We, the Children of Cats by Tomoyuki Hoshino

Abstract

David Harsent In Secret: Versions of Yannis Ritsos Enitharmon British poet David Harsent presents his condensed versions of the essence of Yannis Ritsos’s work. Harsent immersed himself in the Greek poet’s oeuvre, reading as many existing translated versions as possible and following up with new translations. He terms the result “a way of getting inside those dark lines to take their scent and flavor.” Blaine Harden Escape from Camp 14 Viking The misery of being born to imprisoned parents and growing up in a North Korean labor camp is brought to light in this moving biography of Shin Dong-hyuk. Journalist Blaine Harden compassionately narrates Shin’s story of a harrowing escape and his difficulties of adjusting to his new found freedom. Nota Bene Life turned around and got on with something else.” Fresh imagery, such as the use of a formerly upright piano as a metaphor for a mother who falls under the spell of a maestro who is not her piano-tuning husband, awakens the mind from its habitual vantage point to see anew the universal truths it has learned to gloss over. Hershman shows us that our world is, in fact, a nearly unrecognizable place, and we are all aliens in it, alien in our skin, unknowable not only to each other but often to ourselves. Everything is not illuminated in Hershman’s storytelling, and the reader may well ask himself at the end of a story, “What just happened?” The answer: something vague, absurd, the pain of our attempts at human relationships, and our tenuous place in the universe revealing themselves, and they are beautiful. [Editorial note: To read a story by Hershman, see page 18 of this issue.] Kerri Shadid Edmond, Oklahoma Tomoyuki Hoshino. We, the Children of Cats. Brian Bergstrom & Lucy Fraser, tr. Oakland, California. PM Press (IPG, distr.). 2012. isbn 9781604865912 “My wish is for the words in these stories to . . . lodge themselves within the bodies of all of you.” By thus concluding his introduction to this collection, Tomoyuki Hoshino throws down the gauntlet: reader, you have been warned. Since the publication of his first novel in 1997, Hoshino has won multiple major awards, culminating in the 2011 Ōe Kenzaburō Literary Award for Ore Ore (2010). Yet only in 2009 was one of his novels published in English, when PM issued Ronrii haatsu kiraa (2004) as Lonely Hearts Killer. A nearly nihilistic tale of rebellion and revolution, Lonely Hearts Killer overtly engages hot-button geopolitical issues—climate change, authoritarianism, and the culture of fear—as well as social issues particular to modern Japan—majoritarian pressures to conform and the suicide cult among young Japanese. The stories in We, the Children of Cats are more interior, intimate. “Chino” fuses economic globalization with Japan’s crisis of national identity in the character of a young Japanese man who flees to “a small country below Mexico” to eradicate all “Japaneseness” from his being. The title story examines Japan’s predicted steep population decline via the disintegration of an already dysfunctional relationship. Masako’s family press her and her husband, Naru, to start a family, arguing the long-standing tradition that a woman’s primary responsibility is to marry and then bear and raise her husband’s children. But Masako stridently believes in her right to decide whether to ever have children. Some collections can be equally appreciated regardless of the sequence of reading their contents. Not this one. Read in the order presented , the five short stories teach us how to understand Hoshino’s fictions and prepare us for the three novellas to follow. In the first story, “Paper Woman,” Hoshino embeds ideas and images he will subsequently develop . The narrator, writer “Tomoyuki Hoshino,” states his credo: writing may – june 2013 • 63 reviews fiction is “an art that wavers, like a heat shimmer, between joy at the prospect of becoming something else and despair at knowing that such a transformation is ultimately impossible . . . . A true experience of reading is always located in the territory where these two forms of consciousness intermingle.” In the last short story, “Air,” Hoshino brings, with disturbing explicitness , his key theme of transformation to the physiological machineries of gender in the...