Tomoyuki Hoshino is the award-winning author of numerous books, including Fantasista, The Last Gasp, Lonely Hearts Killer, The Mermaids Sing, Open Your Eyes, and OreOre, which won the 2011 Kenzaburo Oe Award for Literature.
"The loosely linked stories collected in We, the Children of Cats
home in on everyday events of millennial Japan only to slowly pan
out onto alternate realities--voyages, crimes of passion, cultural
histories of treason, sudden quarrels and equally sudden truces.
Bergstrom and Fraser's translations brilliantly capture the
emotional tones and shape-shifting nature of Hoshino's language.
These stories explore the longing to be somewhere, sometime, or
even someone else so strongly that reality itself is, before you
know it, transfigured."
--Anne McKnight, Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies at UCLA,
author of Nakagami, Japan: Buraku and the Writing of Ethnicity "I
see [in Hoshino] an ability to truly think through fiction that
recalls Kobo Abe. This superlative ability makes even the most
fantastical details and developments read as perfectly
natural."
--Kenzaburō Oe, Nobel Prize winning author of Nip the Buds, Shoot
the Kids and Teach Us To Outgrow Our Madness "These wonderful
stories make you laugh and cry, but mostly they astonish,
co-mingling daily reality with the envelope pushed to the max and
the interstice of the hard edges of life with the profoundly gentle
ones."
--Helen Mitsios, editor of New Japanese Voices: The Best
Contemporary Fiction from Japan and Digital Geishas and Talking
Frogs: The Best 21st Century Short Stories from Japan "Like a heat
shimmer on a summer's day, Hoshino Tomoyuki's stories tantalize and
haunt. From 'Paper Woman' to 'A Milonga for the Melted Moon, '
Hoshino writes of people stranded between poles of reality and
dream--with each option as uncertain as the other. Wonderfully
translated, selected, and presented, this collection of works will
be required reading."
--Rebecca Copeland, Washington University in St. Louis, author of
Lost Leaves: Women Writers of Meiji Japan and translator of
Grotesque by Natsuo Kirino "What feels most striking and
praiseworthy about Hoshino's work is how he deals with
ambiguity--not as a fusion of multiple meanings, nor as their
simple coexistence, nor as symbolic of meaning's absence; rather,
he deftly weaves these concepts together and then, in the space
between them, makes his escape."
--Maki Kashimada, award-winning author of Love at 6000° and The
Kingdom of Zero
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