The Bear and the Paving Stone

About

Three linked tales of memory and displacement, set in wartime and postwar Japan, where characters circle back to the places and people they've lost with the compulsive logic of dreams. A soldier returns from war to find his hometown both familiar and alien. A woman revisits a European city she once lived in. Each story folds time in on itself, blurring the line between memory and hallucination. Winner of the Akutagawa Prize, Horie's writing occupies the space between waking and sleeping — precise in its imagery, elusive in its meaning, and deeply attuned to the way places hold memory differently than people do. A collection about the strange gravity of the past — how everyone ends up where they began, whether they want to or not.