Toddler Hunting: And Other Stories - Tapa blanda

Kono's intimate descriptions of unhappy relationships are not only unexpectedly frank, but often genuinely shocking.

A sense of unease permeates this disturbing and exceptional collection of stories centered on unhappy women in postwar Japan.

Reminiscent of Flannery O'Connor's works, Kono's stories explore the dark, terrifying side of human nature that manifests itself in antisocial behavior.

Kono's unsparing gaze penetrates the depths of human nature, and she sets forth what she finds there with absolute precision.--Shusaku Endo

Toddler-Hunting and Other Stories introduces a startlingly original voice. Winner of Japan’s top literary prizes for fiction (among them the Akutagawa, the Tanizaki, the Noma, and the Yomiuri), Taeko Kono writes with a strange beauty, pinpricked with sadomasochistic and disquieting scenes.In the title story, the protagonist loathes young girls, but compulsively buys expensive clothes for little boys so that she can watch them dress and undress. The impersonal gaze Taeko Kono turns on this behavior transfixes the reader with a fatal question: What are we hunting for? And why?Multiplying perspectives and refracting light from the strangely facing mirrors of fantasy and reality, pain and pleasure, these ten stories present Kono at her very best.