Here is my most recent read: Record Of A Night Too Brief by Hiromi Kawakami. Another Japanese author, of course. The funny thing is that I started to read The Nakano Thrift Shop, also by Kawakami, but I couldn’t finish it. It was too slow-moving for me. This book, however, was totally different and I enjoyed it much more.
Record Of A Night Too Brief has three short stories in it:
- Record Of A Night Too Brief
- Missing
- A Snake Stepped On
The first short story, Record Of A Night Too Brief, is truly bizarre. It reads like a series of surreal dream sequences, with a loose storyline about a woman and her (porcelain) girlfriend. Reading this short story is basically like reading somebody’s dream. And the language used in it is so expressive and beautiful!
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Missing is about a woman whose brother mysteriously disappears just before he is due to be married. The family welcome his would-be wife into their home, anyway, and she marries the second brother, instead. This story starts off much more ‘normal’ than the first, but it, too, moves into surrealism. Which isn’t a bad thing. I like surrealism.
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In A Snake Stepped On, a woman steps on a snake and then the snake moves into her apartment. It sometimes appears as a snake, sometimes as a woman. The snake claims to be the woman’s mother. Another absolutely bizarre little tale that will most likely be interpreted differently by different readers.
An enjoyable book, but unfortunately not one that will stay with me for very long, I don’t think.
Here’s what else I’ve been reading!
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