Record of a Night too Brief

The Akutagawa Prize-winning stories from one of the most highly regarded & provocative contemporary Japanese writers 'The nightingale sang again. The plates on the table gleamed, & the food, in all its ceaseless variety, breathed, glossy & bright. The night had only just begun.' In these three haunting & lyrical stories, three young women experience unsettling loss & romance.

In a dreamlike adventure, one woman travels through an apparently unending night with a porcelain girlfriend, mist-monsters & villainous monkeys; a sister mourns her invisible brother whom only she can still see, while the rest of her family welcome his would-be wife into their home; & an accident with a snake leads a shop girl to discover the snake-families everyone else seems to be concealing. Sensual, yearning, & filled with the tricks of memory & grief, Record of a Night Too Brief is an atmospheric trio of unforgettable tales.

°°° 
Hiromi Kawakami was born in Tokyo in 1958. Since the publication of God in 1994, she has written numerous novels & collections of short stories, including Strange Weather in Tokyo & The Nakano Thrift Shop. Her most recent novel, Running Water, was published in Japan in 2014 & won the Yomiuri Prize for Literature. Manazuru won the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission prize. Hiromi Kawakami has previously been awarded the Akutagawa Prize & the Tanizaki Prize, & was shortlisted for the 2013 Man Asian Literary Prize & the 2014 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. Her work has been published in more than 20 languages. Kawakami has contributed to editions of Granta in both the UK & Japan & is one of Japan's most popular contemporary novelists.

Lucy North is the translator of The Woman in the Purple Skirt by Natsuko Imamura as well as fiction & nonfiction by over half a dozen other modern & contemporary Japanese writers, including Taeko Kono, Fumiko Enchi, Hiroko Oyamada, & Hiromi