‘He merely desired to unpick her from the snag of what seemed vaguely to him to be her femininity.’
The apartment was small. It lay in the basement of one of the new giant chalets that were going up around the edge of the village, six-storey structures fancifully clad in varnished yellow pine that stood at angles to one another in the dirty snow like oversized doll’s-houses. Their apartment was …
Sign in to Granta.com.
‘Men believed without a doubt that rape was just a variety of sex. That was the world in which Narumi and her classmates lived.’
Mieko Kawakami, translated by Louise Heal Kawai & Hitomi Yoshio.
‘First prize went to the dog school principal, who of course had submitted a cartoon dog.’
Three stories by Hiromi Kawakami, translated by Ted Goossen.
‘Even if the children don’t understand, they know. Everything they managed to forget during the day comes back.’
Masatsugu Ono, translated by David Boyd.
‘Sounds like rain If I go to the window,
it could easily turn into bullets or rabbits.
Which one is right?
Should I go with my eyes or my ears?’
Toshiko Hirata, translated by Eric Hyett and Spencer Thurlow.
‘Hey, Nagaoka, wanna start a new cult with me?’
Sayaka Murata, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori.
An extract from Kudos, the final novel in Rachel Cusk’s trilogy, following Outline and Transit.
‘War is a narrative: it might almost be said to embody the narrative principle itself.’
‘It was right after he was born that I started looking at paintings.’
‘She hadn’t been skiing since her master’s in Iceland, back when glaciers had some heft to them, though slackened and fast-diminishing as the legs of a retired cyclist.’
