Author(s): Kyoko Nakajima (Ginny Takemori (Translator); Ian MacDonald (Translator))

Short Stories | Translated fiction | Read our reviews! | Japan

Prize-winning Japanese author offers stories haunted by history.

'If we want to understand what has been lost to time, there is no way other than through the exercise of imagination ... imagination applied with delicate rather than broad strokes'. So wrote the award winning Japanese author Kyoko Nakajima of her story, Things Remembered and Things Forgotten, a piece that illuminates, as if by throwing a switch, the layers of wartime devastation that lie just below the surface of Tokyo's insistently modern culture.

The ten acclaimed stories in this collection are pervaded by an air of Japanese ghostliness. In beautifully crafted and deceptively light prose, Nakajima portrays men and women beset by cultural amnesia and unaware of how haunted they are - by fragmented memories of war and occupation, by fading traditions, by buildings lost to firestorms and bulldozers, by the spirits of their recent past.

Review: These impressive stories bridge past and present, the familiar and the otherworldly, the lost and the found. -- David Mitchell, author of Number9Dream
Wonderful stories ... a perfect introduction to the quiet, subtle brilliance of Kyoko Nakajima. -- David Peace, author of Tokyo Year Zero

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STELLA'S REVIEW:
What is memory and how does it behave? Or, more accurately, how do we behave when confronted with memories? What we remember could be genuine or fabricated. What we forgot may be purposeful or accidental. Sometimes a happening is just outside our grasp; a thing familiar, hinted at, but not reachable; while at other times what we know has been plainly staring at us, but we have refused to see it. In Kyoko Nakajima’s collection of short stories, memory stands at the centre of her themes. Whether it is a widower getting to know his wife again through her notebooks —  stuffed with recipes, notes-to-self, complaints or pleasures; or a wife navigating her life with her increasingly forgetful husband as he succumbs to dementia; or a niece realising that her taciturn aunt had a secret and pleasurable life, Nakajima’s stories are taut, charming and tantalisingly deceptive, each laced with humour and subtle commentary on Japanese history and culture — societal and familial. What could be taken as quotidian events are surprisingly nuanced. Her concerns with the impact (and what she hints at as a forgetting or pulling away) of the second world war, particularly in the post-war period, are brought to light in several stories, most obviously in the title story, which follows the hardship and decisions made by family during these difficult times, through the eyes of two brothers, and how this has far-reaching consequences well into their future. In 'The Life Story of  Sewing Machine', we follow the glory and fall of an object, the hands which sew upon it and the homes it passes through, ruined, fixed and altered and eventually abandoned or, as it says, left in the dark, to see the light of day again finally at the top of a pile junk at the back of an antique shop. Like many of Nakajima’s stories, she uses a starting point in the present and without warning switches perspective and voice giving a liveliness to the writing as we travel back in time. In 'Kirara’s Paper Plane', a young girl, semi-abandoned as she waits for her mother who is in some sort of trouble, is visited by an older boy who takes her under his wing for a day. A day, because this is all he has. He’s a ghost, one who intermittently finds himself back in his old stomping ground where, after losing his parents in the war, he has struggled to survive on the streets. Ghosts appear in several of the stories, taking in a common element of traditional Japanese fiction, along with reimaginings of traditional folk tales, most markedly in 'The Pet Civet', which folds into its telling the tale of two lovers, one who may have been from the animal spirit realm, as two strangers recount their memories of an aunt. 'When My Wife Was a Shiitake' is charming and thought-provoking, gently touching on prescribed gender roles and fondness that grows through understanding. Kyoko Nakajima’s collection of ten stories, Things Remembered and Things Forgotten is a treat — deceptively sharp, laced with wit, capturing the joy and sadness of remembering and the sometimes necessary desire to forget.

Author Biography: Kyoko Nakajima is a multi-award winning author of novels and short stories. She was awarded the prestigious Naoki Prize for her novel, The Little House, and the Izumi Kyoka Prize for When my Wife was a Shitake. Her work has been adapted for film.