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The Possibility of an Emperor
Patrick Barkham
‘I had always been told that the purple emperor was rare because old woods were rare.’
Aliens and Us
Ken Thompson
‘Japanese knotweed is a terrific late-season source of nectar for both bees and hoverflies, but that’s not much of a headline, is it?’
The High House
Jessie Greengrass
‘All those who might have lived instead of us are gone, or they are starving, while we stay on here at the high house, pulling potatoes from soft earth.’
Upirngasaq (Arctic Spring)
Sheila Watt-Cloutier
‘Everyone benefits from a frozen Arctic. The future of the Arctic environment, and the Inuit it supports, is inextricably tied to the future of the planet.’
Faith
Sayaka Murata
‘Hey, Nagaoka, wanna start a new cult with me?’
New fiction by Sayaka Murata, translated from the Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori.
Kōbō Abe
Thomas McMullan
‘Against the immensity of things, look at what you can grasp, he seems to say. Grasp it tightly.’
Thomas McMullan on the writing of Kōbō Abe.
Pretty Polly
Shinichi Hoshi
‘Compared to all of you, I’m not the handsomest guy or the smartest, which might’ve caused me all sorts of grief if I was a landlubber. But I spent my life at sea, so I got by.’
Paris Desert, Tokyo Mirage
Hitomi Kanehara
‘What I thought was the world yesterday, today I couldn’t even touch its outline.’
Two essays by Hitomi Kanehara.
Podcast | Joanna Kavenna
Joanna Kavenna
‘We all now exist as avatars, on shining tiles in these cubist landscapes’
Joanna Kavenna discusses her all-too-familiar surveillance dystopia, Zed.
One Hundred Years and a Day
Tomoka Shibasaki
‘After a while people’s faces began to fade, and they came to seem like hoards of noppera-bō, faceless spirits gliding by.’
Two stories by Tomoka Shibasaki.
Cheating
Ahmet Altan
‘I get into the police car with four officers from the Anti-Terrorism Branch. They are taking me to the prison.’
Shame
Mieko Kawakami
‘During sex, Narumi would picture herself as steamed rice being turned into mochi rice cakes.’
North Winds Blow the Leaves From the Trees
Yu Miri
‘I liked her quiet regard, the way it gave me a sense of loneliness.’
Nightingale
Marina Kemp
‘She knew it was a trick of the lonely to favour the rude to the simply unmoved; that the loneliest thing in these villages and in this most tucked-away of professions was to elicit no response at all.’
Marina Kemp’s debut novel Nightingale is shortlisted for the 2020 Young Writer of the Year Award.
An Unnecessary Man
Maha Harada
‘I’d lived for half a century, but I had no sense of what that meant; no particular reaction.’
Tongues of Fire
Seán Hewitt
‘Waking, close to morning but still
a shuttered, metal dark in the room’
Two poems by Seán Hewitt from Tongues of Fire, shortlisted for the 2020 Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award.
The Bookmobile
Kotaro Isaka
‘He told me he had quit his job the day after the earthquake and came out here with nothing but a sleeping bag.’
Podcast | Caleb Klaces
Caleb Klaces
‘I think the infrastructure of community around fathering is very limited.’
We discuss Caleb Klaces’s debut novel, Fatherhood.
VIO
Kanako Nishi
‘I had an odd feeling as I regarded Yō, who knew things about me that I hadn’t known.’
Inferno
Catherine Cho
‘My son was eight days shy of his 100-day celebration when I started to see devils in his eyes.’
Catherine Cho’s Inferno is shortlisted for the 2020 Young Writer of the Year Award.
Surge
Jay Bernard
‘The black is coming in from the cold,
rolling up the beach walls, looking for light.’
Two poems by Jay Bernard, from their debut collection Surge, shortlisted for the 2020 Young Writer of the Year Award.
The Death of Distance
Samrat Choudhury
‘It might take only one soldier being shot across the Chinese–Indian border for war to begin. The howitzers, tanks, missiles and fighter jets are lined up, ready and waiting for action.’
A Ghost in Brazil
Kikuko Tsumura
‘I was ever so keen to visit the Aran Islands, but unfortunately, I died before ever making it out of Japan.’
Podcast | Sophie Mackintosh
Sophie Mackintosh
‘Imagine if an alien came to earth and asked, so how to you reproduce?’
We discuss Blue Ticket and the body horror of motherhood.
The Only Way Out Is Through
Hana Pera Aoake
‘Hiding in kumara pits on the side of volcanoes, I was born with an egg inside me ready to be baked.’
