Mysterious Setting

About

A tone-deaf girl wants to sing. This is a problem — not just because she can't carry a tune, but because her determination sets off a chain of events that grows increasingly absurd, surreal, and darkly funny. Kazushige Abe's novel follows her strange fate through a world that seems to rearrange itself around her delusion. Abe is one of Japan's most inventive literary voices, and this novel showcases his ability to transform an unpromising premise into something that feels both completely ridiculous and oddly profound. A comic novel about the gap between ambition and ability — and about what happens when the universe decides to take a hopeless dream seriously.