Touring The Land of the Dead: Two Novellas

by Maki Kashimada

Overview

“A delicate, layered exploration of family, trauma, and memory . . . An intriguing introduction to a significant voice in contemporary Japanese fiction.” —Kirkus Reviews

Two tales about memory, loss and love, both told with stylistic inventiveness and breath-taking sensitivity.

Taichi was forced to stop working almost a decade ago and since then he and his wife Natsuko have been getting by on her wages. But Natsuko is a woman accustomed to hardship. When her own family’s fortune dried up years during her childhood, she lived a surreal hand-to-mouth existence shaped by her mother’s refusal to accept her family’s new station in life.

When Natsuko sees an ad for a spa and recognizes the place as the former luxury hotel where she spent time as a child, she decides to take her sick husband, despite the cost. But the overnight visit triggers hard but ultimately redemptive memories relating to the complicated history of her family.

Modelled on a classic story by Junichiro Tanizaki, Ninety-Nine Kisses is the second story in this book and it portrays in touching and lyrical fashion the lives of the four unmarried sisters in a historical, close-knit neighbourhood of contemporary Tokyo.

“Magical.” —The Guardian, Most Anticipated Fiction of 2021

“An ethereal novel combining two tales exploring memory, love, and loss.” —Vogue (UK)

“Kashimada’s writing is exceptional.” —The Spectator

“While Kashimada’s stories, like Murakami’s, resist easy interpretation, the former revel in the beauty of experience, whether sorrowful or joyous, affirming life in all its strangeness, horror and mystery.” —The Times Literary Supplement (UK)

“Only Kashimada can create this kind of world.” —Yoko Ogawa, author of The Memory Police

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781609456528
Publisher:	Europa Editions, Incorporated
Publication date:	03/08/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	102
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Maki Kashimada’s first novel Two won the 1998 Bungei Prize. Since then, she has established herself as a writer of literary fiction and become known for her avant-garde style. In 2005 she received the Mishima Yukio Prize for Love at 6,000 Degrees Celsius, a novel set in Nagasaki and based on Hiroshima mon amour by Marguerite Duras, and in 2007 she took the Noma Prize for New Writers for Picardy Third. She was nominated three times for the Akutagawa Prize before ultimately garnering the award in 2012 with Touring the Land of the Dead. One of her best-known works is The Kingdom of Zero (2009), which reworks Dostoevsky's The Idiot into the tale of a saintly idiot in Japan. She has been a follower of the Japanese Orthodox Church since high school and was married to a member of its clergy.

Editorial Reviews

Magical.”—The Guardian, Most Anticipated Fiction of 2021

“A delicate, layered exploration of family, trauma, and memory [ . . . ] An intriguing introduction to a significant voice in contemporary Japanese fiction.”—Kirkus Reviews

“Maki Kashimada writes about one woman’s trauma with razor-perfect concision and an austere beauty [ . . . ] Haydn Trowell’s unobtrusive translation leaves room for Kashimada’s prose as she reflects on family, memory, and identity.”—Asian Review of Books

“Kashimada’s allusive, outward-facing work insists on placing her fiction squarely within the context of world literature and thought.”—Literary Hub

“An ethereal novel combining two tales exploring memory, love, and loss.”—Vogue (UK)

“Only Ms. Kashimada can create this kind of world.”—Yoko Ogawa, author of The Memory Police

“Thought-provoking and lingering.”—Osusume Books

“A compelling voice and vision. Touring the land of the Dead & Ninety-Nine Kisses is a very lively and quite charming family-tale.”—The Complete Review

“An unusual love story that simply works [ . . . ] let’s hope we see more of Kashimada’s work in English very soon.”—Tony’s Reading List

“I loved [how] Touring the Land of the Dead was so character driven and how the past, emotions, and trauma played such a significant role throughout.”—Where There’s Ink There’s Paper

“Kashimada’s writing is exceptional; this collection is dark and suffocating. It is part of a trend in Japan of female authors rewriting traditional and well-loved stories through a feminist lens, and is a welcome addition to the works by Japanese women being translated into English.”—The Spectator

“While Kashimada’s stories, like Murakami’s, resist easy interpretation, the former revel in the beauty of experience, whether sorrowful or joyous, affirming life in all its strangeness, horror and mystery.”—The Times Literary Supplement (UK)

“Two polished novellas, though different in mood, probe family relationships with insight and elegance.”—Tatler (UK)

From the Publisher

2021-02-10
This pair of novellas, ably translated from the Japanese by Trowell, marks the English-language debut of celebrated author Kashimada.

In the first novella, Touring the Land of the Dead, a delicate, layered exploration of family, trauma, and memory, Natsuko and her husband, Taichi, board a train to a luxury seaside resort–turned–"cheap health retreat." Her wealthy grandparents frequented the resort on long-ago summer vacations with her mother, and Natsuko also visited the spot in its better days with her own parents, before her father was struck by a fatal disease that plunged the family into a poverty Natsuko's feckless mother could never imagine—much less work—her way out of. The trip is their first since Taichi became ill with a progressive neurological disorder not long after they married, leaving Natsuko to support them with her part-time job at a child care center. At the humbled hotel, "the past...[creeps] up on the present," rooting Natsuko in place as her mind's eye gazes back to the 8 mm films of her mother dancing as a child with her grandparents in the hotel's once-elegant, now empty salon. Natsuko contemplates how her mother's and brother's entitlement has only grown through their own diminishment, how they've exploited Natusko and Taichi to fortify their denial, and revisiting these memories opens Natsuko to a new understanding of her obligations, affections, and what might yet be possible. The second novella, Ninety-Nine Kisses, is told through Nanako, the youngest of four sisters who live with their mother in one of Tokyo's Shitamachi, its older, traditionally less affluent and less fashionable neighborhoods. When "a pretentious-looking outsider" lands in the area, apparently looking for inspiration as an aspiring filmmaker and, Nanako suspects, easy pickings among the neighborhood girls, the elder three sisters vie for his attention. But for Nanako, he holds no interest, and she's equally uninterested in what she sees as artificial divisions of class, worth, and the self. Sexually obsessed with her sisters, she views herself as inseparable from them, four parts of a single body. While this story links thematically to Touring the Land of the Dead through its portrayal of a family in unglamorous circumstances, uncertainty in one's sense of self, and aberrant manifestations of familial bonds, it doesn't quite rise to its rarefied level.

An intriguing introduction to a significant voice in contemporary Japanese fiction.

Kirkus Reviews