Toddler-Hunting: And Other Stories

by Taeko Kono, Lucy North (Translator)

Overview

Kirkus Reviews Best Books of 2018

An unforgettable collection of stories from “the most carnally direct and the most lucidly intelligent woman writing in Japan” (Kenzaburo Oe)

Toddler-Hunting and Other Stories introduces a startlingly original voice. Winner of Japan’s top literary prizes for fiction (among them the Akutagawa, the Tanizaki, the Noma, and the Yomiuri), Taeko Kono writes with a strange beauty, pinpricked with sadomasochistic and disquieting scenes.

In the title story, the protagonist loathes young girls, but compulsively buys expensive clothes for little boys so that she can watch them dress and undress. The impersonal gaze Taeko Kono turns on this behavior transfixes the reader with a fatal question: What are we hunting for? And why?

Multiplying perspectives and refracting light from the strangely facing mirrors of fantasy and reality, pain and pleasure, these ten stories present Kono at her very best.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811228275
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	10/30/2018
Edition description:	Revised
Pages:	272
Sales rank:	767,111
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Born in Tokyo, Taeko Kono (1926–2015) was “one of the most significant feminist writers of postwar Japan” (Japan Times).

Lucy North is a Japanese translator and editor based in the southeast of England.

Editorial Reviews

As nonchalantly as another author might describe a character's hair color, Kono introduces her characters' taboo desires…But the pleasure in Kono's work is not only, or even primarily, derived from its daring. These stories are also captivating in traditional ways. "Snow" is the psychological portrait of a woman who gets migraines when it snows, a malady she inherited from her mother, who suffered the headaches for reasons that are traumatic and brilliantly revealed. The first two pages of the title story introduce the main character in a way that makes you want a novel built around her…Like all of Kono's characters, she invites our deep and sustained interest but remains ultimately irreducible.

The New York Times Book Review - John Williams

★ 08/27/2018
This collection from Kono (1926–2015), one of Japan’s most prestigious writers, features stories written throughout the 1960s that are both provocative and eerily moving in their confrontation of the terrifying and the taboo. In the title story, a middle-aged woman despises young girls while cultivating a secret obsession with little boys, going so far as to buy them clothes in hopes of watching them undress. In “Night Journey,” after years of awkwardness, two couples address their interest in swapping partners, only to be thwarted by mysterious circumstances. In “Ants Swarm,” a married couple whose passion thrives on sadomasochism are thrown off when the wife believes she might be pregnant. At first, both are upset, but their feelings evolve as they consider what changes a child might make to their erotic life. And in the hypnotic “Snow,” a woman named Hayako attends the wake of her mother only to be confronted by the traumatic past they shared, and the effect such a legacy has had on her own relationships with others. She works toward recovering from that legacy: “Perhaps she could force a miracle.... She was determined to part from that old self, once and for all.” Each of Kono’s stories features characters confronting new ways to live with their own secret selves, resulting in a strikingly original and surprising collection. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

Kono’s intimate descriptions of unhappy relationships are not only unexpectedly frank, but often genuinely shocking.

Boston Review

Reminiscent of Flannery O’Connor’s works, Kono’s stories explore the dark, terrifying side of human nature that manifests itself in antisocial behavior.

World Literature Today

The fiery, beguiling stories in Toddler Hunting and Other Stories are vertiginous tightrope walks between two planes of reality. Kono’s writing is shocking, ominous, and subversive; it lays bare the destruction and the renewal that freedom and desire can cause.

The Paris Review Daily

Kono’s unsparing gaze penetrates the depths of human nature, and she sets forth what she finds there with absolute precision.

Shusaku Endo

I was not prepared for this unsettling and unforgettable collection. These stories left me shaken and in awe; they are incendiary, beautiful, and frightening confrontations of the lives we keep hidden from others. Taeko Kono fearlessly writes into the abyss, and there is no one like her.

Gabe Habash

Both the sadism and masochism here is very raw—but pain and pleasure mingle in ways that never cease to be surprising or poetic.

Thessaly La Force - T-Magazine

Two currents are constantly crossing in the stories, the first depicting the polite forms of public interactions and the second pulsing with taboo fantasies and hallucinations. There are resonances here with Tanizaki, but Kono’s subversions feel somehow scarier, in part because of her deadpan prose and in part because she strikes at sacred paradigms of motherhood and femininity.

The Wall Street Journal

★ 2018-08-21

A lively translation of postwar stories from Kono (1926-2015), a Japanese master of the unsettling.

There is a moment in the collection's penultimate story, "Conjurer," when the protagonist, Hisako, thinks back to a fight she witnessed between her married friends. They were vehemently arguing about whether a magic show they'd seen was real, and Hisako agreed to buy a ticket to the show to help settle their dispute. As she ponders the couple, she thinks, "They'd been forced to acknowledge something in each of them and also something about their very relationship that they'd been unconsciously avoiding, and, forced to become aware of it, they felt betrayed." This moment shines a light backward on the rest of the collection: Kono's specialty is this avoidance of the unconscious and the moments when the darkness of her characters' psyches finally spills out. In the title story, a childless woman balances a violent misanthropy with an obsession with very young boys. In the opener, "Night Journey," a couple walks across town to visit friends with whom they've tentatively agreed to swap spouses. The Twilight Zone-esque "Final Moments" explores what happens when a woman bargains with death for an extra 26 hours to live. In "Bone Meat," a woman whose boyfriend has left her becomes increasingly haunted by seemingly mundane objects—clothes, oyster shells—that push her toward destruction. Kono, who died in 2015, structures most of her stories similarly, with an unsettling flashback at the center of a story told in chronological time to show the ways that the dark seeds of our actions are planted, often unwittingly. And though the structures of the stories repeat and the protagonists resemble each other, each story unburies something that feels both thrillingly specific and surprisingly contemporary.

Kono should be an electrifying discovery for English-speaking lovers of short fiction.

Kirkus Reviews

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