A Snake Stepped On", "Missing" & "Record of a Night Too Brief" which together won the Akutagawa Prize in 1996. Filled with fantastically multicoloured images & unexplained collapses in time and place, these highly surreal, meticulously worked stories of longing & disappearance, love & loathing are the work of an enormously talented writer at the top of her game.
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Hiromi Kawakami was born in Tokyo in 1958. Since the publication of God in 1994, she has written numerous novels & collections of short stories, including Strange Weather in Tokyo & The Nakano Thrift Shop. Her most recent novel, Running Water, was published in Japan in 2014 & won the Yomiuri Prize for Literature. Manazuru won the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission prize. Kawakami has previously been awarded the Akutagawa Prize & the Tanizaki Prize, & was shortlisted for the 2013 Man Asian Literary Prize & the 2014 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. Her work has been published in more than twenty languages.
Lucy North lives & works in London as a freelance translator & editor. She has a PhD in modern Japanese literature from Harvard University (2000), & she lived in Tokyo for nearly 14 years. As a graduate student she published Toddler Hunting & Other Stories by Kono Taeko (New Directions, 1996). Her translations have been included in The Oxford Anthology of Japanese Short Stories (Oxford University Press, 1997/2002) & The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature, From 1945 to the Present (2007). She is currently translating three short stories by Hiromi Kawakami.