‘Hey, Nagaoka, wanna start a new cult with me?’ New fiction by Sayaka Murata, translated from the Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori.
‘If I let myself sink down into this I’m never coming back up.’
‘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.’
‘What I thought was the world yesterday, today I couldn’t even touch its outline.’ Two essays by Hitomi Kanehara.
‘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.
‘You think I like being called Cherry / because your cat’s named Cherry?’
‘During sex, Narumi would picture herself as steamed rice being turned into mochi rice cakes.’
‘I liked her quiet regard, the way it gave me a sense of loneliness.’
‘I’d lived for half a century, but I had no sense of what that meant; no particular reaction.’
‘He told me he had quit his job the day after the earthquake and came out here with nothing but a sleeping bag.’
‘If I go to the window, / it could easily turn into bullets or rabbits.’
‘I had an odd feeling as I regarded Yō, who knew things about me that I hadn’t known.’
‘I was ever so keen to visit the Aran Islands, but unfortunately, I died before ever making it out of Japan.’
‘The night was sealed off completely – or so it seemed.’
