Breakfast | Granta

Breakfast

Toshiki Okada

Translated by Michael Emmerich

‘If I had known she were heading for Tokyo then, and if I had known she thought of Tokyo as a city of zombies, I would have wanted to know, of course, whether she saw me that way, too.’

Toshiki Okada

Toshiki Okada is a playwright, director, novelist and founder of theatre company Chelfitsch. His plays inlcude Sangatsu no itsukakan (Five Days in March), Cooler (Air Conditioner) and Marijuana no gai ni tsuite (On the Harmful Effects of Marijuana). His novella collection Watashitachi ni yurusareta tokubetsu na jikan no owari (The End of the Special Time We Were Allowed) was awarded the Kenzaburō Ōe Prize in 2007.

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Translated by Michael Emmerich

Michael Emmerich is Professor of Japanese literature at the University of California, Los Angeles and Director of the Tadashi Yanai Initiative for Globalizing Japanese Humanities. He is the author of The Tale of Genji: Translation, Canonization, and World Literature and Tentekomai: bungaku wa hi kurete michi tōshi, the editor of Read Real Japanese Fiction: Short Stories by Contemporary Writers and New Penguin Parallel Texts: Short Stories in Japanese, and the translator of numerous works of premodern to contemporary Japanese literature by authors ranging from Kawabata Yasunari and Inoue Yasushi to Yoshimoto Banana and Takahashi Gen’ichirō.

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