Then Why Ask Me To Come?. Este artículo no está disponible.Then Why Ask Me To Come?

“How times had changed. She’d even broken out the champagne flutes ― plastic, but still ― for our pre-meal drinks. In the afternoon light, the bubbles sparkled in a different way than they do after dark. They seemed more wholesome, more free.”

This story orbits a BBQ gathering taking place during a pandemic lockdown, to which our main protagonist has been reluctantly invited, along with his wife, by his wife’s best female confidante. Unbeknownst to him, he is about to be confronted over something he thought would remain a secret…

Wataya Risa was born in Tokyo in 1984. In 2001, aged 17, she made her literary debut with the Bungei-Prize-winning novel, Install. Her second work, I Want to Kick You in the Back, won the Akutagawa Prize, making her the youngest ever Akutagawa Prize winner at 19 years old. I Want to Kick You in the Back has since sold millions. Her other works include Aren't You Sad, which won the Ōe Kenzaburō Prize, and Just As You Are, which won the Shimase Prize for Romantic Fiction.

Yuki Tejima is a translator from Los Angeles who is currently based in Tokyo. Her translations from Japanese into English include Mizuki Tsujimura’s novels Lost Souls Meet Under a Full Moon(Doubleday, 2025) and How to Hold Someone in Your Heart (Doubleday, 2025), Someone to Watch Over You (Pushkin Press, 2025) by Kumi Kimura, When the Museum is Closed by Emi Yagi (Harvill Secker, 2025) and the sequel to Tetsuko Kuroyanagi’s best-selling memoir Totto-chan: The Little Girl at the Window 2 (Kodansha, 2025).